Bear Grease - Ep. 36: Ducks - The Duck Hunting Capital of the World (Part 1)

Episode Date: January 12, 2022

On this episode of the Bear Grease Podcast, we’ll be exploring the ancient migration of mallard ducks and why the place they choose as a primary wintering ground -- Arkansas -- is called the “Duck Hunting Capital of the World.” We're exploring why this reputation has lasted the test of time. We’ll talk with the lead waterfowl biologist of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, Luke Naylor, and the new director of the agency, Austin Booth. We'll get a good lesson in waterfowl biology and the Mississippi flyway. We’ll go into the flooded timber and hunt with a world-champion duck caller, Jimbo Ronquest, and lastly, we’ll talk with ornithologist and author, Scott Wiednesal about the mystery of migration. We’ll even hear from Sean Weaver of MeatEater. The lineup is stacked, the knowledge drop will be thick, and we’ll be getting an introduction to how the Green Tree Reservoirs -- the flood prone hardwood bottoms of Arkansas are in jeopardy, and what the plan is to save them. It would not be possible for you to intentionally want to miss this one. Connect with Clay and MeatEaterClay on InstagramMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop Bear Grease Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Built to perform, built to last. Check out. First Light's new field. Worldware gear at firstlight.com. My dad, he thought he was unique even at that time to have a camouflage boat and a black dog in South Central Kansas. And then he comes out here to visit me and hunt here. And it's nothing exceptional at all. I mean, there's a camouflage boat and a black dog at every other house, it seems.

On this episode of the Bear Greas podcast will be exploring the ancient migration of Mallard Ducks. and how a place they chose as a primary wintering ground is called the duck hunting capital of the world. I'm talking about my home state of Arkansas, and I want to understand why this reputation has lasted the test of time. I like the boldness and passion of such labels. We'll talk with the lead waterfowl biologist of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission and the new director of the agency. We'll go into the flooded timber and hunt with a world champion duck collar, Jimbo Ron Quest, and we'll talk with ornithologist and author Scott Weidensaw about the mystery of the migration. We'll even hear from Sean Weaver of Meat Eater. The lineup is stacked, the knowledge drop will be thick,

and we'll use this info in part two of the podcast. Yep, already talking about part two, to learn how the green tree reservoirs, the flood prone hardwood bottoms of Arkansas, are in jeopardy and what the plan is to save them. It would not be possible for you to intentionally want to miss this one. Duck hunting in Arkansas was something I was obsessed with as a kid because there was a romance that all duck hunters had. Like across the country, no matter what, you look to Arkansas and you were ending. of them shooting green heads coming through the trees. My name is Clay Newcomb, and this is the Bear Grease podcast,

where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant. Search for insight in unlikely places, and where we'll tell the story of Americans who live their lives close to the land. Presented by FHF Gear, American-made, purpose-built, hunting and fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged as the world. places we explore. What's this dog's name? His name's Tiny. Tiny. How old is it? Tiny's 19 months. 19 months. He'll retriever duck. He'll fetch a duck. I promise you. He will fetch a duck. Let's go.

I want to see him do it. Let's kick this thing off. Caleb, you're a push off man. It's dark, but a large LED light on the front of the boat illuminates the dark water and the skeletal shapes of timber in front of us. We're in a 16, foot John boat with two black labs. Driving the boat is Jimbo Ronquest. We're in Arkansas cruising through a giant stand of oak timber in about two feet of water. Now where are we going this morning? We're going to a hole called Twin Willis. There's two big will oaks on each side of it, frames it up like a gold post for South Wind. They break between them two big willow trees, and it's beautiful when they fall in there. Hopefully we'll get that opportunity this morning.

This is part of it that you wouldn't understand unless you're here. You can't describe this to somebody, can you? You can't. This is Mr. Bobby Martin. And, you know, this morning we've got a full moon. This is about our third day of having a full moon. And, you know, really, even if I kill the light, you can just kind of see and feel again. This moonlight coming across the top of those trees, and it's a sight.

Every one of us always enjoy seeing. Now, Mr. Bobby, our duck hunters just like everybody else, and they make big excuses when there's a full moon. You know, there's something that happens that Mother Nature cranked in there. I knew it. I knew it. This is our excuse. You've got to have something to lean on. It's kind of like that big fish that got away. We get to the Twin Oaks hole and put out our decoys. I'm instructed to tuck in tight at the base of a tree. We're standing in knee-deep water in the flooded timber. This is our first calling sequence. Just almost legal shooting light. One minute

until legal shooting light. We're going to drop in here. A shot, boys. Good job. 80 degree angle coming down. Arkansas has long been known as the duck hunting capital of the world. Have you heard that before? On this episode, we're going to learn if the label is fitting, and if so, why. Finally, we're going to learn about green tree reservoirs and why the ones in Arkansas are critical. If you'll just buckle in and be patient over the next two episodes, I'm going to introduce you to some experts that are going to paint for us a grand story, an old story involving man and beast. And as you know, with great pride, I've often proclaimed that I'm a seventh generation, Arkansasan. But I've rarely hunted ducks. I grew up in the highlands of Arkansas, in the mountains, a long way from any major waterfowl flyway.

You see, Arkansas is geographically divided into the highlands and delta regions. If you envisioned Arkansas as a square and drew a line diagonally from the upper right-hand corner of the square to the lower left-hand corner of the square, you would divide the state into two sections. And for the general purposes of this analogy, the upper-left section would be mountainous, including the Ozark and Wachita Mountains, and the lower right section, the side hug in the Mississippi River, would be the lowland delta regions of Arkansas.

It's flat agricultural land with timbered rivers and pockets of contiguous hardwoods. The delta regions of Arkansas are the bread and butter of the great and ancient Mississippi waterfowl flyway, also known as the flyway of the Mallard, which is the most sought after of all waterfowl. Arkansas is special and I want to understand why. As non-looker, it's clear that the mystical migrations of these birds moves people's souls in strange ways.

People talk about ducks flying into a set of decoys as if they're recounting a spiritual experience. Their eyes twinkle, their voices change, and in the right context around the right fire with the right people, a tear might even be shed when the cupping of the... of mallard wings is spoken of. It's clear that this is sacred territory, and I'm interested in understanding why. The second objective of looking into the waterfowl world is of more importance than the first.

There's a significant sector of critical winter ground waterfow habitat that's in peril, and that peril is man-induced. By the time we're done with the series, we'll be experts on green tree reservoirs, or GTRs as they're called. They're flooded hardwood bottoms. Luke Naylor is the lead waterfowl biologist for the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. He's one of those guys that when you shake his hand, you're convinced of his authenticity. His confidence coupled with his down-to-earth demeanor lets you know that you're dealing with a professional.

I'm interested in gleaning from the passion and sight of these hardcore waterfowl guys. I'm hoping that Luke can help. So you're the statewide waterfowl program coordinator. That's right. Yeah, waterfow biologist, duck biologist. And how long have you been with gammonfish? 15 years now. So got here early summer of 2006.

That's pretty cool, man. It is. I mean, it's... Is that kind of like playing for like the Golden State Warriors, the championship team? Yeah, if I could shoot like Steph Curry, I guess. You know, it is and talked to a lot of people before I got this job. And the situation you come into when you work as the Arkansas

all waterfow biologists and there's a whole lot of positives there's a few things some people might view as negatives but you know if you just kind of roll with it there's a lot of a lot of interest a lot of intensity here and so sometimes that can be can be a lot to deal with i'd rather have folks that are really passionate about the resource and passionate about the pastime of duck hunting and the culture of duck hunting i'd much rather have folks who are on the on the extremely passionate side of the spectrum versus apathetic you know so you come here and it yeah and it's definitely the truth in Arkansas. There's just lots of people care about it, but that passion that people have here makes a job both really rewarding, frustrating at times, but you can work through that. And there's

always something new to be done, you know. There's always some new issue. Yeah, there's always because of that passion, because of the great waterfow resource we have, there's just always something else to work on. I want to understand the duck hunting culture of this place that's been dubbed as its capital. I'm well aware of the reputation of Arkansas duck hunting. but being raised in a region absent of a major flyway, I have missed out. And if I'm being honest, we're probably a little jealous and tried to convince ourselves that our squirrels and coons were a more noble quarry. But that's currently under reconsideration.

I've asked Luke to describe Arkansas duck hunting culture. Yeah, the culture of duck hunting here is everywhere. It's amazing. There's other places, of course, that have really strong claims to a waterfowl hunting culture. I never want to forget that, right? I mean, most of modern waterfowl hunting is an east coast, Great Lakes type affair, right? Folks maybe here in the South don't want to hear that sometimes. But, you know, I mean, but it's a matter of where, you know, European settlement started and just that progression of things, right?

So the culture of duck hunting here is just intense. You know, I grew up in South Central Kansas and moved here in 06, and I'll never forget my dad coming. He thought he was, and it kind of is, it was unique even at that time to have a camouflage boat and a black doll. in South Central Kansas. And then he comes out here to visit me and hunt here. And it's nothing exceptional at all. I mean, there's a camouflage boat and a black dog on it every other house, it seems. And so it's just deeply culturally embedded here.

Sean Weaver is an addict. He's a waterfowl addict. He's the kind of guy that earns your respect quickly as you see the honesty of his passion. and he's meat eater's waterfow guru and the host of our new show called Ducklor, which is coming out soon. Sean talks about the waterfow prospects of the different regions of the country, like an art dealer talks about art, or like Brent Reeves talks about cornbread. Sean lives in South Dakota, so I wanted to see what he said about Arkansas duck hunting culture. Arkansas duck hunting culture and just duck hunting in Arkansas.

was something I was obsessed with as a kid because there was a romance that all duck hunters had, like across the country no matter what, you look to Arkansas and you were envious of them shooting greenheads coming through the trees. So I just became aid up with Arkansas duck hunting culture. And you really looked at the guys in Arkansas as the best. and that they got, you know, they got all the ducks, but they also were the best at hunting ducks. And they had the most experience, right? And it's reflected in a bunch of ways. You have companies that were based around Arkansas duck hunting.

All the call companies were based in Arkansas, or the vast majority of them for a long time. You had world champion duck callers and the world champion duck calling contest based in Arkansas. So really, it's undeniable that it was the epicenter of duck hunting. And no one could argue it otherwise. Let me ask you a question. How much of that was marketing and hype and how much of it was reality? I think that, and that is not a slight to Arkansas. I mean, I am deeply, deeply biased towards Arkansas.

So I want you to say, Clay, every word of it was true. But I just know that there's, epicenters for things that produce culture, but they're not always, they're not always the best, they're not always everything, but... Right. Yeah, the first duck hunt

I had where I came to hunt in Arkansas wasn't what I was watching on Rusty Creasies. It didn't quite. It wasn't the same. It wasn't eight-man limits of greenheads coming down in the flooded timber. So some of it for sure was just like a lot of video

content, you're watching the Cream off the top. Yeah, you're watching the best. You're watching the... And you can go to Iowa and sit in the best farm in the world and not kill a 170-inch buck. Exactly. And you are undeniably watching stuff that's either one real special day or a private

duck club that, you know, someone like myself might never have access to. That being said, even though my first duck hunting trip to Arkansas wasn't that great and wasn't that successful, I still loved it. because the culture surrounding it. You know, a way I've described the Delta of Arkansas to a lot of people that have never seen it is there's a $30,000 duck boat parked in front of like a $5,000 pickup, a lot of places.

I mean, there is a duck boat around every corner in every driveway. It just runs thick. And I love that. I just love it. Here's Luke continuing to build the story of Arkansas duck hunting. You know, it goes back all the way to, I think the importance overall of Arkansas duck hunting ties back to its important to ducks, obviously. And that's really a question of geography and geology of how this whole landscape. Tell me about that. Yeah, it just funnels ducks here. I mean,

you just kind of take a step back out to 20, 30,000 feet and look at the whole landscape, and you just see this you see all these rivers just kind of draining throughout most of the mid-continent U.S. and ending up funneling together right here in the Delta of Arkansas. So you could have if you weren't from here but you knew about waterfowl biology, you would you would look at a map and you would go that region is going to be special. Yeah, you look back at the early maps of migratory corridors for ducks, the early flyway maps and I've got to be real careful about that. The term flyway gets thrown around a lot these days with duck hunters. He's talking about a flyway here and a flyway there, and that's not how we talk about

flyways when we talk about continental waterfowl management. We talk about these major flyways within which we manage resources, you know, the four major flyways across the continent. So there are four major waterfowl flyways in North America. From east to west, it's the Atlantic Flyway, the Mississippi Flyway, the Central Flyway, and the Pacific Flyways. The Atlantic Flyway starts in the Eastern Arctic Tundra of Canada, travels down the Atlantic coast, and goes into the Caribbean covering more than 3,000 linear miles.

The Central Flyway spans from Central Canada all the way to the Texas Gulf Coast. The Pacific Flyway stretches 4,000 miles starting in Alaska and goes to Mexico. We've gone out of order because I wanted to be dramatic. The Mississippi Flyway is the progeny of what? what the Algonquin tribe called the Father of Waters or the Big River, the mighty Mississippi. The name Mississippi is a transliteration of an Algonquin language word, Mississippi, and the French called it Mississippi, and later it turned into the modern pronunciation. Turns out, Hernando de Soto called it the River of the Holy Spirit, but that didn't stick.

I'm very happy the river wasn't named after some chunk. or a politician's girlfriend. This river drains 41% of the continental United States. It's the third largest river watershed in the world behind the Amazon and Nile rivers. The flyway is 2,300 miles long and has a watershed of over 1.5 million square miles and it's the most heavily used migration corridor

for waterfowl on the continent. Wild stuff. those were described really early on by guys like Frank Bellrose where they looked at did some really just cool observations of ducks during migration, looked at early band recovery information, and developed these maps. And if you go back decades to look at these maps, it just highlights all of these little corridors, major areas of band recovery, just follow these lines of these major rivers and they all come to a confluence in Arkansas. So it just makes sense that this literally does funnel. This funnels them right now. Once I started dabbling in the Arkansas

Waterfowl world, Jim Ronquist's name came up over and over. They call him Jimbo. I quickly learned he's very well respected in the waterfowl industry as a caller, hunter, conservation advocate, and just a general good man. He's a call maker and was the world's duck calling champion in 2006, but more important than titles,

he's a Jedi master in the Duckwoods. I asked Jimbo why Arkansas is special when it comes to ducks. Geographical location. So if you think of the Mississippi Flyway and to some extent the Central Flyway and you look at a big map of the USA and you think of water drainage is, watershed. What's the Ohio River do?

The Ohio River comes from the northeast where the southwesternly flow meets up with the Mississippi River at Cairo, Illinois. Then above it, you got the Missouri River coming out of the Northern Plains and the Dakota's into Montana, and it dumps into the Mississippi River just above St. Louis. Then as you come down, you've got the Arkansas River that starts in Colorado, comes across the Central Plains with a southeasterly flow

and dumps into the Mississippi River just below Stuttgart. But when you start looking at all those confluences of watersheds, and you think of ducks traveling those watersheds as arteries. Maybe people would relate to it better as interstate highways or roads or highways. If you start looking at it, we're in the eye of the funnel. But the geographic location of where we are is what set us up to be the matter of capital world. It's just where ducks want to be. Continental geography on a massive scale plays a vital role

when you're dealing with an animal that has a home range, encompassing thousands, of linear miles. To understand why ducks come down this funnel in the winter, we've got to understand flooded timber or GTRs. We'll be talking a lot about this stuff, and if you're a duck hunter, you may have just gotten cold chills. Austin Booth is a born and bred Arkansason,

a former marine, a lawyer, a public land duck hunter, and he's the new director of the Arkansas Game in Fish Commission. We're going to hear more from Austin in part two of this podcast, hashtag foreshadow, but I wanted to hear his thoughts on Arkansas being the DHCW, the duck hunting capital of the world. We're known as the duck hunting capital world because about 50 to 60 years ago, the public discovered what the ducks discovered a long time ago, and that was green tree reservoirs. Do we have plenty of other kinds of duck hunting opportunities? sure. We got fantastic moist soil habitat. We got fantastic grain rice, mostly habitat. But it's really

the green tree reservoirs smack dab in the middle of the Mississippi Flyway that put us on the map. When I worded it that way saying that the public discovered what the ducks discovered long ago, I meant that. I mean that this flyway in Arkansas, eastern central Arkansas, northeast Arkansas, has been a duck magnet for a very, very long time. Yeah. And when we started to record... I mean, it has nothing to do with man. It has nothing...

I mean, the ancient history, the ancient, just natural migration patterns of these ducks and geese is coming down. Right down the Mississippi River. And they'll shoot off one of the best duck hunting offshoots of the Mississippi River is the White River and the Cache River and the Black River and the St. Francis. It's the whole flyway. We recognize that, that these ducks were attracted in a special way to green tree reservoirs, to bottomland hardwoods. And so 50, 60 years ago, we started putting up infrastructure to try to hold water on these green tree reservoirs for the purpose of attracting more ducks, one, but two, making the green tree reservoir hunting more predictable and more stable rather than relying on Mother Nature to flood and drop.

down and flood and drop down. We need to understand the original design of green tree reservoirs or flooded hardwood tibber inside of natural systems. Here's Luke. I think it's pretty fascinating to think about pre-European settlement, animal movements, and what was here. To think about this flyway is ancient. It is.

As long as there have been ducks, mallard ducks and all these ducks that. have flown in the air, they have been doing this thing. They have been coming through this area. Talk to me about the flooded timber of Arkansas and how that's unique. Because I would have thought that there was, this flooded timber thing would have been kind of all over widespread, but tell me about that. Yes, it's not as much as what you might think. Now, there's pockets of this sort of habitat really all across the U.S. and just at a lot smaller scale. Okay. So, That makes sense. You know, even in my home state of Kansas, you know, there's some areas in eastern Kansas,

and there's some of these old river bottoms that would have flooded up, that would have seasonally flooded, and surely provided habitat for ducks. But the vast majority of it was here in the Mississippi Alluvial Valley, where we're talking, you know, well over 20 million acres of bottom and hardwood forest in the Delta of Arkansas. 20 million acres. Over 20 million. And a bunch of other states, right? You would have had Mississippi, Western Mississippi.

You even would have had the Butteal in Missouri. Western Kentucky, Western Tennessee, and northeast Louisiana, all would have contributed to this massive block of bottom and hardwood forest. Now it would have been constantly in a state of flux. This landscape would have been constantly changing. It would have been bottom and hardwood forest in some stage of succession. And a really good colleague and friend of mine said years ago, you know, really the mallard, if you really kind of think about the continental landscape, it kind of transitions from a prairie species to a forest species, probably about St. Louis latitude. If you go back and look at historic land cover maps, you can start looking at the Delta becoming this forested landscape, maybe about that St. Louis latitude and following those river corridors south.

So that's what these ducks were adapted to come find prairie wetlands throughout most of the year, and then several months of the year finding the resources they need in these forested wetlands. Forested wetlands, flooded timber, or green tree reservoirs are all the same thing. It's odd to think of ducks landing in a forest, but it's what makes the lower Mississippi flyway special. I'm pretty sure that any part of a waterfowler's body that comes in pairs, they'd be willing to give their left one to hunt flooded hardwoods. But let's get back to Luke talking about flooded timber and how ducks use it. And that provided ducks a whole bunch of different resources. You had acorn production from mass producing red oak trees throughout that.

You would have a leaf litter that produces a ton of invertebrates, which are critically important for ducks during the wintering period. All of those resources would have been available, at least at different times of the year, when those areas flooded. Flooding is the catalyst for these areas to produce food for waterfowl. It is. Because they got to have water to swim in. It's all tied back to hydrology.

You know, so being from the highlands of Arkansas, Coming down to the Delta is so bizarre to me because of the water. The levee systems, the water containment systems, just kind of blow my mind that this place is so flat that to make much of it usable, you had to put up levees and do all this stuff. I mean, it's a pretty wild system of regulation. And I guess really what we're trying to do with all that is this place all used to would have flooded. Is that about right? Yeah, at some level, we think most of it would have gone underwater at some point. I mean, think about the...

So like a third of Arkansas would have been underwater at any given point in a year? Yeah. Just naturally. Yep. And some, you know, smart folks who kind of study the geological aspects of it and study historical flood patterns, right? They can kind of map out, like, okay, historically, these areas would have flooded once every 20 years and then step it on down, right? Once every seven, once every five. And these areas probably flooded every year, right?

See, he would have this whole gradient, elevate based on elevation. Gosh, what, we're pushing 100 years now of such an altered landscape. It was 1927, right? The big Mississippi River flood that prompted the building of the major levee system along the Mississippi River itself. And so that goes way back to think read old accounts of how extensive the flooding was. Yeah.

After that major flood and how those levees were then built to prevent that from happening in the future. Luke, that makes a guy from the mountains kind of nervous to be down. down here, man. I'm afraid we're going to get flooded out. Yeah, if a levy breaks, you never know, right? We talk about, you know, you talk about contours and elevation and hills when you get down here. And people use those terms down here. Yeah. And if you're from the mountains at all, you kind of look at them crazy.

I just heard you a minute ago talking about a one foot change in elevation being like really significant for water levels and changes. It is. It kind of blew my mind. A one foot elevation change being significant. is hard to comprehend, but here a one-foot change can be the difference in thousands and thousands of acres flooding. Let's stop and recap what we've just heard. It took me a long time to understand the geology and flood-prone wetland regions of the south. Basically, much of it naturally flooded, making it risky to live and farm here until the levee systems were built, which was after the turn

of the 20th century. Heck, I didn't even know what a levy was until I was an adult. It's an and dam that runs on both sides of a river that keeps it from flooding out of its banks. The levees on these major rivers are truly incredible engineering feats. But I want to key in on one phrase that Luke said, we've been living in an altered environment for about 100 years. Changing the flooding regimes of rivers is a major ecological alteration. The only other critter that does this besides humans is beavers, and we know what a nuisance they can be.

However, as you've heard, basically one-third of Arkansas would be almost uninhabitable if it weren't for these levees. Austin mentioned how we've artificially flooded timber to create duck habitat. But to understand the full picture of Arkansas duck hunting, we need to understand the agricultural component. I now understand the historic picture of these flooded bottom land hardwoods. What happened and what was the time period that we came in and started clearing this timber, planting rice and soybeans and everything? When did we get here and how did that change duck hunting? And I'm still trying to have an understanding of why Arkansas has become and is known as the duck hunting capital of the world.

Walk me through that process. Yeah, so it's, again, coming from a plane states, when a lot of habitat conversion happened, relatively speaking, quite a bit earlier than what it happened here. You know, you have major accounts. You have people still living and farming in the Delta who were alive and farming, or at least witnessed major land clearing of the 50s and 60s, for example. A lot of forests were taken out in Arkansas as recent as the 1950s and 60s. Yeah. And some another big effort in land clearing, you know, it's probably, you know, right around that 100 year mark, really.

We started as an agency and as hunters started noticing the loss of these forested wetlands, likely in the 1920s. 30s, 40s. Okay. And that would have been initial land clearing going on. Folks starting to realize that, wow,

we're losing some of this habitat on the landscape. And the other side of that is that these were people that were just trying to make a living off a swamp ground. Yeah, they're trying to make them living. Yeah.

These people would have felt like they were taking some worthless country and turning it into something really valuable, which they were. Yeah, it's a desolate swamp. You know?

I mean, yes. It's full of mosquitoes and it's just in the way and it appeared like an endless resource. If you've got 20-some million acres of forested wetlands, man, can you imagine coming across here in the 1700s and looking at just this whole landscape being nothing but one massive, almost contiguous forest? It's almost just crazy to imagine at this point. Yeah. But yeah, people were clearing the land. And one thing that really benefited,

surely benefited Arkansas, and ducks and duck hunting was the fact that a lot of this land conversion happened, the land was converted to what we know is a very wildlife-friendly type of agriculture, which is rice. So a lot of these changes were happening at similar times. I forget the date exactly when the first folks started trying to plant rice here in the Grand Prairie, not far from where we're sitting right now. But it would have been, I mean, in the last 100 years. 150, but I think the late 1800s, some folks were experimenting with rice here and really took off in that 1920s, 30s, 40s time frame. So people were growing rice and we know that ducks love rice. We talk about it as kind of a surrogate wetland when managed properly because it's a wetland plant. It grows in wet soils throughout

much of the years. Produces a grain. Can tolerate lots of water. I mean, it grows in water in the summer, of course. And so it was this natural connection that well, okay, yeah, we're losing habitat. Ducks are losing some of what they've historically come to Arkansas for, but it's mostly being replaced. by something that's also really beneficial with ducks. You end up with a situation where you hear, you know, the old stories about people older agricultural methods of shocking grain and you cut it and you shock it to let it dry and people, you know, just almost endless some numbers of ducks

coming in and trying to eat that shocked rice and people having to shoot them off to save their crop. I always have to rib people a little bit when you get around, you know, this part of Arkansas and big rice country, of course, biggest rice producer in the country. And they're proud of it, which they should be. And it's funny. You know, ducks come to Arkansas to eat rice.

It's like, well, lots of ducks were coming here before the first colonel of rice. It wasn't just for you guys. It's not necessarily a cause and effect. On blood trails, the stories don't end when the hunt is over. They just get darker. I've seen something in the road. I instantly thought it was a sleeping bag. And there was a full of blood.

Oh, my God. He doesn't have a hit. Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors, where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce, and the truth gets buried under brush and silence. Indications were he should be right there, but he wasn't. This season, we're going deeper, from cold case files to whispered suspicions, from remote mountains to frozen backwoods. Each story begins in the wilderness and ends in darkness.

Because out here, there are no witness. no cameras, just fragments and the people left behind trying to piece them back together. He's not an honest person. He's incapable of being honest. Somebody somewhere knows something. I'm Jordan Sillers. Season 2 of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, Iheart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Every year, Arkansas farmers plant on average 1.3 million acres in rice on over 1,800. private farms. Did you know that Bill Gates is the largest private landowner in Arkansas?

I'm just glad they didn't give him the right to name this place. Arkansas produces about 9 billion pounds of rice per year, which is close to half of the production of the United States. Rice is a nutrient-dense, complex carbohydrate with 15 essential vitamins and nutrients. Cue the Arkansas rice commercial. Ducks and humans love the stuff. Anyway, Arkansas is known for its public land Waterfowhoney, and these large tracks of bottomland hardwoods now frame up a remnant GTR system that is vital to waterfow. I want to understand how that land, once thought to be unusable,

became public. As this habitat base of forested wetlands dwindled, rice expanded on the landscape. That's when agencies came on board and started purchasing some of these remaining bottom and hardwood forest tracks. Okay. So right around the same, this all happened around the same time that the Pittman-Robertson Act was passed in Congress, right? So the first dedicated funding stream.

In the 40s probably. Yep. So the first dedicated funding stream for state wildlife agencies. And a lot of the initial work of many state wildlife agencies, including the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, was to purchase land. And we're very thankful these days that those folks had the foresight to do that, to go buy land for just, I mean, just pennies, really. And by that time, were they not kind of getting, when I say the scraps, I don't mean that in a derogatory way, but I mean that in like a literal way. They were. Yeah, they were getting the stuff that as land clearing was progressing, we, Gammon Fish bought the areas that were too low.

They were the biggest pain to drain and clear. Yeah, they were the places that people didn't want to buy or had tried to find a way to use it and couldn't. Yeah, they couldn't get over that financial hump that it was worth it. So would you say that the state lands that we do have are, I know today they're critical because they're the biggest blocks of this bottomland hardwood that we have left. So they've now become massively critical. But these spots wouldn't have necessarily been anything special when this place was totally wooded or wooded. No, not necessarily.

I mean, they back to geology. I mean, they kind of lay in areas that they may have been at the bottom of the funnel more at a smaller scale, if that makes sense. Not the continental scale, but on a smaller scale, they are kind of at the bottom of a funnel within this region of Arkansas. What's interesting about most public land is that it's the stuff that nobody wanted.

Arkansas became a state in 1836, and in that time of settlement, they were almost given away land trying to get people to civilize this wild place. Our public lands are the places people didn't want or later got drove out. of because they couldn't make a living there. That's why national forests, not just in Arkansas, but everywhere, are always the steepest, roughest regions of the states. Or in the case of lowland

states, the public ground is the swampiest and most uninhabitable land in the region. It wasn't that we wanted to preserve the beauty of the rugged places. However, it eventually became that. Like so many things in life, our value system changed with the economy and social factors of the country. Today, you couldn't put a price tag on the bottomland hardwoods of Arkansas. It's clear to me that Arkansas got its reputation with the ducks honestly. It's just where they wanted to be and has been for thousands of years, but I'm still interested in the human component of how we so unabashedly proclaimed and has been accepted that Arkansas is the duck hunting capital of the world. So when we brought in rice and started farming, we replaced this timber, standing timber,

with agricultural land. You know, prime production of rice would have been probably from the 1920s on. Right. Did that draw more ducks or were the same amount of ducks coming here? They were just doing different stuff when they got here. You know, it's interesting to think about. We don't have any records going back to tell us whether it increased. No cave paintings down here. No cave. There's probably a cave somewhere in the Ozarks because they couldn't. to live down here because it would have flooded. So they would have retreated back to the Ozarks, probably a cave in the Ozarks that shows the flyways. This is a joke. Luke's looking at me like I'm serious. If we just would have had a good count back then, it'd be fantastic. But I can imagine

people looking out there at the landscape and once you open stuff up, ducks become more visible. And they would have been highly visible on this rice that all of a sudden is on the landscape. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I bet people had the perception that duck numbers just skyrocketed. And that would have influenced marketing. Oh, yeah, big time. And I'm still trying to understand how Arkansas is known as the duck hunting capital of the world. And all of a sudden, we removed a bunch of this timber. We could see these ducks.

You know, you have these different eras where sport hunting, you just kind of read back on sport hunting in general and how you have these kind of peaks where people had time or disposable income or whatever it might be, post-war especially. Right. in the 50s and 60s. Yeah, 50s and 60s. It's one of the remarkable feats of marketing that folks in Arkansas have done for years, but it's not based on nothing. It's brilliant marketing to proclaim the stuck guard,

and rice and duck capital of the world. Sure. They come here over the years and they realize like, wow, that is true, that this is the rice and duck capital of the world. Woo, that was a close one. I thought we were going to get to the end of this rabbit hole and find out that this was just a well-laid tourist trap. Well, actually, it wasn't close at all. The mallard duck made this place their capital, and the people here just proclaimed what the ducks told them.

Here's Jimbo helping us turn our rudder toward the most fascinating thing about ducks. And this will get us into a biological discussion of one of nature's most spectacular displays of brilliance. migration. The mystery of migration, I think, is what drives a lot of us to chase waterfowl. And when you shoot a big pretty matter drag or miter hen or whatever, you're holding that duck in your hand, and you've got to look at it and wonder, okay, where does sucker come from? It's what makes banding and bands so cool is there's a story. This duck has a story, and what is his story? Here at this place, a couple years ago, killed a duck, ban a duck. I wound up with the band. I turned it in, and that duck was banded in the finger-lose.

region of New York two years prior. And we just had a really big cold front that hit the northeast and that duck wound up here. It'd been interesting to know where that duck bred at, you know, and where it normally wintered, but that sucker come from way to the northeast. If right now you and I were mallards and we were flying south, we'd be making a slight turn in our story. I want to talk about migration. In the world of ornithology, the guy that.

we're about to talk to needs no introduction. Scott Wydensohn is a Pennsylvania-based naturalist and author. He's given TED talks on bird migrations and authored nine books, many about birds. I want to unravel as much of the mystery as we can about migration. Here's Scott. Scott, I'm trying to understand how animals navigate. And I know that's a massive question that is extremely complex. But in general, how do birds navigate and find their way? Well, you're right, that's a really big question, Clay. And to an extent, science is still trying to get a TED around this.

We've made some really amazing discoveries, especially in recent years, but there's still a lot we don't know about how birds orient and navigate. And those are two different tasks a bird has to do. It has to orient itself in the landscape and figure out north, south, east, and west. and it also has to navigate, which is it has to find its way across the landscape with all kinds of outside pressures like crosswinds and, you know, bad weather and things like that. And we have a pretty good sense of how birds orient themselves. And they use a whole bunch of different fallbacks. Most birds, even birds that are normally active in the daytime, migrate after dark.

So celestial orientation is a big deal for them. You know, they're using the night sky. Now, they're not using the pattern of the stars the way the mariners did. what they're doing is they're aware of the part of the night sky around Polaris that does not appear to move. You know, the stars look like they rotate because, of course, the earth is spinning. And the part of the night sky that doesn't move gives them their compass directions. It shows where the north, southeast, and west are. But, of course, some nights it's cloudy, and they can't see the night sky.

And, well, for example, seabirds can smell their way across thousands of miles of ocean back to their particular nest burrow, among millions of other nest burrows on a lonely island out in the middle of the ocean. We know that birds like swallows and some hawks and falcons that migrate mostly in the daytime use the position and movement of the sun across the sky. They use the position and movement of a band of polarized light that they can see that we can't. We know that birds can hear infrasound, extremely low-frequency sound waves that are generated by ocean surf and wind and high mountain passes and tectonic activity, seismic activity from like Baltimore. And the volcanoes and earthquakes.

So, you know, you can literally have a duck or a goose that's flying down the middle of North America listening to the sound of the Pacific Ocean in one ear and the Atlantic Ocean and the other and the rumble of volcanoes and the trans volcanic mountain belt in Mexico dead ahead of it, watching the movement of the sun across the sky and the span of polarized light. One of the most important orientation cues for birds and one that's always been the most mysterious is birds have a magnetic sense. And not just birds, most organisms have a magnetic sense. have a magnetic sense.

Nutes and bumblebees have a magnetic sense. And when I was in college in the 1970s, I took a course in ornithology, and we were taught that birds had little deposits of magnetic iron crystals called magnetite, either in their brain or at the base of their beak. And the idea was this kind of functioned like a little compass, you know, kind of pulled their nose to the north. Except that scientists also realized that there was some sort of visual component to this, because if you exposed these birds to wavelengths of yellow light or especially red light,

they lost their ability to orient magnetically. So there was something going on with the eye. And nobody could figure out for the longest time what this was. Now, back in the 1970s, there was a physicist, a German-born physicist named Klaus Schulton, who came up with this crackpot idea that it involved photosensitive molecules in the eyes of birds. But nobody knew whether those kind of molecules even existed. And when Dr. Shulton submitted that paper to a physics journal, he was told it was better suited to the waste can than publication. Well, he did finally get it published.

And he just died a few years ago, unfortunately. But he lived long enough to see that theory proven to be, that hypothesis proven to be right. That it turns out, birds are using a form of quantum physics, something known as quantum entanglement. That, you know, that's an aspect of quantum physics that was so weird that even Albertines, Einstein kind of disowned it, even though it grew out of his own equations. But they're essentially able to see the Earth's magnetic field as they're migrating through the night sky because of these photosensitive, magnetically sensitive pigment molecules in their eye. So birds are using a whole host of ways of orienting and navigating that we're blind, deaf, and dumb to.

I read that often inside of our efforts to understand how a bird would navigate or animals would navigate, we anthropomorphize these animals and assume that they have the same senses as us, which humans are quite visual. And we think about flying across, you know, 1,200 miles across the continent and looking and seeing things. But what I'm hearing you describe is that the birds perceive the earth in a radically different way. than we do. Yes, without doubt. Now, they are also using the kinds of, the kind of techniques and approaches that we would use.

I mean, birds use what are known as leading lines on the landscape, and these can be river valleys, they can be mountain ridges. You know, birds will use coastlines. So, you know, they're using all of these techniques. They're using all the things that we would use if we were getting from point A to point B, and then they're tapping into these other spheres of, you know,

of orientation and navigation that we can't use. Mind blowing. Animal navigation isn't a magic show, but it's probably as close as you'll get to one on this side of Las Vegas. Birds perceive an entirely different set of cues than we do as humans. They make navigation look easy because they're operating off of cues that are invisible to us. There are two components of migration. One involves navigation.

How do they get to where they want to go? But the second has to do with timing. knowing when to leave. Leaving too early or late can have catastrophic consequences so they've got to get it right. I asked Scott how birds know when to leave. Well they're using a couple of things. You know all all organisms have internal circadian rhythms. They have an internal clock. Birds have an internal clock just like we do. They're also keenly aware of the photo period. That's the changing, the seasonally changing ratio of daylight and darkness. The long-scale trigger for migration for a bird is the photo

period. Now, whether the bird leaves today or tomorrow or the day after is going to depend on the bird's physical condition. It's not going to take off until its body tells it it has enough fat to make, in some cases, thousands of miles of non-stop flight. And it's also going to be keenly aware of the local weather conditions because, you know, bird migration has a lot to do, you know, as any duck hunter knows in the fall. You know, you get the big, you get the Big flights out of the north after you've had a cold front that's pushing the birds south. In the springtime, the major migration occurs when you have strong south winds pushing these birds up out of the tropics. They're not fools. They want to save as much energy as possible.

So you're going to find the weather conditions that are most conducive to flying easily and quickly at that time of the year. So they're aware of that timing, and you're right. If they get that timing wrong, it can be calamitous for them. Animals have an uncanny ability to key in on food sources, and with birds, sometimes the knowledge of food availability great distances away almost seems supernatural. I've got a pointed question that most duck hunters might have asked before. Okay, I've got a specific question. I hear these duck hunters talk about how they'll have ducks in a certain area and a river 25, 30, 50 miles away. will flood. And they say it's almost magical how the ducks will leave to go to flooded timber.

And the question is, how do they know where water is? You know how I said there's a lot we don't know? We don't know. Those are the kind of questions that just fascinate me. One of the species I study are snowy owls, which breed in the Arctic. And they only breed successfully in places where there are huge numbers of lemmings. And the lemming population rises and falls in unpredictable. cycles. Somehow, snowy owls from across the Canadian Arctic will figure out that, like, hey, this year there's a lemming peak in the northern Ongava Peninsula in northern Quebec, and they'll

gather there, they'll move, in some cases, thousands of miles from where they were breeding the previous year. How do they know that? We have the foggiest idea. One of my colleagues says they must smell them on the wind, and I'm prepared to believe that. We always thought that birds didn't have a good sense of smell. Turns out that's not true. There's also the chance, maybe they can hear that river flooding? Now that sounds, that sounds ridiculous. We're talking about something 20 or 30 miles away. One of my former research technicians when he was working on his PhD was studying golden-winged warblers in the southern Appalachians. He had a little tiny tracking devices on these birds. And when he looked at the data from the tracking devices, he realized that these birds,

a day or two before this massive line of thunderstorms that spawned dozens of tornadoes swept through Tennessee and North Carolina, these birds up and flew as far away as Florida or Cuba for just a couple of days and then turned around and came right back again after that storm passed. How did they know that that storm was coming through? They sensed something. So again, I mean, birds

are able to sense things that we can't. Cracking the door open on the mechanics of animal migration opens a wide world of possibility I never dreamed of and highlights a word that Jimbo used, mystery.

The word mystery starts with the letter M. And if we're talking about M's, let's turn the flock and talk about mallards. There's something peculiar about the way waterfowlers treat and talk about this emerald green-headed duck. They act like they're talking about the king of all ducks. Is there a duck king?

Why is it a mallard? Here's Luke talking about them. So to somebody that hasn't had a lifetime of duck hunting, you would look at all these, you know, dozen or so species of ducks that we hunt. And if you just looked at him in a line, you would go, man, that's a pretty duck. That's a neat-looking duck.

And I don't know that you would pick out a mallard and say, now that duck is special. But that is exactly what has happened. Just on its own, it's not because of anything other than just the merit that this duck has earned. But the mallard duck is like the duck to kill. why the heck is a mallard so special? Yeah, you said, I kind of had to back away for a second when you said that.

I thought lightning may strike where we are. If you say something. This is heresy. Yeah, if you say something bad about a mallard where we're sitting. Now, I think a couple things, it's the most abundant duck species in North America. Okay. So it's just abundant, available, and it is everywhere. So typically mallards have been available in a lot of locations across the country.

So there's this connection to mallards being everywhere. and being abundant. I think in Arkansas, they are a duck that really responds to calling. Okay. And they... It's a huntable duck.

It's a huntable duck because you can have this, you can call lots of different ducks, but mallards are what people buy duck calls for, right? So the duck call that you go buy at the store is going to be tuned to sound like a mallard duck. Oh, it's a mallard hen. Man, you can go all the way back to the mallard being a forest adapted duck south of St. Louis,

and you think about the history of duck calling and a whole bunch of it being the Illinois River Valley, actually, which again is sort of heresy talking about it around here. You've got to be careful. But you think about a duck of open habitats north and west of there and how open habitats would diminish the value of calling. We get to forested wetlands. Ducks seem to be, mallards seem to be much more looking at audio cues

because they can't necessarily see every duck down in the wetlands. So they're talking. They're communicating with their voices way more than just visually looking across a section of prairie in South Dakota and seeing ducks on a pothole well and going to them. Down here, they're listening for other mallards to be talking down there in the woods. Yeah, that makes sense. So that just builds this importance and this whole other cultural aspect of duck hunting of the call. Here's Jimbo talking about why mallards are king.

For the most part, when you talk duck hunting in this part of the world, it's matter of duck hunting. and a lot of it all comes back to the calling. And they're very callable, and that's kind of what we're doing. The most vocal duck, is that right? Yes. They respond well to calls for the most part. Yeah. That, and you go back to the old market hunting days, you know,

matters fetched the higher price than other ducks. The canvas backs fetched even higher price over on East Coast, but they were good table fair, pretty good size. You know, big fat matter Drake probably weighs three pounds, three and a half pounds. So I think that's why. I think. Are they a bigger duck than most of the ducks we've got around here? Yeah, for sure.

So they're big duck. Yeah. Most duck. Yeah. I'm still not satisfied. Sean's not from Arkansas. Let's see if he'll talk some smack about mallards. I think first and foremost, most places, pretty much everywhere you go in the United States, is going to have mallards, right?

And so everyone can relate to Hunter's success on mallards. A guy in... So other ducks would be more regionally specific. Right. A guy in North Carolina isn't going to shoot that many whiggin, whereas in Washington, they're like fleas. On top of that, they're not the easiest duck to hunt. They do take some knowledge and some skill to be successful. I think maybe a good example of why mallards are so revered is an example of a duck that's not. The shoveler.

Shoveler takes all sorts of flack. Everyone talks smack on the shoveler. And I think, you know, the big old bill doesn't exactly help. But on top of that, they're easy to decoy. And they're not that. So if they're easy, we don't like them. Yeah, that's probably a little messed up. But, you know, I think duck hunters like the challenge.

And nationwide guys can relate to if you're standing there holding a strap full of greenheads, whether you're in Washington or. New York or Louisiana or North Dakota, you accomplish something. Okay, Sean, I want to understand the way that a duck hunter thinks. So let's say you and a buddy go out and you could kill two limits of green wing teal, which I understand would be 12 birds. Yep. Or you could kill two mallards.

What would it be? See, because I... Okay, okay. I now see 12 teal is worth two mallards. It's worth more. Yeah, yeah. Okay. How about six mallards versus 12 green winged teal?

Yeah, I'd take the six mallards. Okay. So a mallard duck is worth two green wing teal. Yeah, probably. Okay. How many wiggins is a mallard duck worth? Oh, see, I really like whiggin. So it's maybe like a one to one and a half or maybe even a one to one.

But a lot of guys... You better not say that in Arkansas. No, that's true, man. A lot of guys are mallard peers. You know, I have an old man friend of mine that just refuses to shoot anything other than a mallard. A lot of times when we hunt together, I'll be done with my limit, sitting there waiting for him to even shoot a bird because I've been shooting pentails or whiggin or whatever else is coming in. You know, he's got that, that mallard purist bug. There's a lot of guys that all they care about is mallards.

Well, when I hunted in Arkansas, I noted in the photographs after the hunt, they're putting all these mowers. Mallard's up front. They're putting other ducks in the back. I mean, it was very clear that they were interested in Mallards. Yep. You can go out and kind of get lucky and shoot a limit of green wing teal or a limit of whiggin or limit of gadwall. If you're in the right places, it's hard to get lucky and be shooting limits of greenheads. And that's, I think that's why so many duck hunters see the mallard is kind of this.

The gold standard. The gold standard. The king of ducks. Here's Luke going on and on and on about mallards. There's got to be something to the whole sexual dimorphism, right? That there's a male and the female, right? You can look at the Drake and the Hills. And most hunters can readily distinguish the two.

They look dramatically different. Oh, yeah, and people select for drakes. Is that not normal with the other species of ducks we hunt? It's harder. It's harder. Okay, that means something. It's always interesting that this is the only duck that we have sex-specific regulations for. So if you think back, you know, Gadwall, they're tougher to tell a part.

It can be done in the air tell Drake's from hens, wood ducks. But hunters really seem to select for Drake Mallard. I guarantee you if there's a hen's shot, it's put on the peg kind of to the kind of behind. It was. Yeah, if it could be moved behind the greenheads. Duck hunting tricks, man. It's great. And so people want to talk about how many greenheads they shot.

Sure seems like mallards are the undisputed king of ducks. I like the passion of that proclamation, and I also love the boldness of a region being deemed the duck hunting capital of the world. I've found it was a cause and effect situation. The astounding navigation systems of ancient ducks led them here, and their progeny has since followed creating the Mississippi Flyway. The ducks chose their own capital. and the hunters just found out where it was. If you're a wild beast, it's a good thing when North American hunters

covet your meat, feathers, and fur, because these hunters will spend life, limb, and money to preserve your habitat and make sure their offspring, the hunter's offspring, will have a chance to engage wild places while in pursuit of that game. I want to say that all the people I interviewed were quick to mention the great water fowling in other regions of the country.

And to mention the recent changes in duck movement that have impacted how many green heads are coming to Arkansas. Things are changing. The ancient system is in a state of flux. Weather patterns and other complex ecological factors are making them do weird stuff. In part two of this podcast, we're going to dive in deep into the conservation of duck habitat. We'll be talking about how green tree reservoirs are in peril and what is going to be done to save them.

I can't thank you guys enough for listening to Bear Grease. Please leave us a review on iTunes and share this podcast with your friends. Long live the King of the Ducks, the Mallard. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls and building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called prime cuts. Now, I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest.

It's just not going to happen. But when I run this call, I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to. I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out Prime Cuts at Phelps Game Calls.com.

I think you'll be glad you did, and you'll find out that the Steve Rinella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. This is an I-Heart podcast, Guaranteed Human.