RELOADED EP39 | Waterfowlers Play An Important Role In Citizen Science Programs

Hosts Dr. Mike Brasher and Chris Jennings are joined by Dr. Mark Lindberg, professor at University of Alaska, Fairbanks, Institute of Arctic Biology to discuss the ways hunters play a vital role in citizen-science programs. Banding, HIP, and other various programs are supported by hunters, and are crucial to waterfowl science.

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Whether you're a seasoned hunter or just getting started, this episode is packed with valuable insights into the world of waterfowl hunting and conservation.

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Creators and Guests

Host

Mike Brasher

DUPodcast Science Host

Writer

Chris Jennings

DUPodcast Contributor

What is Ducks Unlimited Podcast?

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.

VO: 01:54

Welcome to the Ducks Unlimited podcast, Reloaded. We bring you the best of our past episodes. Whether you're a seasoned waterfowler or curious about conservation, this series is for you. Over the years, we've had incredible guests and discussions about everything from wetland conservation to the latest waterfowl research and hunting strategies. In Reloaded, we're revisiting those conversations to keep the passion alive and the mission strong.

VO: 02:19

So sit back, relax, and enjoy this reload.

Mike Brasher: 02:26

Welcome to the Ducks Unlimited podcast. I am joined here today by my cohost, Chris Jennings. And today we have another exciting episode for you. It's gonna be a highly educational episode. We're gonna pay tribute in some way to the hunters and the active role they play in collecting data that through the years has provided the foundation for much of what we know waterfowl population ecology, and quite frankly, it continues to fuel many of the decisions around waterfowl management and conservation in North America.

Mike Brasher: 02:56

And so specifically, we're going to be talking about waterfowl hunters as citizen scientists and the important role that we all play in that regard. To help us in this discussion, we're going be welcoming in a special guest, Doctor Mark Lindberg, Professor of Wildlife Ecology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Institute of Arctic Biology. Mark, welcome into the show, and I promise that'll be the last time I referred to you as Doctor Lindbergh per our earlier conversation.

Mark Lindberg: 03:21

I appreciate that.

Mike Brasher: 03:22

Yeah, so thanks for joining us here. We always want to start off the show when we have some special guests by giving you an opportunity to introduce yourself, your personal insights, professional interest, and kinda where we are, where you are today, and help us understand a little bit about where you come from.

Mark Lindberg: 03:41

Yeah, sure. I think it's important, it's very important when talking to hunters that first establish that many of us are also hunters too, are also biologists. And sure enough, I started hunting when I was 10. I grew up in Pennsylvania. My dad was a big time deer hunter and he encouraged me and I got interested very early in life and that interest just continued to grow through my life and my roots again were deer hunting, but my passion is definitely in upland bird hunting and do a fair amount of waterfowl hunting as well.

Mark Lindberg: 04:16

So hopefully hunters appreciate as I'm talking to them that I could appreciate their perspective and have a similar one as they do. That interest in hunting and wildlife and outdoors grew into a career as well. I I started with the Pennsylvania Game Commission in 1984 as a technician. It's I I was working on a project on Canada geese and that led into some graduate studies. Did my master's degree on Canada geese at Cornell University in the, gosh, late 1980s.

Mark Lindberg: 05:02

And that led to a PhD in Alaska on Black Brand. From there I started down my career path. I actually had a job at Ducks Unlimited. And in 02/2001, we returned to Alaska and I took a position as you described as a faculty member, professor of wildlife ecology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks where I've been ever since.

Mike Brasher: 05:27

I always try to do

Mark Lindberg: 05:28

a little bit

Mike Brasher: 05:28

of research, additional research on the guests that we're going to have, so I went to your webpage, and you're an incredibly accomplished waterfowl ecologist. When I read your bio, your research interest, you're interested in things such as population ecology, banding analyses, harvest management decision analysis, you're one of those smart people that always look up to you, bring a lot of quantitative skills to these discussions, and that's always really valuable, sometimes intimidating for me to get in these conversations, I think you're gonna be a fantastic part of this show. So happy to have you on this and appreciate your time, because I know you're certainly a busy person.

Mark Lindberg: 06:10

Yeah, I appreciate that. Yeah, you're right about traveling around for this job. Early in my career someone pointed out to me, hey, if you study waterfowl, they can take you to some really neat places, and I'd just like to point out that has definitely been the case and one of the reasons I initially got interested.

Mike Brasher: 06:29

Mark, you also have I believe a podcast of your own that you started here recently, something I believe it's called the Hunting Science Podcast, do I have that right?

Mark Lindberg: 06:37

Yeah, thanks for the plug and I appreciate that. Yeah, I have been very active and I guess successful in science in the form of communicating to other scientists. But one of the things I was frustrated with, I guess, late in my career is that we weren't getting the science to hunters enough at least, in my opinion. And that was the motivation behind starting this podcast, as you said, called Hunting Science. And our goal is to make hunters aware of the science of hunting.

Mark Lindberg: 07:16

And there's quite a bit of it, some we'll talk about today, but there's other podcasts there that dive into other topics as well.

Mike Brasher: 07:25

We talk about that often, Chris, and Clay and I, when we're mapping out the potential for this particular podcast, and there is so much really interesting information that feeds the waterfowl management enterprise. And I know a lot of our our hunters and conservation supporters will be interested in that, and I think your philosophy on the hunting podcast the hunting science podcast of yours is sort of similar to ours. The more that we can educate and share this information with our with our supporters, I think the the greater appreciation and understanding of that resource they they have. And so that's pretty cool that you've headed down that that road.

Chris Jennings: 08:06

Yeah. Absolutely, Mark. I'm gonna have to look into that, into your podcast. You know, just when this topic came up, I thought, you know, kind of the citizen science is how waterfowl hunters kinda lead the way with this. You know, one thing to kind of expand on even from what Mike said is I live every day inside the waterfowl hunting community working with the magazine, creating content online, social media.

Chris Jennings: 08:30

But every time we do one of these podcasts, I manage to pick up some tidbit of information from the science side of things, something that I didn't know, something that I know that our listeners will definitely learn from. So I do appreciate you coming on and and, you know, this is gonna be a great topic, the citizen scientist.

Mark Lindberg: 08:48

Thanks. Yeah.

Mike Brasher: 08:49

So to that topic, let's get right into it here. When we use the term citizen scientist, I think that term has probably come of age in the last ten years, at least that's my sense of it. Mark, help us understand what we're actually talking about when we use that term.

Mark Lindberg: 09:07

Yeah, I think you're right, that term is relatively new, but the idea of someone collecting information for us, data, scientific data for us is rather old. And that is my definition, someone who volunteers to collect information to help us make management decisions, conservation decisions. And I guess I would add to that definition that they may not know they're doing that, so it's either knowingly or unknowingly they're helping us gather information that we need to make the best decisions we possibly can.

Mike Brasher: 09:46

Whenever I was thinking about this this episode over the past few days, and in my mind coming up with examples of citizen scientists, I think we're going to mention that waterfowl hunters, the hunters in general, are some of the first citizen scientists that that we've ever had. But there's also another group of citizen scientists out there that I I don't know how how common or how active they are anymore, but when I was growing up, my grandfather would be a one of these local weather reporters. The local weather station would reach out to citizens towns around broadcast location, and I got a great kick out of having my granddad be the one to call in and report the weather from his little town. And so the fact that I have a grandfather that collected data and reported it is probably going to come as a shock and surprise to no one that knows me and the fact that I'm into data a little bit. So that was sort of a neat way of looking back and a personal example that I thought about.

Mike Brasher: 10:43

Mark, what are some other specific examples of citizen science as we might see in the conservation field?

Mark Lindberg: 10:51

Yeah, your point about the weather data is a good one, I hadn't thought about that. Yeah, But hunters have been doing this for quite some time. I guess maybe the most obvious way to some hunters they do this is through things like a bag check station. You stop, you show who's ever checking what you may have harvested and they might look at the age, the sex of the animal or some other characteristics. So that's citizen scientist data that you're providing to help them make management decisions about those animals.

Mark Lindberg: 11:26

I know this is the case with most other places, but in Alaska, every year after a season closes, we need to file hunt reports whether we harvested an animal or not. Where did we hunt? How many days did we hunt? How did we get to where we hunted? Things like that.

Mark Lindberg: 11:43

And it again helps them, agencies, make management decisions for those species. And there's more modern forms starting to crop up here and there too. EBird is one app that you can get on your phone that allows you to record observations of birds from around the world that's shared with biologists and scientists and other birders and hunters for that matter. So, there's definitely a lot of forms in which hunters, citizens can contribute.

VO: 12:30

Stay tuned to the Ducks Unlimited podcast, sponsored by Purina Pro Plan and Bird Dog Whiskey. After these messages.

Chris Jennings: 14:37

You know, I know hunters, you know, maybe someone forgets their license and they have to call in. And I've I've actually been on the phone, you know, with people or been near them when, you know, they're filling out their license online and telling, or it's an automated system and they're just pressing no no no no no and and I'm like hey man you can't do that.

VO: 14:55

You know

Chris Jennings: 14:55

and they're like why I'm just trying to get through it. And I'm like because it's an important you know it's important aspect. It's something you know HIP is something that every single hunter in The US is participating in now and that's a one great program and something for people to keep in mind when they start getting the questions about,

VO: 15:10

did you hunt coots, rails, or gallonules?

Chris Jennings: 15:13

That's right. And then, you know, just make sure you you're following along with that, and that's a good reminder for hunters that they are participating in this science.

Mark Lindberg: 15:20

Yeah, definitely. The Harvest Information Program is very obvious one. About a million waterfowl hunters a year are reporting their harvest from the previous year. That's a million data points provided by citizen scientists. And that information goes into decisions about future harvest regulations.

Mark Lindberg: 15:43

So it's important not only to provide that information but do it in a reliable manner.

Mike Brasher: 15:50

I would imagine as some people are listening to this, they're expecting us to get into the details of what the harvest information program is and how that data is used. Because there's a tremendous misunderstanding of how that data is is used. A lot of people think that it's estimating harvest for the current year, but that's not true at all. So I don't want to veer off into that, otherwise we'll have to be pulled out of the ditch here on this particular podcast, but we will get back to that at some point in the future. What are some other examples, Mark, of citizen science, the data collection responsibilities that waterfowl hunters have?

Mark Lindberg: 16:25

Yeah. So some hunters, not all, participate in what is called, not attractively the parts collection survey, maybe a better name, the wing survey. That's been going on for about forty years. And here hunters send in their wings of harvested waterfowl and biologists gather every year what's called the wing bee. And at that wing bee they look at those wings and from the patterns of feathers and colors they can tell the age and the sex of the birds.

Mark Lindberg: 17:02

And by knowing the age and sex, they can determine things like production rates for that year. So if there's more young birds in the wing bees than adult birds, that looks like a good production year whereas reverse might indicate that it wasn't a very good production year. So that's a neat way to do it and it's really fun to look at those wings. One of my first jobs was to work bag check stations looking at wings of birds that hunters had harvested, and it's pretty fascinating that you can determine that much information just from the color patterns in the wings. The other one that people might be a little more familiar with is reporting the bands of lake banded birds they may harvest.

Mark Lindberg: 17:51

So those who've been around for a while know that the metal lake bands on waterfowl used to have just something simple that said, advise Washington DC, and not many people knew what to do with those bans. In fact, about 35% of the people recorded those bans when that information existed. But in more recent decades we've moved to a phone reporting system with 800 numbers, and also now we're using websites that allow hunters to report information on the they've harvested, banded birds they've harvested. And that results in about a 100,000 reports per year, and about 75% of the hunters that get a band now report that information. So we've increased the volume of data.

Chris Jennings: 18:45

I'm just curious, did the, when when the submitting process went online and did did you guys see like a slight jump in the percentage of birds reported? I mean, just the convenience of, especially, you know, this day and age, you know, even when you're hunting, you're not without your phone. Did did did you see any increase in that go up just because it makes it so easy?

Mark Lindberg: 19:10

Yeah. It was almost immediate increase. In fact, shortly after they implemented the +1 800 number that doesn't exist anymore, but when they implemented it, I so happened to be at Bird Banning Lab in Washington DC and they had a bank of phones there that were people were answering. And while I was there during the hunting season, people were calling in from their buying, hey. I just shot this pintail with this number.

Mark Lindberg: 19:39

And and it was an immediate input of information and then they got immediate feedback on that bird as well. Expenses of having people answer those phones were probably the most important reason why they decided to just go to a more passive approach of having people enter on the website. But nonetheless, the it's still a system that encourages people to hunt it or report, I should say. And, again, reporting rates back in the day when this goes back to nineteen twenties, by the way, when we just had advised Washington DC, about 35% of the people actually reported it and now about 75% do. So that's been a huge improvement in the information we get from those and is consistent I guess with sort of my philosophy is we should empower hunters with knowledge and make them better citizen scientists.

Mark Lindberg: 20:40

And I think that case study is a good example of where we see those improvements in the information. Just another statistic that I like to throw out, but since 1960 hunters have reported almost 4,000,000 bans.

Chris Jennings: 20:56

Wow, that's impressive. Now you mentioned that 20 so so in in that that dataset, it's assumed that twenty five percent of the people who shoot a banded bird do not report it.

Mike Brasher: 21:10

Is that right?

Mark Lindberg: 21:11

Yeah. And that's determined through things like reward band studies. I don't know if anybody has had been fortunate enough to shoot a bird that has a monetary value on its band, but the idea there is that occasionally we put those type of bands out and the assumption is that at some dollar value, whatever that is, everyone that shoots it, a bird with that dollar value will report it. And from there, we can estimate how many report it when there is no dollar value. And so that's that's how we've determined how reporting rates, which they're called, have changed through time.

Mark Lindberg: 21:51

But yeah, there's still some 25% of the people that choose not to report those bans based the information we have.

Mike Brasher: 22:00

Are those reporting rates calculated every year?

Mark Lindberg: 22:03

No, it's not done every year, It's done occasionally as needed is how I would say it. I don't think anything's been done for a few years now.

Mike Brasher: 22:12

But certainly when there's a change in reporting method, that's when it becomes really important.

Mark Lindberg: 22:17

Oh, definitely. Yeah. And you know, I think we're just starting to go down this path, if you will, of empowering hunters with this type of knowledge. I'm kind of curious if we get the word out via podcasts or other ways, I wonder if reporting rates will increase. You know, people, again, my guess is that some of that 25% of the people that don't report just don't understand the value of that information.

Mark Lindberg: 22:47

And that if we can tell them

Mike Brasher: 22:48

They don't understand how it's right.

Mark Lindberg: 22:50

Yeah, yeah, so I mean it just leads to better decisions. It's more reliable information. The more information we have the more reliable it is. So not reporting that information creates uncertainty in the decisions we make. And again, I think I'm of the opinion that if hunters understood that, more of them would report their bands.

Mark Lindberg: 23:15

Because I think almost everyone wants us to have reliable information.

Mike Brasher: 23:19

I wanna go back just a little bit. You mentioned something about the one-eight 100 bands. I know those bands are no longer used, but if someone recovers a bird that has one-eight 100 BAND on it, is that number still functional?

Mark Lindberg: 23:31

The number I believe just gets you to a recording that tells you to report via the website. I'm pretty sure that's where it goes now. So it's not functional in the sense you can't report your information via that route, but it tells you how to do it.

Mike Brasher: 23:46

But you can still report those one-eight 100 bands online.

Mark Lindberg: 23:50

Yeah, you can still do that online for sure. Have you shot one?

Mike Brasher: 23:55

You know, it's been a while, I think I did. I think I shot one of the early ones. That would have been back when the the number was functional. Yeah. So I shot a band one

Chris Jennings: 24:05

time in Indiana when I was younger and got excited, picked it up. I was like, yeah, my first band. I was probably 16, 17 years old. And and looked at the band and it had some guy's name. He's got I won't mention his name just in case he's still around, but had his name carved in it very loosely with a phone number and I called it, and I'm sure he was some knucklehead in Brazil, Indiana that was banding birds Yeah.

Chris Jennings: 24:26

Probably illegally without a permit.

Mark Lindberg: 24:28

That was

Chris Jennings: 24:28

the it's the only band duck band I've ever killed, so

Mike Brasher: 24:30

We'll have to get into our banding stories Absolutely. And the birds we've shot with banded birds. I actually have a couple of interesting stories on that. I hope we've shared with our listeners their role in collecting this information. I think we're gonna have you back and talk a little bit more about how some of this data is used and speak a little bit more deliberately about the importance of reporting the data reliably and collecting that data reliably, and we want folks to realize that they play a critical role.

Mike Brasher: 25:04

They have for decades, and they will continue to play a role, a critical role in the data that is collected and used to manage our waterfowl harvest on an annual basis. And we want to share this information with people. We want them to understand how that information is used. We want them to understand the importance of it. And we appreciate you coming on and helping us tell this story.

Mike Brasher: 25:26

And so, yeah, I think Chris, any any final words here? Everyone out there listening, report your bans. Report your bans. Absolutely.

Chris Jennings: 25:35

It's important.

Mike Brasher: 25:35

Mark, any final words on this on on this particular episode?

Mark Lindberg: 25:40

Just Just this thought I guess, the way I try to present this to hunters, if you were the decision maker, if the hunter was the person setting the harvest regulations, what information would you like to have to do that? And, you know, I think everyone would say the most and the most reliable information I can get. And I think if you view it from that perspective then that will really motivate you to want to provide this information in a reliable manner. So hopefully people will think that way about it. It's not like we're trying to use this information against you.

Mark Lindberg: 26:19

It's everyone involved wants to make the best decisions possible, and that's only possible with the lack of data.

Mike Brasher: 26:27

That's right. Mark, we thank you for your time. Thank you for joining us all the way from Fairbanks, and thank my cohost Chris Jennings for joining us here. I wanna also thank at this time our producer, Clay Baird, who's gonna make us all sound sound great, and thanks to each of you, each of our listeners for a very important part of this entire enterprise. Thank you for your contribution to the science.

Mike Brasher: 26:52

Thank you for your commitment to wetlands and waterfowl conservation, and we'll catch you on the next episode.

VO: 27:12

Thank you for listening to the DU podcast, sponsored by Purina Pro Plan, the official performance dog food of Ducks Unlimited. Purina Pro Plan, always advancing. Also proudly sponsored by Bird Dog Whiskey and Cocktails. Whether you're winding down with your best friend or celebrating with your favorite crew, Bird Dog brings award winning flavor to every moment. Enjoy responsibly.

VO: 27:34

Be sure to rate, review, and subscribe to the show and visit ducks.org/dupodcast. Opinions expressed by guests do not necessarily reflect those of Ducks Unlimited. Until next time, stay tuned to the Ducks.