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Ducks Unlimited Podcast is a constant discussion of all things waterfowl; from in-depth hunting tips and tactics, to waterfowl biology, research, science, and habitat updates. The DU Podcast is the go-to resource for waterfowl hunters and conservationists. Ducks Unlimited is the world's leader in wetlands conservation.
Mike Brasher: Hey everybody, welcome back. Thanks for tuning in again. I'm your host, Dr. Mike Brasher, and I'm excited to be another On Location episode. We are here in Warsaw, Illinois. Is that the right way to introduce it? If I got this right, the Alice Kibbe, where did I write it down here? The Alice Kibbe Life Science Station. Did I get that right?
Josh Osborne: Yeah, close enough.
Mike Brasher: Alright, and so I'm here with three guests and friends, waterfowl scientists, wildlife scientists, that I'm really excited about being able to sit down with. We're going to talk about history of waterfowl research and broader research in wildlife here in the Mississippi River Valley, Illinois River Valley, centered around an entity that a lot of folks will will know about the Illinois Natural History Survey, specifically the Forbes Biological Station. This is a pretty special year for the Forbes Biological Station, the 130th anniversary. Incredible, whenever I learned about that. So, I'm gonna go around the table here. Actually, I'm gonna go this way and have each of you introduce yourselves. So, Arielle, go first, please.
Auriel Fournier: Yeah, so I'm Arielle Furnier. I'm the Director at Forbes Biological Station and an Associate Research Scientist with the Illinois Natural History Survey.
Josh Osborne: Hey, Josh. I'm Josh Osborne. I'm a waterfowl ecologist at the Natural History Survey stationed at Forbes. I've been with the survey for about going on 10 years, pretty close to 10 years now.
Therin Bradshaw: And here to my left. And I am Theron Bradshaw. I am a waterbird ecologist at the Forbes Biological Station, and I've been around for just about three years now.
Mike Brasher: So, Dr. Auriel Foringer, tell me a little bit about your background because I'm associated with you most, I guess, because of our time that we spent down on the Gulf Coast. We interacted for a few years but then you moved up here and so it's pretty cool to be able to sit down with you and talk about what all you're doing in your new role with INHS. So, give us a little bit about your background.
Auriel Fournier: Yeah. So I'm from the Midwest originally, grew up in Ohio, got very interested in wetlands and wetland birds through a group called Green Creek Wildlife Society and also some work out at Winus Point Marsh Conservancy. Did my undergrad at Michigan Tech and then went on and did my PhD at the University of Arkansas where I worked on waterfowl management during fall migration and the impacts on rails, mostly focused on Soar and Virginia Rail in Missouri. And then went on and did a postdoc at Mississippi State, which is where we met down on the Gulf Coast working on trying to better coordinate bird monitoring efforts in the Gulf in response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. And yeah, then about five years ago, it'll be five years in June, came up and have been the director at Forbes ever since.
Mike Brasher: It's hard to believe it's been five years. I agree.
Auriel Fournier: I 100% agree.
Mike Brasher: Alright, and so Josh, tell us about yourself, a little bit of your background. And people are gonna, a lot of our listeners I think will be familiar with your name, maybe? I think it probably will. So tell us a little bit about that also.
Josh Osborne: So I'm a little bit more of a non-traditional. kind of background. I did not start doing this. I was in the Navy for six years, so I was a nuclear propulsion plant operator on a… What?
Mike Brasher: Nuclear propulsion plant operator.
Josh Osborne: Who knew? Yeah, right? So I went from, you know, physics and chemistry and all that thing into the stuff that I really care about. So I was on a submarine for about six years and got out and decided that I didn't spend enough time outdoors anymore. So I got into this, did my undergrad at Mississippi State University, go Dawgs. Transitioned to University of Tennessee at Knoxville where I studied habitat selection and food availability for black ducks and other dabbling ducks in the West Tennessee area. and ultimately hired on with INHS in 2013 at the Forbes Biological Station. So, a little bit of a, you know, chopped up background, but takes all kinds.
Mike Brasher: It's great to be here with you. I mentioned that a lot of our audience will be familiar with your name. They'll certainly be familiar with a lot of the information that you provide or that you collect through the weekly aerial waterfowl surveys. I find it interesting that You went from a submarine, how long, what was your longest stint out on a submarine?
Josh Osborne: So, I was on a boomer, so, you know, you go out to sea for three months and then come back. It's kind of a, it's more of a set schedule of the kind of the deployed ships, boats, whatever you want to call them. But so the longest time I spent at sea was something like 107 days, 110 days, something like that.
Mike Brasher: Did those experiences have anything to do with your choice now to spend a significant portion of your year flying? You go from beneath the surface to up above the surface?
Josh Osborne: You know, I've never thought about it that way.
Mike Brasher: Can you not just be on the ground?
Josh Osborne: No, I guess not. You know, maybe I'm just not a land lover. I don't know. But I never thought about it that way. I just kind of started flying for a different project that we had where we were actually evaluating the aerial survey and to try to see if there was some other methods that we could do. Turns out, There's not. The census that we do is kind of the way it needs to be done for our landscape. And I just enjoyed it so much that, you know, when Aaron retired, it was natural for me to fall into that role.
Mike Brasher: Yeah, we're talking about Aaron Yetter, a longtime observer for the flights, the waterfowl surveys and shorebird surveys. And so, you're doing that now and you're responsible for some of the information that goes out on social media, the weekly counts of people. geek out about, including myself, and so we're going to come back and talk to you about that. That's a significant piece of what INHS has contributed to the waterfowl research and science field, and so you're the person that's heavily invested in that right now. So, great to be here with you on that. And Theron, tell us about yourself.
Therin Bradshaw: I was going to say a little less exciting of a story there. No, my career actually started at Forbes Biological Station right out of undergrad. I graduated undergrad at the end of 2014 and the beginning of 2015 was my first experience catching scop on the Illinois River Valley under Heath Hagee. He was the director at that time. I was teching for a handful of months and then I bounced around doing a couple of different technician jobs through the University of Illinois and then after that Heath Hagee kind of tapped me on the shoulder and asked if I was up for doing a a master's position at the Forbes Biological Station and I ended up going out throughout the state of Illinois conducting marsh bird surveys and waterfowl management surveys to see if there was any interaction between waterfowl management and other water birds. participation or occupancy. After my master's, I ended up going up to North Dakota and I worked up at the Audubon National Wildlife Refuge up in Coal Harbor and essentially did easement checks for the Fish and Wildlife Service, so I got to drive around on an ATV all day on other people's properties, which was great. I enjoyed doing that quite a bit. And then after that, my wife, Abby Blake Bradshaw, who you guys may have heard on the podcast already, but her and I, our team, obviously, and she ended up going down to Tennessee for her PhD. And that's when I ended up snagging a job with the Tennessee Wildlife Resource Agency and was a wildlife management technician down there for about a year. And then after that, the Forbes Biological Station posted a full-time position at the station, and I got it. And so it's been history ever since.
Mike Brasher: And here you are. And yeah, just last week, we had your wife, Dr. Abby Blake Bradshaw. Does she make you call her that? She doesn't listen unless I say doctor. Dr. Abby Blake Bradshaw and Dr. Nick Masto joined us in studio. We had a very lengthy discussion about the research that they conducted there in West Tennessee. And I don't know which of these episodes is going to air first, but that's all good. So, it's really cool though to have you and Abby kind of in back-to-back episodes, at least for me recording. That was the last one that I was able to record. So, very cool. We've got a lot to cover here. One of the things I wanted to start with, though, is a brief recap of the waterfowl hunting season. As you all saw it through your eyes, it's still that time of year where it's fresh on our minds. Just last week, we finished our annual season in review report. Just today, I was notified that the website is live where folks can go and find this report. It's a lot of information in there. We've had an episode about sort of our season in review. We mentioned, I think in that episode and maybe even in this report, we referenced the incredibly warm, abnormally warm December and how that allowed birds to stay north a little bit more than what they would in even an average year. One of the statistics we cited was that, as evidence of that, Missouri midwinter counts were 70% above average, which is sort of an indication, not necessarily an indication of larger continental population size, because I don't think any of us were expecting that to be the case. but rather that there was an abnormally large number of birds still hanging out at that latitude. Josh, we were talking about this a little bit earlier, and I think y'all saw the same thing in the areas where y'all surveyed. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Josh Osborne: Sure, we did. So, we kind of got an early push, at least during our central zone season here, and it was kind of this early influx of pintails. And we always get them early, but North Dakota got a pretty strong early storm, and it seemed to really push those birds down to us. But then we weren't really cold at that point, and we just never seemed to really get cold. We certainly didn't get any snow. during most of the hunting season. And, you know, the peaks and valleys of the survey, so we track the peaks and we track, you know, all these different descriptive statistics of the numbers that we get each week, and it's a pretty immediate rise and fall on the peak. and it creates this really cool bell curve just about every year. But when we peak this year, we kind of flattened out, and we really held on to a lot of birds, especially some of the smaller-bodied waterfowl longer than we normally do, at least in central Illinois. And so, as far as hunting success went, it was still kind of patchy for us. So, we've been really fortunate. The Illinois River is really flashy. And so, the rivers cooperated in recent years. The past three years, we've just had phenomenal habitat on the Illinois River. And this year, we got water on a lot of it. The river cooperated with us. A lot of people were able to pump that haven't been in previous years. And we, you know, we just had great habitat. The birds hung around for a long time. What that kind of turned into is the haves and the have-nots. And so some people did extraordinarily well. You know, some of the state fish and wildlife areas had really great luck, but it was peaks and valleys. So people either did really, really well or they didn't. really no in-between where people kind of did okay. That was a lot of the reports that we were getting almost exclusively across the survey area, which is, you know, kind of the confluence of the Mississippi and Illinois rivers all the way up to Muscatine and then over to Spring Valley and North Illinois.
Mike Brasher: I mentioned that our season in review report is now out and once it goes final, it's like, okay, well, I hope we got it right. I hope it's reasonably representative of people's experience. It's an impossible task. And the thing we added this year was like reports from the field. And that makes you really nervous because you're trying to summarize for all four flyways and it makes you really nervous. Like, well, I know I'm going to misrepresent something, but you try to capture the broad, the broad stories that you hear, the dominant stories, and so I'm always kind of uptight whenever I'm, after this goes out, and then I'm sitting down talking to somebody that I didn't speak with whenever forming the report, and it's like, what did I, are they going to say the same type things that we put in the report, and in this case you did. So, woo!
Josh Osborne: Yeah, that makes me feel better too, because I've been saying it for weeks now.
Mike Brasher: So yeah, cool. Now we could talk at length about those surveys and what you saw, the type of habitat that we have here in these two river valleys, and I'm sure we will as we get into some of the history of this area. But I think that's where I want to move. One of the primary reasons for being here with y'all is to talk about the 130th anniversary of the Forbes Biological Station. I was telling somebody that it was coming up here to record this to sort of honor that significant milestone. I knew it was an anniversary. I'd forgotten what it was. I was telling people, maybe a 75, you know, I think I might have even said 50 years now. I'm really embarrassed to say that. It shows what I know. But I think I was saying 75 year anniversary, something in there, 100. I was only off by like, what is that? 55 years or something? That is incredible. 130 years. So, Arielle, introduce us to that conversation. I mean, who were the forward-thinking individuals 130 years ago? What was their motivation? How did all this come to be?
Auriel Fournier: Yeah, so Stephen Forbes is who the station is named for, and that's the scientist who initially started doing work on the Illinois River and on its fisheries and aquatic communities in the late 1800s. And he was the one who really advocated to the state of Illinois that there needed to be a station in Havana, which is the town in Illinois that Forbes is based out of, for the continuous study of the Illinois River and its associated systems. And so on April 1st, 1894, the state of Illinois allocated a small amount of money, I think I read earlier $1,800. to establish that station, and Forbes and many others in the coming decades did foundational work on the science of the river, on the fish communities, on the many different backwaters and associated floodplains. This was before any of the locks and dams were put in place, before the levee districts were established, and so they really provided this amazing kind of ecological view on what this river was like. The Illinois River is by no means the largest river in the United States, but it's been an important one for a wide variety of wetland birds. And it gives us something to compare to now because the Illinois River today looks so different than it did in the late 1800s. And we know that in part because of the work that Stephen Forbes and many others did.
Mike Brasher: A lot of people that listen to this, that have a passion for waterfowl, will be familiar with the Illinois Natural History Survey, Forbes Biological Station. They'll know names like Frank Belrose, Steve Rivera, and others that we're going to talk about. This is one of those truly iconic and classic destinations for waterfowl science, really in all the world. It's right up there with the Delta waterfowl station. I was sitting here a few minutes ago trying to think of some of the others, Patuxent, the Wildlife Research Center in Bethesda, that area over there. So Patuxent and what are some of the others that you might put in this category? Are there others? I'm sure there are a couple, but I can't… When you've looked through this and you've studied, are there others that come to mind? that you think are in sort of this echelon of long-standing research stations and made such profound contributions to our discipline?
Auriel Fournier: Yeah, I mean, there's several that are more marine focused, things like Shoals Research Lab, and there's several others on the East Coast, because Forbes has the designation of being the oldest inland field station in North America, but there are some marine stations that are older than us. One that I often have been in a lot of contact with is Archbold Biological Station down in Florida as well. They don't do a lot of waterfall work, but they've done a lot of really foundational work on the ecology of birds in Florida, especially around things like Florida scrub jay. There's a series of biological stations kind of around the Great Lakes that have been really instrumental in studying a lot of the larger fisheries and aquatic science of the Great Lakes as well. So yeah, it can be a real suite of places. I did some work as an undergrad at Kellogg Biological Station in Michigan, which is a Michigan State University. field station and so yeah I mean I think kind of the cool things about field stations is people can kind of bop in and out of them over time and end up connected to a lot of different places.
Mike Brasher: So Theron, how long have you been with the station? Three years. So you've been with the, that would be the way of saying, you're the The newest, that'd be the right way to say it. The newest of the three that we have here.
Therin Bradshaw: Technically, I think we just hired Liz Bilkey.
Auriel Fournier: Liz did just start, but yes.
Mike Brasher: But of the three that we have here. And so coming into having the opportunity to work at a field station that is so storied in this kind of history, what does that mean to you?
Therin Bradshaw: Uh, well, one thing that we make clear to everybody is that we've chosen to come back to the station. We've, most of us have had the opportunity to build our career past what we've gained at the station and then have chosen to come back. And I think that speaks very, very loudly to the environment that's at the station. Very, very welcoming, very, very well supported. in as far as like equipment and manpower, people power to get tasks done, very, very collaborative work environment to tackle all these larger research projects that we've been very fortunate to be connected to.
Mike Brasher: Was it you telling me about having spent some time going back through the notes of Frank Belrose? It was mostly Josh.
Therin Bradshaw: He really, really enjoys reading the journals.
Josh Osborne: I'm a nerd. I just enjoy the history so much, especially with Frank, because Frank was so pivotal in a lot of the waterfowl research. really responsible for the return of the wood duck and just some of the other research that's been conducted at the station. I just get, you know, I get geeked up about that like folks do about the numbers, you know.
Mike Brasher: You've read a lot of documents there, I'm sure historical documents, that few other people have laid their eyes on. Is there any one piece of information or one note or one, yeah, one report that kind of stands out most for you?
Josh Osborne: You know, no, not Not really, just the summation of it all. You know, just to look at the old notebooks that we have, just the handwritten notes by Frank during the early years of the survey, you know, before he was even flying. He started the survey in 38, but he didn't start flying until 48. So, some of those old, you know, notebooks, some of the handwritten notes from the early years of the wood duck box study, it's almost like taking a time machine, you know, and going back and looking at it. It's hard to imagine a world where we don't have all the conveniences that we have and to think about doing science in that world where we don't have all the conveniences that we have is a pretty strange thought.
Mike Brasher: You mentioned the wood duck and the significant influence that Frank and others that came through the station had on understanding the ecology of that species and contributing to its recovery. Ariel, what are some of the other more notable contributions that that you talk about often whenever you're telling people about Forbes and that you want to highlight as part of this celebration.
Auriel Fournier: Yeah, I mean, I think the aerial survey and the wood duck are two of the big ones we talk about, especially when we talk about Frank. The other is the work he did on lead shot and demonstrating the negative impact that lead shot had on waterfowl and on other birds, which, you know, now is kind of like an accepted thing, but at the time was not a popular idea. And, you know, was also kind of a good example of why, you know, it's important to have academic scientists who can go down lines of inquiry that aren't necessarily popular and explore them. And he was able to do that in part because of the support of the station and to show that it was a problem. And then he spent time traveling the country and advocating for some of the changes that we've seen now.
Mike Brasher: So you bring up a good point there, the support behind the station. Talk about that. What system is INHS a part of? Where do you get the support? Talk about any of that that we want to make sure we cover. Has it changed through the years or any of that?
Auriel Fournier: Right now, the Forbes Biological Station is a part of INHS, so the Illinois Natural History Survey, which is a part of something called the Prairie Research Institute, which is a part of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. So at the end of the day, the three of us work for the University of Illinois, and that has been the case since about 2008. Prior to that, INHS was a part of the Illinois Department of Natural Resources. And it's a long story about why that changed, but we're glad where we're at all as well.
Therin Bradshaw: And so… Change happens.
Auriel Fournier: Yep. And INHS was also founded by Stephen Forbes, very prolific guy, did a lot of things. And so INHS has had several different homes over the years in different kind of academic settings in the DNR, kind of back and forth. But the DNR, so the Illinois DNR has been kind of our long-term supporter in terms of Forbes Biological Station. They've been supporting the Aerial Waterfowl Survey, then the Aerial Shorebird Survey, and a wide variety of other projects over the years. We also receive support from a variety of other agencies that we work with. So right now we also have projects with Colorado Parks and Wildlife, Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. We do work with the Nature Conservancy and NRCS and the Fish and Wildlife Service. We do work in the Gulf of Mexico. So we do a really wide variety of things, but the bulk of our support comes from the Illinois DNR and they're a great partner.
Mike Brasher: It occurs to me that we sit here and we talk about Frank Belrose as though we all know who he is. We know he's a prominent figure, historical figure, influential figure, pioneer in waterfowl ecology. Is it worth just making sure people know, listening to this, all the younger folks know exactly who he was, why he's… We've alluded to some of it, but just to make sure we give proper description and introduction to Frank. Who wants to take that?
Auriel Fournier: I never had the pleasure of meeting Frank, which I think is like one of, like, probably my biggest sadness as the directors. I never got to know him personally. I've gotten to talk to a lot of people who met Frank and worked for Frank. But he had a real passion for waterfowl and for wetlands that started at a very young age. He's from central Illinois. That's where he spent his career. And he was really dedicated to a place. which is something that at least in my career, I can't say I've bounced all over the place and continue to work all over the place, but he knew the Illinois River Valley in a way that I doubt I will get to even if I spend the rest of my career at Forbes. He just had this vision for tackling these really big complicated problems and being pretty tenacious about it. So yeah, he arrived at Forbes in the late 30s. And, you know, really started the waterfowl program that, you know, I now have the pleasure of leading today. But, you know, started driving around and, you know, as we were talking about earlier, standing on the roof of his car and counting ducks and trying to figure out what was going on and where were they and at what times. And, you know, he was willing to tackle problems in a lot of different ways. He was, you know, also brought waterfowl into captivity to do different things around studying lead shot. So he was at the station for, I think, almost two decades before he actually became the director. And then he was the director for quite some time as well. You know, he wrote one of the editions of Ducks, Geese, and Swans of North America. He wrote, you know, the literal wood duck book with Dan Holm, who recently retired from the Illinois DNR and used to work at Forbes. And so, you know, he has this I don't know, it's hard to summarize Frank. He did so many things.
Mike Brasher: One of the other things that I've… because I've… any student of waterfowl ecology during… if you study migration and wintering ecology of waterfowl and breeding ecology for a lot of different species you're going to come across Frank's name in a lot of his publications. One of the things that stood out to me that I don't think we've mentioned yet as a demonstration of how forward-thinking he was. He was always sort of on the cutting edge. He started out by standing on the top of his car to count ducks Towards the end, well, I don't know where in his career this happened, but he was one of the first, I think, to use radar, weather radar, to realize there are biological signals in this weather radar that we're using. I mean that was pretty… Pretty revolutionary, right?
Therin Bradshaw: Cutting edge.
Mike Brasher: Cutting edge, for sure. And what else did he do with regard to, I mean, chronicling or looking at… He wrote some of the initial summaries of migration chronology through this part of the world and… A lot of the banding efforts, you know, early on that helped kind of map out the flyways, you know, Frederick Lincoln flyways, you know,
Josh Osborne: he was a piece of all that. The migration corridors between the flyways and birds trading back and forth, you know, in small proportions, you know, he kind of pioneered a lot of that stuff too. So, you know, Frank saw the need and I mean it really was his life's work, you know, this is what he did. He had a wonderful family and, you know, kids and stuff. He was really involved in the community in Havana. He was, you know, he was just a driven guy that did a lot of research. And, you know, I find it interesting that looking back through all these journals that we have, a lot of the questions that they had back in those days, we still have today. You know, a lot of the arguments that duck hunters and conservationists and managers have, and researchers have, are the same conversations, you know, that they were having back in the 30s and 40s and 50s, you know, like this idea of, do we put food on refuges, you know? Early on, Frank was a big proponent of leaving refuges alone and not worrying about food on refuges because there was so much waste grain on the landscape. Even back then, the central Illinois landscape was pretty ag-dominated. But the equipment was horrible and there was piles and piles of corn and whatever else they had that was available for the birds. So there was really no energetic need that was being met by putting food on refuges. And he later, you know, as the decades rolled on and times changed, he kind of changed his thinking on that or changed his opinion of that based on, you know, the change in the waste grain on the landscape. But that's just one example of the questions that we face today are some of the same questions that they were facing back in those days too.
Mike Brasher: So that was Frank, a giant in the field. His name lives on forever. His contributions will as well. It's not an envious position to be in, to be the person to come in after somebody like Frank, right? But lo and behold, along comes a guy by the name of Stephen Rivera, and he was with the, he was the director of the station for how long? Tell us about his, some of his contributions, because he made a sizable mark in his own right.
Auriel Fournier: Yeah. Yeah. So Steve arrived at Forbes in the late seventies and became the director in, it was either the mid or I think it was the mid eighties and he was the director until early two thousands. And so a lot of, a lot of Steve's work was, you know, he, he can continue with the aerial waterfowl survey. You know, Frank was actually the observer for the survey when Steve took over as director. That's when we moved to a model of having a staff member as the observer for the survey. And he was very supportive of that. He was very involved with the Flyway and in helping kind of tackle different kinds of issues within different committees within the tech section for the Flyway. The thing today that he still loves to talk about the most, you know, Steve is still around the station on a pretty regular basis. We love having him come in and hear about all the amazing history and memories that he has, is like the book, The Waterfowl of Illinois. Like it is like this like Bible of a book. It's incredible. Yeah, that he and Aaron Yetter and Chris Hine and Michelle Horath spent tons of time and energy doing research on, and then it was compiled into this amazing Bible of information. They did a lot of diet work, they did a lot of habitat use work, they did different work on different kinds of… migration ecology and wetland management. You know, Steve, you know, he likes to joke that, you know, like he did, you know, he did his graduate work on squirrels and, you know, all these different things. Like he's got this very varied background, but, you know, his career at Forbes was very waterfowl focused, but at the same time, very diverse.
Mike Brasher: And then the couple of folks came along after After those, we know those folks well. I went to school with, I guess, both of them. I'm not sure if I overlapped with Heath. I'd have to go back and actually do the math and look at the calendars. But Josh, I did. So tell us about, then there were two other folks that came along, Dr. Josh Stafford, Dr. Heath Hagee, both brief stints as the director of the Forbes station.
Auriel Fournier: Yeah, so Steve retired in the early 2000s and pretty soon thereafter Josh Stafford was hired on as the director and he was there for, I believe, almost seven years. And he's now at South Dakota State with the co-op unit there. But, you know, Josh kind of put his mark on the station in a couple different ways. He really restarted the station and having graduate students again. something that has continued now. He started kind of this trend of expanding the waterfowl program to being like waterfowl and other water birds. So he did some really great diet work on shorebirds. He did a lot of really neat work like comparing the IRV, the Illinois River Valley today to like past time steps that we have and looking at how things have changed. He also got the station very involved with the Upper Miss Great Lakes Joint Venture. a connection that still remains today and got the station more involved with kind of the conservation planning side of the science. So yeah, Josh did a lot of things and then is now doing great up in South Dakota. And after Josh left for that job, Heath Hagee was hired in fairly shortly after that and Heath was at the station for several years. Heath, you know, being Heath tackled a whole great big wide variety of things. He expanded even more into other kinds of wetland birds while also doing a lot of really foundational waterfowl work. He was the one who went out and was like, are we doing the aerial survey in the best way possible and did some of the comparisons that Josh alluded to earlier. He started us up doing a lot of true metabolizable energy work, some of the marsh bird work that Theron was talking about. The sanctuary, I know he was part of some sanctuary studies. Sanctuary projects, yeah.
Josh Osborne: And Josh and Heath kind of together started the diving duck work that we do over in the Illinois River Valley. So that turned into a, you know, of course the banding effort was already happening here for lesser scop on pool 19. Dr. Afton had started that, you know, years ago. But we started doing spring observations, behavioral observations, and we did a a large-scale diet study and parasite study from the tip of southern Illinois all the way up into Wisconsin during the spring and following these birds to figure out what they were eating and to try to solve this whole lesser scot population issue and get our hands around that. And that's a project that we continue today with Cheyenne that you met today and is operating the banding station here. It was a pretty cool mix of, you know, Josh had this idea and then Heath kind of, you know, kind of came together with him and they really turned it into something that's quite unique.
Mike Brasher: I remember whenever Josh first became the director, shortly after he became the director, he started doing some really creative thinking and studying of foraging ecology of ducks. That was a topic that was of interest to me at that time because of some of my dissertation research. sort of intersected forging ecology and some of the theory behind it. And Josh was, I remember him telling me some stories from experimental designs he was trying to develop and met with different levels of success as all of these types of things do. And then Heath came in and continued on some of that work. It's been really cool to follow the work that continues to be done here and is a significant part of what we know about the ecology of waterfowl and it's impactful from so many different perspectives and so thanks to the three of you for continuing on with that. We haven't even really talked yet about the banding work and that's one of the things we didn't even talk yet or mention that we were out this morning, we're here in the afternoon recording this, we were out this morning. removing scop and redheads and canvasbacks, maybe a ring neck or two from a series of baited swimming traps along the shallow areas of Pool 19, a pretty iconic classic area for staging diving ducks here in this part of the world. My first time ever being here, it's early, mid, I guess it's March 11th is what today is. Concentrations of birds are pretty impressive out there. I've been enthusiastic whenever I've seen all those and remarking at them as we have put our binoculars on them. It's a really, really amazing thing and I appreciate all the work that continues there. I think we'll get into some of those discussions here a bit later on about what are some of the current projects that the biological station is involved in that we're going to try to talk with Cheyenne also later on about her research and visit on some of this. Right now, I think we're going to take a break and when we come back, maybe it'll be a good time to pick up on the surveys, the waterfowl surveys, talk a little bit more in detail about them. So, stay with us, folks. We got a lot more. We'll be right back. Welcome back everyone. We are here on location in Warsaw, Illinois and we are reflecting back on 130 years of the Forbes Biological Station. I'm with Dr. Ariel Fournier, Josh Osborne and Theron Bradshaw and when we took a break Josh grabbed a book, a field book and set it down in front of me and it looks like it's… Well, probably because it, I'm a 1940. Oh my gosh, let me do the math. What are we doing with 60, 84 years old? Wow. And so it is a field book, original field book. I feel like I shouldn't be touching this. I'm like, should be in a, in like the National Archives, this actual field book from Frank Belrose, 1940 waterfowl census. I don't know what to do. Wow, this is incredible. Josh, what am I looking at here?
Josh Osborne: That's before Frank started flying, so that's when he was driving around and standing on levees and things and counting birds, which really took him all week to cover the entire Illinois River Valley. And so that's his notes from those surveys for that particular year.
Mike Brasher: Wow, this is incredible. I mean, it's a little emotional here. You're looking back and it's like the people that you've read about and who have helped shape the career that you chose, your profession, and you're looking at his handwriting from 84 years ago, Cripple Records and October 16th of 1940. Oh my goodness, this is super special. Man, I'm gonna look at that a little bit more. I don't want to break it. Duck flight and cornfield studies. Yeah, classic, of course, right? Studying cornfields back in 1940. As we continue to today. Amazing. All right. So, yeah, I think where we want to— a few more things to talk about here on the latter half of this episode. We'll start out with the waterfowl surveys and how they came to be. I mean, I'm looking at how they came to be in this field book, but what they have become and the significance of them to understanding trends in waterfowl distribution and abundance, habitat use, the list goes on and on. Josh, you've been involved with them for a number of years now, so tell us about them for the people that may not know. When they're conducted, how they're conducted, the frequency, why is this such a notable thing when we talk about the Illinois waterfowl and shorebird surveys within our profession?
Josh Osborne: It's really the longest continuous survey of its type. I mean, if you think about the breeding population survey the Fish and Wildlife Service does, that started in 55, right? So this even predates that. You know, like we said earlier, Frank started counting in 38, but he was driving around and he didn't start flying until 48. And so that's when we kind of consider the actual beginning of the waterfowl census that we do. Last year was actually the 75th anniversary of these surveys. We're really fortunate to have this data set. It's used, you know, conservation efforts really not just in Illinois but across the flyway. The Upper Miss and Great Lakes Joint Venture have used this data set to set conservation priorities in the region. They've used it to help add to carrying capacity models for the region. Multiple states use our data set. Multiple research projects have used our data set. It's just a wealth of information that goes back a really, really long time. We're really fortunate to have it. So, the survey starts in Pekin, Illinois, currently. It hasn't always been that way, but as the survey exists now, we start in Pekin, Illinois. and we survey down the length of the Illinois River to the confluence. So we go as far south as Grafton and Alton, and we pick up the Mississippi there and fly all the way north to Muscatine, Iowa on the Mississippi region. And then we kind of backtrack and go back to the upper Illinois and Spring Valley, Illinois, and then survey our way back to peak and to land. Mike Kruse is our current pilot. He flew Aaron for a number of years. I think we looked back at it and this year will be, this coming fall will be Mike's 17th year flying the survey. He's very good at what he does and this type of work you want to have somebody that's super comfortable piloting the plane. So another thing that Heath added, and I should probably get this out before I continue on with the waterfowl portion, is we do shorebird surveys now too, and so that starts in late July, early August, and we fly shorebirds for six weeks, and then that rolls directly into, in fact, it overlaps for two weeks with our early waterfowl flights, our September teal flights, and we start those And once those start, we roll into those for four weeks, we take a two-week break, and then we finish out. So the waterfowl flights from start to finish are 17 weeks, and they go up to the midwinter inventory the first week of January. And then we get a break for about five weeks, depending on the ice cover conditions and the weather and things. We get a break for about five weeks and then we start our spring waterfowl counts. And we're kind of in the dead center of that right now. In fact, I have to fly on Wednesday. We do that for six to eight weeks, again, depending on the weather, because spring is a little bit more variable than the fall is. And then we roll out of that directly into more shorebird counts, so another six weeks of shorebird counts. So it puts us in the air for about… 32 to 34 weeks out of the year. I don't want to say it's a grind, but the spring counts are a little bit longer. We count more areas, so it's important to note that the traditional survey area, Frank was counting every little pothole, every hunted area, everything. That's not something we do anymore. So in 2004 and 2005, Michelle Horth and Aaron Yetter did an analysis of the areas that we fly during the fall. And, you know, was there a way to shorten that? Because as everyone knows, the daylight time gets shorter in the fall. And they were taken off at sunrise and sometimes not landing until after dark. So we did an analysis in 04-05 and determined that 95% of the ducks that we were counting could be counted in, you know, 28 refuges along the Illinois and something like 16 along. So that's when we switched from accounting everything's perspective in the fall, at least, to accounting just the refuges in the spring. And over the years we've added and kind of removed areas. It's kind of, it's something that we don't like to do because it makes that long-term data set a little choppy. It makes it harder to work with. But that is something that we've done over time. Frank started in 48, he flew until 70. Tud Crompton picked up after that. Tud is actually the only one of us that has actually, at least a portion of the time that he was conducting the survey, he flew himself for a little while.
Mike Brasher: So he was the pilot and the observer.
Josh Osborne: Correct. But not the whole time, but at least a portion of the time he flew himself. Michelle Horath, who was actually on staff when I hired on in 2013, she flew until about 2002, and that's when Aaron Yetter picked up. And Aaron flew until his last flight was spring of…
Mike Brasher: Okay, so 19, 20, yeah, 19, 20 years.
Josh Osborne: And so that's when I picked up the survey.
Mike Brasher: So you do spring surveys through the shorebird migration. Do you pick up, you probably said this, and I was, I have an excuse, I was looking at Frank Belrose's field book. Do you do shorebird surveys in the fall, I guess is the question.
Josh Osborne: Correct, we do. So we start those in late July, early August.
Mike Brasher: So that's the point I was going to hope to make, if you did, is that a lot of people, and it still blows my mind, the last shorebird survey is conducted when, during the spring? It's like, what are we, April, May?
Josh Osborne: So 10 weeks from now. Right around about early to mid-May.
Mike Brasher: And so then a couple of months later, the shorebirds are coming back through. Maybe not the same ones that came through at the very last, but still, there's not a big window. We think ducks have it tough in terms of a small window within which to breed. raise their chicks and build up the reserves, get strong enough to fly. Shorebirds, man, it blows my mind how compressed their breeding season is. Anything to add there? I see you nodding.
Auriel Fournier: Yeah, I mean, some of them only have 30 days or something before they turn around and head right back. And many of them are making cross-continental movements. A lot of them are going to South America for the winter. So, by the time they get down there, they're pretty much immediately turning around and coming back north again.
Mike Brasher: Given a lot of the changes to the landscape that we have and that we've seen over, well, since we've settled any part of this globe, it's hard to imagine that there are, at some level, it's hard to imagine there are any shorebirds left or any species of some types of birds left. And so, number one, that shows you how incredibly impressive they are, adaptable, some of them are, but also emphasizes the importance of the work that this group here does, the work of all of our conservation partners, and the importance of the support that we get from everybody that is also interested in this. And so, these type of even just basic natural history observations are vital for reminding us just how how special the resource is that we have committed our careers to and have the opportunity to study, collect data on, and help inform decisions to hopefully make this landscape and world a little bit better for them. So thanks to everything that y'all are doing in that regard. So yeah, waterfowl, shorebirds. What have been some of the more notable maybe revelations that have been made as a result of of those surveys through the years, whether it be the change in the timing of birds coming through, the degree to which maybe the number that winter here has changed, anything else related to management of wetland systems that you've learned through it, what are some of the things that we've really made a strong contribution to?
Josh Osborne: So, I think you could say all of that, really. I mean, you really could. So, something that we get out of these surveys that's not always obvious is we can help land managers on the ground and kind of tell them what's going on in the systems. And even without that communication, you could look at the bird numbers and kind of tell that. We've helped with multiple on-the-ground, you know, large-scale restorations just by the numbers that we use, but also, you know, what we're seeing from the air. And to me, that's a larger part of this that we don't always talk about, is you could see large-scale landscape changes that aren't always obvious from the ground. Erin Yetter talked about the changes in the bird distributions based on certain restorations in our little neck of the woods over in Havana. And I think you could take good habitat years in the valley and kind of do that same thing. So a local duck club hired a new manager a few years ago in this massive property, and they really kind of went through the ringer trying to restore this place to what it used to be. And the bird response past two years has just been phenomenal. I think this particular club wintered about 150,000 ducks at the peak this year. So much so that we couldn't even really get in there and survey it. We just kind of had to take our best guess from flying around the perimeter of the area and just getting in and out of places where we could. You know, it's such a unique data set and it's, there's just a wide array of uses that, you know, aren't always obvious to even folks that are in this field.
Mike Brasher: The other thing that I like about what y'all do is that you make it available, at least insert your summary. You fly these surveys weekly during the waterfowl season. You're a very popular, I guess, person in terms of information during that time of year. Not saying you're not popular other times of the year, I'm just… Just read the comments.
Josh Osborne: Yeah, we're certainly more active during that time of year.
Mike Brasher: Yeah, you tell these stories about what you're seeing. You provide the data for the constituents to consume, view, ask questions about how much traffic do you get on your social media account, your cell phone, email. Pretty busy during those.
Josh Osborne: Pretty busy during that time. And, you know, I welcome the constructive parts of it or the positive parts of it. You know, obviously, you can't read the comments, right? I love getting emails from folks that genuinely want to know what's going on on the ground. You know, our, I guess our traffic on our social media accounts is highly varied. I can always tell, because I'm from Mississippi originally, so I care what's going on down there, and I can always tell when my, you know, my southern brethren start killing birds, because the traffic really does pick up. And, you know, I joke that this is Aaron's fault because he kind of brought it up and suggested it to Aaron.
Mike Brasher: In terms of putting it on social media?
Josh Osborne: Correct. Yeah, yeah. And so that's kind of how the whole ball got rolling.
Mike Brasher: How long after he put it on social media before Aaron retired? A couple years?
Josh Osborne: If he could have, it would have been immediate, I think. But, and that's something that Aaron took very seriously as a responsibility and, you know, I don't know if I hadn't got to experience that through him that I would have taken it as seriously. Aaron, you know, people want to know, you know, they want to know what you're seeing and they want to know where the birds are and, you know, and sometimes you just don't have answers for them. You know, that's the unfortunate part of this is I don't have all the answers, but it is pretty incredible, the response we get. It could be 50,000 likes or views or whatever, and then the next week we get a little bit of ice and the birds are bunched up and you take a picture and post it and it's a million. It's pretty variable, but it's pretty incredible, the response that we get to some of these things.
Mike Brasher: It's a testament to and it's a compliment to the people that, as I said earlier, obsess over these birds. Many of them are hunters. Not all of them are hunters. Some of them just love to study the birds, love to know where the birds are, a lot of bird watchers, photographers, but the fact that people… That's what's so cool. I know y'all will appreciate this. The fact that, I mean, our job sometimes, yes, the comments can make for a taxing day and make us scratch our head, and why are you thinking of that? But can you imagine if we didn't have people that were so interested that they weren't commenting, that just the apathy would be far worse than the vitriol, in my opinion. Because people are, not to say that, I mean, there's some of that, we all know that, but even those folks or expressing that outrage in some instances, that disagreement, that dissatisfaction, because they care about the resource. That's it. I mean, if they didn't, they would not engage. They would not spend their time. They would not spend their time to make that opinion known.
Auriel Fournier: And recently we've been going through some of Steve Havera's papers and we found series of letters back and forth between him and some of the duck clubs along the IRV. debating back and forth some of the same issues. And, you know, I kind of took him to Josh and I was like, well, here's the Facebook comments of the 1990s. These like written letters back and forth, like being like, well, I disagree with you for this reason, you know, and, and I think that that, you know, hearing from all different kinds of folks about what they're seeing on the landscape can be really valuable.
Mike Brasher: And you respond to some of the comments. You know, Facebook or any other, I guess, place like that is not where to sort of adjudicate some type of disagreement. That's not what it is. But I do this also. Sometimes I respond because I know that person has commented in a certain way or they have engaged because they care, and I appreciate that. And you all do the same thing. You will engage with some people because we care also. We're not just, this is not just a one-way street, right? We'd like to provide information, provide clarification in some regard where we can, but then you also have to know when to kind of just let it, let it go. So, all right, let's see, what else about the survey that we want to talk about? One thing I want to, I guess we spoke about this before we started recording. I asked you, you know, when was the last, when do you stop recording the survey or conducting the survey, like in January? Right now, you told me, give us the history of that. When did you used to stop conducting that false survey? When do you now stop conducting that quote false survey? And what are we looking at maybe going forward?
Josh Osborne: Sure, so historically and for really for a long time up until the recent couple of decades, we flew the fall survey from September until December 15th. You know, the winters were hard here. Most of the birds were gone. We froze early. We got snow. But in recent decades, we've shifted that and we continued the surveys through December until the midwinter flight in the first week of January. And that's just because, you know, as things change, as we stay warm, as, you know, most of the water around here was open except for about a 10 to 14 day stretch when we had a hard freeze during that late December, early January period. Most of that period, we're still holding birds. We're kind of becoming a wintering state for mallards, at least on some level. I'm not saying we're at peak numbers, but we're holding birds here. We held divers here for as long as I've ever seen it in my 10 years in Illinois.
Mike Brasher: If I could ask, stop holding the birds. I mean, because I know that…
Josh Osborne: Put it in the request box. Well, we would stop holding them if we could, because our duck season is over that last week of December here anyway, so they're not doing us any good here. And as that changes, we've had conversations this year, actually, about do we need to shift that even further into January, because we held birds for a really long time this year. It's important for us that this data set continues to do what it was set out to do, and that's monitor the trend in migration for as long as the birds are here.
Mike Brasher: Well, this is another data set that we… Incredibly valuable data set, especially given the length of time that it's been conducted to capture these changes empirically. Incredible record of information. Thanks for keeping it going. And thanks for, I mean, at some point you'll be able to add up how many miles you have logged and how many birds you've counted and all that. I do want to ask, counting ducks versus shorebirds, what's the, how much larger of a challenge is it to count shorebirds and how good are you at shorebird ID?
Josh Osborne: Um, not great.
Mike Brasher: Have we talked about, like, these are aircraft-based surveys. Did you go through all that, the methods, like, while I was reading this book and I spaced out?
Therin Bradshaw: No, probably not.
Mike Brasher: Like, how high, what speed, that type of stuff. Not too technical, just to give people an idea.
Josh Osborne: On average, 200 feet above the ground. The speed varies depending on, honestly, the weather and what we're trying to accomplish. If there's a big pile of birds, Mike will slow down for me a little bit, but 120 miles an hour, 100 miles an hour. You know, it's a census, you know, there are multiple types of aerial surveys, and we alluded to that study that Heath had the foresight of putting together, where we have evaluated whether or not we could do transects, and we did that over here on Pool 19. And it just didn't work quite as well. And over in the Illinois River, we set up these one-square-mile grids. And so we randomly placed these grids throughout the 100-year floodplain. And we were trying to see if we could do that instead, if it would be easier, saving staff time, saving, you know, the DNR money, and model those numbers and see how close they could get to the census. And what's incredible about that is for two years, Aaron did those surveys back-to-back. So he was flying the grid survey with me in the back of the plane trying to point out habitat characteristics, and then the next day he would do the census. The things we do for ducks. Correct. And so for our circumstances here in central Illinois, it may not be the same at other places, but this census-style survey where we fly around and try to get a really good estimate of what the bird numbers are in this specific area, that's what works for us. As far as the difference between shorebirds and ducks is, ducks you can kind of, you can fly and get a good idea of species, but, and the number of, you know, you can tell, okay, there's, you know, 100,000. whatever's over here, 5,000 over here, you can determine species from the air at that speed at a reasonable click. Shorebirds, you can't do that. Shorebirds, we group into bigs and littles, so anything that's keel deer sized and bigger is a big, and anything smaller than that is a little. And you can determine species from the air, but you just don't have the time to do it on a survey like this. Flocks are so dense, I'm sure. and they just scatter, you know, it's all mudflats and they just scatter and there's just no reasonable way to do that.
Mike Brasher: Let's transition to ongoing work. Darren, we're gonna pepper you with some questions here, give you an opportunity to talk about ongoing work, priorities of Forbes Biological Station, give us the rundown.
Therin Bradshaw: Yeah, I don't know about priorities, but we are currently running what we're calling a hunter disturbance project, where we're… If only you knew somebody who had some familiarity with that kind of a study, right? There's some new research that's been pumped out by a significant other of mine. So yeah, my wife, Dr. Abigail Grace Blake Bradshaw, has published some of her research, particularly associated with her use of using autonomous recording units to be placed out on the landscape and to record the soundscape of the landscape. And so other folks have used the autonomous recording units, or ARUs, to detect bird species, frog species, bat species, anything that gives a unique audio signal that can be identified later. And so we're using that method to detect gunshots on the landscape because they also have a unique audio signal. And so we're essentially spreading these units out across the landscape. across the Illinois River Valley. The Illinois River Valley is hunted by waterfowl hunters pretty heavily, but one thing that we have for us is that it is a very narrow corridor, so it's very easy for us to put out autonomous recording units, ARUs, on the landscape and have a good confidence level of we're covering the hunted areas pretty thoroughly. And so we're very excited to see what research or what results are going to come out of that. But essentially our goal is to record and tally the number of gunshots in a given area. And then we're also putting on GPS backpacks onto mallards and green-winged teal. And we're interested to see if the birds are making movement decisions based on hunter intensity or hunter opportunity based on the number of gunshots that are recorded. One interesting, we don't have a whole lot of data since we've only have gone through two of three field seasons so far. But one thing that we've noticed from our first year of recordings is that where my wife, Abby, did her research down in Tennessee. The hunting pressure was constant, just non-stop, lots of hunter activity, lots of hunter pressure. Whereas in our area, in the IRV, what we're seeing is that there seems to be a lot of fluctuation based on day. That there would be hot days, whether it's on the weekend or good weather days, or there's a lot of birds in our area that given day. And then there's some days where we're not getting a lot of detections, assuming that there's not a whole lot of hunter activity, stuff that hunters are shooting at in the area. And so we're very interested to see how these pulses of pressure are influencing our birds' decision of moving across our local habitat. And then one other good thing that we are excited to look at, as far as looking at Illinois versus a more Southern state like Tennessee, is that we're there in mid-latitude. And so we're assuming that birds are still making that decision of, am I sticking around? Am I getting more nutrients? Or am I getting the heck out of here and going further South? And so we're hoping to see how that hunter pressure on the landscape is influencing potentially birds' decision to get out of Dodge and go down South.
Mike Brasher: That's really cool to hear about that. And Abby is a postdoc with y'all now, right? I think we talked about that with her last week. But yes, so that is awesome. We talked in that discussion with her and Nick about this very thing in that West Tennessee landscape is pretty unique relative to among many others that I'm familiar with. We talk about the Mississippi Alluvial Valley, the Central Valley of California, Gulf Coast, and I'm not as familiar with the IRV and Mississippi River Valley up here as y'all are, but at least among those that I'm familiar with, it's West Tennessee is quite a bit different. And so the comment that we were making, the discussion we were having last week is that, and they were careful to point out, these are the observations and the findings from the landscape in which we conducted this study. I mean, that's the way all science works. You don't draw inference outside the bounds of where the study is relevant and so forth, and made the comment of it will be really neat once studies similar to this are conducted, replicated in other locations, and sounds like we're on the way to having that done. And that's really cool that you're already seem to be noticing some differences in pressure on the landscape and maybe how birds are responding to that pressure.
Therin Bradshaw: And I think that whether it's a blessing or a curse is that we've had a very, very strange winter this past year of it being really, really hot and really, really dry. And so it will be interesting to see what our numbers will look like next year I'm assuming that our winter is going to be different than this past one.
Mike Brasher: What are some of the other projects that occupy your time now?
Therin Bradshaw: Occupy my time? Well, I am currently wrapping up a true metabolizable energy project. We've already done our feeding trials and so our true metabolizable energy stuff is essentially trying to figure out what energy waterfowl are actually gaining from the seeds on the landscape. And so that's actually how my position started here at the Forbes Biological Station was, welcome aboard, Theron. You get to take a lead on this true metabolizable energy project that everybody loves. Thank you. Great. I will do it. What species of ducks are part of that? Oh, yeah. So we had a couple of projects going. We had one project that was looking and comparing mallards to pintails to green-winged teal. And then we had a separate project that was comparing blue-winged teal from ring-necked ducks, kind of comparing dabbler versus diving ducks, and then this was actually sponsored by the state of Florida, and so they're interested in those waterfowl species in particular.
Mike Brasher: So if it's sponsored by the state of Florida, they're probably going to have an interest in some rather, I don't know, unusual but different food types as well.
Therin Bradshaw: That's correct. I think the main project was to assess the impact that invasive species had on diets of birds and then we thought it was not a good idea to move invasive species across state lines and so We did stick with the non-invasive species, but yes, they were different species that we wouldn't have in the Midwest, and so it was a kind of a separate project. Such as? Like, we don't have sawgrass. Oh yeah, cladium. Yep, right. So that was an interesting seed of choice down there. Apparently, it was very, very abundant across the landscape, and it was everywhere, and folks were finding it in birds' diets, and then now it's not as prevalent on the landscape, I believe, if I'm saying that correctly. but they're still finding it in ducks' diets. So, if it's not on the landscape as much, but ducks are still finding it, then that might indicate that they want it or that they're selecting for it.
Mike Brasher: What are you learning in terms of the TME? So, I'm on a personal quest now with this line of questions. What are you learning in terms of TME with sawgrass?
Therin Bradshaw: We're learning a lot. I think sawgrass was one that the birds were getting more energy from compared… We were looking at a lot of submerged aquatic vegetation. It turns out most of submerged aquatic vegetation is water, so there's not a lot of nutrition. It's like eating lettuce, right?
Mike Brasher: Except hydrilla, do I remember correctly? Hydrilla had a surprisingly…
Therin Bradshaw: It might have. It might have. That wasn't a part of my project.
Mike Brasher: It may have been a one prior to it. Yeah.
Therin Bradshaw: But I mean, we're finding a lot of interesting stuff. I think as far as grouping different genuses of seeds together, we're finding that there is a lot of similarities within seeds within the same genus, which makes sense. But I believe that managers really like, or at least some managers that I've met, really like to manage on the species level. They really want to know that species is better than this one. And we're stepping back saying, they're all good. It's fine. So we're kind of finding that sort of stuff.
Mike Brasher: The reason I was asking about cladium sawgrass is because in Louisiana, there's a similar observation in that it was once abundant on the landscape. And I'm not going to attempt the years because I'll get it wrong. I'm not going to attempt an explanation for the cause because I'm certain I'll mess it up as well. But for one reason or another, it went through a period of time where it became less prevalent on the landscape and I think there are still pockets of it in South Louisiana and I think maybe even a resurgence of it in some landscapes based on a few things that I've heard lately, but all the while they were still in some studies of waterfowl duck diets in South Louisiana, they were finding it. And also I think in a study that was collecting thousands of core samples from across the coastal marshes of Louisiana and Texas, sawgrass was made up of a fairly high percentage of the biomass because it's a pretty large seed, right? But we weren't sure what the TME value of it was, we weren't sure if birds were using it as an alternative source of grit or what. So anyway… I'm really curious to see how the final results of all that come out. Is all that published yet? Not yet. Not yet, okay. Nope, it's all on me.
Auriel Fournier: All in good time, all in good time.
Mike Brasher: Yeah, that's right. So, that's another important part of the scientific process is getting the data published. And so, one of the things I want to make sure we… I think I asked you this during the break, Ariel, about some of the other reports and publications from INHS and you reminded me that INHS produces a bulletin, the Illinois Natural History Survey bulletin, a peer-reviewed outlet. There were also a series of reports. Do I remember that correctly? That maybe like Frank would have authored or maybe was that just the bulletin? Is that what we're talking about?
Auriel Fournier: No, I mean he authored kind of reports under I think kind of a couple different report series like when INHS was a part of the DNR there was a couple different series. So he's published across kind of a wide range of both like traditional peer-reviewed journals and more broadly accessible publications.
Mike Brasher: Maybe that's what I'm thinking about is some of the limited series options or whatever. But there is an INHS bulletin that comes out, how often?
Auriel Fournier: I think as often as they get enough papers to fill an issue. So yeah, it depends on the year, but yeah. And you know, there's kind of a series of different technical reports that come out through INHS as well. Like a lot of our waterfowl work comes out in annual reports that are submitted at the DNR, but are also publicly accessible. So yeah, so we, we kind of, you know, contribute to like the wider, what's often called like gray literature, but also do a lot of peer reviewed publication as well.
Mike Brasher: One other thing I want to talk with you about here, Ariel, before we go, but before we do that, I want to make sure, was there any other exciting research that you want to make sure we covered or exciting questions that are on the horizon?
Therin Bradshaw: I would say we're wrapping up a lot of student projects, not a lot of waterfowl projects, but it has been a blast to be a staff member, to be able to assist graduate students through their process.
Mike Brasher: We can talk about some of them if you want to. There's one sitting over here behind you, Cheyenne Beach.
Auriel Fournier: We're going to have her. She's not almost done though. I think Farron was alluding to the ones that graduate in a couple of weeks.
Mike Brasher: Is that why she looks shocked and terrified? We're going to talk with Cheyenne here in a bit about her ongoing work. So yeah, any that you want to mention for sure.
Therin Bradshaw: I guess this past summer I got to help Nicole Petrunti is her last name. And she's been doing a Canada goose study in Illinois where during goose roundups she is swabbing them and essentially assessing how many potential infectious diseases they're passing around. If the diseases that they do have are in relation to how close they are to urban areas, whether there's some overlap happening there, and so that has been a lot of fun. Helped out Chad Kramer with his marsh bird research done throughout the Illinois River Valley, getting up early and actually a lot of times staying up late trying to capture these marsh birds by net at night with headlamps just walking through the marsh.
Mike Brasher: What species of marsh birds?
Therin Bradshaw: So, he was looking at Sora and Virginia Rail, but we did catch a handful of Yellow Rail as well, so that was very, very exciting. No Black Rails. No Black Rails. Okay. Not in Illinois. Turns out they're hard to find. Yeah. But yeah, those were two of the three. I didn't really get to help Nora Hargett's stuff, but she was out in Colorado.
Auriel Fournier: Yeah, so Nora is working on Black Rail out in Colorado, so they're along the Arkansas River in the southeastern part of the state. A fairly recently discovered population, like just in the past couple decades, and now that Black Rail is federally listed, the state of Colorado is really interested in figuring out what's going on with them, and so Nora's done kind of the foundational work there.
Mike Brasher: And you know a few things about rails.
Auriel Fournier: I do, yeah. It's my area of expertise, definitely. So it's been really exciting to work with them there. And then the other student that's finishing up this spring is Jess Schmidt. She's at the University of Arkansas working on king rails in Southeastern Arkansas at Choctaw West Wildlife Management Area. It's an Arkansas Game and Fish Commission property. It's the only site in the state of Arkansas that we know of that has multiple breeding pairs of king rails.
Mike Brasher: Wow. Yeah, I'm glad to hear about the work that y'all are doing on the secretive marsh birds. They're a really cool group of animals. They're secretive, they're difficult to study, you encounter them, they can be highly vocal, some of them more so than others, but not as visible as many of the other species that we're so familiar with in terms of ducks and geese. but occupy a lot of the same habitat types and many of them are hunted species and they taste quite good and glad to hear about the continuation of and maybe expansion of some of that research being conducted out of the station. So what else before we kind of close out, I want to talk about this, you know, the publication where people can go access. What else do we need to highlight? Pay tribute to the folks that have come before us, the people that helped make this happen, ongoing work, people get excited about all the aerial surveys, you're going to continue to do those?
Auriel Fournier: Yeah, continue the aerial surveys and continue, I think, you know, kind of Frank's emphasis was very IRV specific. It was a very place-based research program in a lot of ways that had these larger impacts. And today I would say we continue to do a lot of very place-based work. A lot of our work is focused on the Illinois River, helping our local partners, the Nature Conservancy, the state Fish and Wildlife Service, helping them address questions that they have so we can continue to have these amazing wetlands into the future.
Mike Brasher: And for people that may want to learn more about the history of the Forbes Biological Station, there's a publication that you have in front of me, Forbes Biological Station, The Past and the Promise. This is, what year was that published?
Auriel Fournier: This was published in, I believe, 2003. It was written by Steve Hevera.
Mike Brasher: So, 20 years old now. Yeah. Still looking back on that 110-year history at that time, which is crazy.
Auriel Fournier: Yeah, exactly. So this chronicles the first 110 years of the station. You can download a copy of it from the Field Station's website if you're interested. We're in the process of updating it to include the most recent 20 years. So myself, Josh Stafford, and Heath Hagee have written an update that'll get appended to the back. We're hoping to have that out by June that'll cover the full 130-year history, including some new pictures and A complete list of all the different grad students that have been involved. There's been like over 20 graduate students that have come through Forbes in the past 20 years.
Mike Brasher: This has been fun. I'm glad that you reached out to me last year, making me aware of this and trying to plan a time to get together to do this. We can always do these remote. It's always better to do them in person, though. The interaction is better and it's especially better when we can have it coincide with an opportunity to get out and get our hand on some animals, some ducks, as we did this morning. And we're going to talk about some of that with Cheyenne in another episode. But yeah, Dr. Ariel Fournier, Josh Osborne, and Theron Bradshaw, thank you all so much for being here, for participating in this episode, and for all the work that you continue to do. Great to have you.
Auriel Fournier: Thank you, Mike. Thanks for having us.
Mike Brasher: A very special thanks to our guests on today's episode, Dr. Ariel Fornier, Josh Osborne, and Theron Bradshaw of the Illinois Natural History Survey, Forbes Biological Station. Congratulations on 130 years of science and research and informing conservation for the animals that we care about. As always, we thank our producer, Chris Isaac, for the great job he does getting these episodes out, and we thank you, the listener, for your time and for your commitment to wetlands and waterfowl conservation.