Bear Grease - Ep. 397: Backwoods University - Where Have The Mallards Gone?

Episode Date: December 8, 2025

Over the last 20 years waterfowl hunters in the lower portion of the Mississippi flyway have been asking the same question. Where have the mallards gone? It's a question worth asking, and getting to the bottom of. In this episode we talk with long-time waterfowl biologist, James Callicutt, a man who has been on the front lines of waterfowl research for years and can shed some much needed light on this burning question. Connect with Lake Pickle and MeatEater Lake Pickle on Instagram MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and YouTube Clips MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Welcome to Backwoods University, a place where we focus on wildlife, wild places, and the people who dedicate their lives to conserving both. Big shout out to Onyx hunt for their support of this podcast. I'm your host, Lake Pickle. On this episode, we're going to address one of the most burning questions being asked in the hunting community today. Where have all the mallards gone? More specifically, where have all the mallards gone in the Mississippi Flyway? This question has been getting asked for a while, and its persistence has been. has led to more questions and theories, such as is the flyways shifting or changing,

or ducks simply not migrating as south due to human manipulations or other factors. There's a lot of ideas and impassioned opinions on this subject. So, all the more reason for us here at Backwood University to lean right into it. And see if we can't shine some light on this issue. So get your waiters on and make sure you've got non-toxic shot and duck stamps, because we're going duck hunting. It's duck season in Mississippi. And I'm standing in muddy, knee-deep water in the heart of the Mississippi Delta.

For any that don't know, the Mississippi Delta is part of an alluvial floodplain that has the Mississippi River to thank for its unique geographical characteristics and significance. It's flat, it's vast, and it's known for its fertile soils and high diversity and amount of wildlife. And this time of year, the late winter months, it's at its absolute best. The cold, crisp mornings, the white-tailed deer out in stir. deer out and stirring. The distant sound of speckle belly and snow geese flying overhead and yes, of course, ducks. Some of the old-age duck hunters that I got to spend some time around in duck camps would always say things like, you know the Delta likes to show off this time of year. Which reminds me, I should probably pay attention because we've got some mallards working.

What you're hearing is arguably the most sought-out scenario for every duck hunter that has ever lived. We're minutes into legal shooting. and a pair of greenheads are now working our hole and flirting with being in range. As I try to stealthily peek at my fragmented view of the dim sky, broken up by branches and limbs of the tree I'm leaned against, my eyes lock on to the two of them. I've always been enamored by duck flight. The way they seem to fly so in sync with one another,

the way they cup or set their wings as they prepare to land. I dare say it's downright poetic to watch, and I promise I'm being truthful when I say that I feel lucky every single time I get to see it. It never gets old. Not, uh-uh. Dead bird. Well, they say there's my bright arduced ones with the fridge days, huh? All I know is that's a good way you start morning.

Yeah. Knox here. Hang them up and get rid of the morning. Yeah. 1,533 miles. That is the distance between where I duck hunted in North Dakota earlier this year and the area in Mississippi that you just heard me duck hunting in in that video clip. 1,533 miles.

I know humans that hesitate at the thought of traveling that distance. However, these mallard ducks do that and more every single year. Or at least they used to. Well, some of them still do. We think, or we know, or at least we think we know. What I'm trying to say is that's exactly what we're here to talk about. The migration of mallards in the lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley. As I stated earlier, the video clip of the hunt you heard,

in an ideal scenario that duck hunters seek out. However, in recent years, those very incidents of mallard ducks cascading down into your decoys has become a more rare occurrence. But why? That's the million duck question there, my foul-minded friends, and you know on this show we aren't afraid to ask questions. To kick this off, I want to read you an excerpt from an article that is aptly titled, Where Have the Mallards Gone?

A clear look at the decline of Mallards in the Lower Mississippi Valley. Over the past several winters, waterfow hunters across the lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley, from Mississippi to eastern Arkansas to northeast Louisiana. Ask the same question. Where are all the mallards? It's not a new question. More than 20 years ago, Dr. Rick Kaminsky and others published a popular article that echoed the same concern. Borrowing from the 1960s folk song, Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

They titled the article, Where Have All the Mallards gone? The article described how mallard numbers had dropped sharply in the Mississippi-Aluvial Valley since the 1980s. Even though breeding populations were greater in the 2000s during the drought-bitten 80s, they pointed to multiple contributing factors including mild winter weather and changing food availability. Importantly, they emphasized a growing mismatch between habitat and duck needs. There was still water on the landscape in Mississippi, but the groceries were getting scarce in some areas, likely due to increased crop. harvest efficiency and changing agricultural practices. Fast forward to today and the mystery

of the missing mallard continues. However, our tools and data sets have improved and our understanding of flyway scale changes has deepened. First, the long-term decline of the wintering mallards in the Mississippi-Alivial Valley is not completely driven by what is happening during duck season. The dominant forces behind the decline are rooted farther north on the breeding grounds. Second, there is a perceived reduction in winter water across portions of the Mississippi Alluvio Valley and changes in land use and management practices since the original article. Further, changes in fall and winter weather that affect duck migration are now well documented. Okay, I know I gave you a whole lot there, but don't

worry. We're going to break down every bit of that further with the author of this very article. So I'm James Calicott. I'm the Waterfow and Upland-Upland Game Bird Extension Specialist at Mississippi State University. It's kind of like any other professor, you know, that does research and teaching, but a good proportion of my appointment is extension. And so what that is is our arm in the university that takes the research and puts it into the hands of the stakeholder. So the landowners, the habitat managers, the hunters. And so we try to communicate the science we produce at the university to those audiences. So, you know, I do workshops, field days, write popular articles. We have Game Bird University podcast where we talk a lot about the projects and topics that come from the phone calls that I get here at the office.

So I felt like I got a pretty sweet dig here for sure. James has been neck deep and waterfowl research in the Mississippi Alluvial Valley for a long time now. And he also wrote this article alongside two other authors, Mike Schumer and Mark McConnell. Some of you may remember McConnell from the first Bob White Quill episode. Anyway, I want to start this discussion by asking, James about the fact that this is not a new question, but rather a question that has been getting asked and left unanswered for quite some time now. So I went to work for wildlife fisheries and parks and the waterfowl program in 2011, I think. And from the day one, putting on the patches,

man, that was a phone call I'm going to get, you know, and I've had it since then. And prior to that when I was in grad school. And, you know, that question had been going on for a while. Even back then at that time frame, when they wrote that article, Aaron Pierce was doing his dissertation that was creating what we know now of the aerial waterfowl survey in Mississippi. So his Ph.D. work was the first of those surveys. And then the state adopted it and has had it for 20 years since. But another researcher in the Delta that did a lot of waterfowl work, Ken Ronicky had had done some aerial surveys in the dealt in the late 80s, early 90s.

And they had seen the decline in mallards from when Ken did those surveys to when Aaron did his. And so it was like, we're missing like 200 or 400,000 mallards or something. Like, where did they get? You know, and that's Arkansas and Mississippi there. So that question's been going on for a very, very long time with a lot of theories behind why that is. And not to go straight doom and gloom here, but correct me if I'm wrong from reading that article, it seemed like that question's been going on for a long time. But while that question's been going on, we haven't seen Mallard's going up. Seems like it's still just kind of downward. Yeah, so the long-term trend of Mallards and the MAV, both from Arkansas and Mississippi, is trending negative. It's a little bit. It seems. to be more stronger in Arkansas, you know, it's not getting any better from that front. And there's a lot of reasons behind that potentially. You know, when you look at some of these better years of Mallard Harvest and that sort of thing, you know, a lot of those are driven so much by weather. And I feel like that's where a lot of our issues are. And that's a tough place to be, man. That's something we ain't got, we can't do nothing about. And so, you know, good years kind of come with the weather.

and the rest of the time it's, you know, it fluctuates, but it's trending downwards. And in the, in those trends, you know, you kind of think about it. You look at something over 20 years and you have some ups and downs. And so you're confident, it's interval is wide and then that sort of thing. But, you know, if the overall trend line is negative, like you'd have that negative line still going. But if you looked at the points of where those peak numbers are, yeah, occasionally there's one that's way up here and there's some there way down here, you know. So when the weather happens,

happens we get birds. But yeah, the overall trend, it's not good. Okay, so we're starting to get a broad idea of what's going on here. And frankly, it's not great news. There's not really a way to sugarcoat it. This has been causing biologists and duck hunters to scratch their heads for 20 years now. And I know, trust me, I know we want answers. The way that I'm approaching this discussion is to start with the broader, more outside factors and work inward to the more specific factors. And if you caught it there in that last bit, James already gave us big contributing and broad factor number one.

Weather. This is my least favorite factor. Man, I really do hate this factor. And you want to know why? Because you can't really do anything about it. The weather's going to be what it's going to be. Seriously, if you figure out how to manufacture a cold front, let me know. However, it's undoubtedly one of the key ingredients to the smaller decline problem that we're having.

And we're going to learn more about that. but go ahead and keep track as we start this list. Now, on to the next. Like I said, broad factors first, and then we work inward. Waterfile or migratory. We know this. However, it's easy for us as hunters to develop a myopic view when it comes to ducks. What I mean by this is when we see mallard declines that are impossible to ignore,

we sometimes only think about our local landscape. And hang on, I'm not saying we shouldn't think about our local landscape. I'm saying we shouldn't only think about our local landscape. For instance, a vital player in this equation is the breeding range, the prey pothole region, made up of the Dakotas and the southern portion of Saskatchewan and Alberta. This is the Mallard factory, more or less. And if this area isn't doing well, then, frankly, it doesn't matter how good of a job we do here in the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley. There won't be any mallards to travel down here.

There's tons of, you know, reasons and threats to breeding habitat for waterfowl. You know, ducks in the prairies and parklands and elsewhere, what they need is grassland nesting cover to feed on and to raise breeds on and to malt on as well. And so there's, you know, the to-do list, that's for one reason that when we talk about, like, you know, mortality and ducalty and ducks and skewed sex ratios and everything, you know, the breeding time period at times, you die there. That matters a lot more, you know. So, and a hen has a whole lot of to-dos that a drake doesn't, you know, so hens are are a little bit more predisposed to that natural mortality up there. But, you know, we need a lot of that cover to produce ducks, especially in dry years. And we've been kind of dry on the drier end for quite a while.

Now, I've seen that, you know, depending on the age of the person who has watched prairie conditions over time, you know, there were times where it was really dry and we were really struggling. And then water came back to the prairies and we just went through the roof. So, I mean, they can bounce back. But it's harder to bounce back the less you have of that habitat. Because just like anything else, whether you're talking about beer or turkey or anything. you have X amount of habitat and there's only so many animals that can support. And that's the one reason we talk about this. You can't stop pile ducks.

So like, well, if you just send a whole bunch of birds back to the north, you didn't shoot, there's only so many that can do their thing up there on what's left up there. And so you just have higher natural mortality because hunting in general is based on the fact that we are compensating for that natural mortality. So if ducts that we shoot likely could die from natural causes. Right. That's an oversimplification of things, but we need that cover. And that cover is disappearing for a multitude of reasons. One way that we have been very successful in putting habitat in the prairies is through programs like the Conservation Reserve program.

So taking marginal crop land and putting it back into some type of cover, you know, down here in the Delta, So we may plant bottomland hardwoods with that, but up in the prairies, they're planting grass in those. And so we've lost since 2017 total CRP acres, like 12 million some odd acres. But I tried my best to go through and calculate on a per county basis in the prairies of the states because we don't have CRP in Canada. You know, they don't have a program quite like that. But here, we lost about somewhere in the neighborhood of 4.8 million acres of CRP that went back into production. And, you know, things drive that. You know, that's a farming landscape.

It's a working landscape. And those are going to drive those decisions on what to do with that land. And, you know, but that's 4.8 million less acres that could be producing ducks right now. I'm going to interject here, and this may sound obvious. But if we want ducks to persist, and even more down the line, if we want mallards to, end up in the lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley, then we have to have breeding grounds. And losing 4.8 million acres of CRP is not good. Since 2015, they've been declining, so the last 10 years.

So 10 years ago, though, we counted more ducks than we ever have. You know, it's the highest bee breeding population on record. Forgive me, I'm going to say BOP a lot, but that's waterfowl breeding populations. So we have the highest one of that survey on record. And from that point, it's pretty well precipitous to climb down to where we are now. And hopefully we're kind of leveling off at this point, or else we are going to see reduced seasons and value limits. You know, when we go too much further below where we are now,

we're not producing as many mallards. So there just are less mallards to even be able to come here if we get the weather. So we have way less than we're. we would have 10 years. So 10 plus million mallards 10 years ago, we're like six. You know, and when we get to that half point, about 5 million, depending on what the pond counts are in that matrix of how harvest packages are selected, at 5 million mallards with, you know, a certain level of pond count,

that's a 45-day six-dug back. So we're not that far from it. For me, man, so, and this is an anecdote, but I'd been to South Dakota a lot. This past trip was my first time ever going to North Dakota. And you hear about North Dakota as like this waterfowl mecca, right? Like growing up down here, that's all you hear about is, man, North Dakota, North Dakota, the shooting mallards in North Dakota, dry field hunts, all this mallards everywhere, by the thousands and craries upon prairies.

Man, I saw ducks. I did. I mean, like, there were ducks up there. We had one good hunt while I was up there. But it was not what I thought it was going to be. I don't want to go to North Dakota and say, man, I was kind of disappointed. You know what I mean? You don't want to.

But just what I was seeing, I was like, bro, where do they go? You know, you know what I mean? And that's a whole other conversation because people own land, people farm, people got to make. I mean, like, it's complex. It's nuanced. I understand that. But it points to a larger problem. them, hey, if this is going to be something that we're going to prioritize,

somebody has to figure this out. Yeah. And conservation is always nuanced in the way that we have to go about it. Because like you said, it's the reality of the fact that, you know, producers have to make a living, you know, and we have to provide those crops to people and for all the various needs we have for those. And, you know, ag markets fluctuate all the time. And so there's times when conservation is profitable and there's times where it's not.

And we have to come up with some kind of creative ways to make that a little bit more effective, I think, moving forward. And I don't know right now what that would be, but the game is changing a little bit. And we got to be adaptable and we got to do it. And I have, I got a lot of confidence in the conservation community because we've gone through our ups and downs. And we've had challenges. It's just, it's scary to be in those points where it's like, man, this is, this is not good. You know, it's very scary time frame. And I, it's hard to stay upbeat about it.

And, you know, we have to look at everything. But, you know, we do what the science tells us to do. And right now the science is telling us that we're not producing ducks. 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 one. witnesses, 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 two of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, Iheart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Big contributing and broad factor number two. Trouble in the Breeding Grounds. In this present time, we see. simply are not producing as many mallards as we were a decade ago. From 10 million mallards to 6 million mallards is alarming, much like losing 4.8 millions of CRP is alarming. This is a large

problem. But now, I want to change topics. Weather and breeding grounds, big parts of the problem. We got that down. So let's transition into talking more of the prominent theories you hear in camp conversations or table chatter at your local DU banquet. One of the most popular ones is that the flyway is shifting. We hear that all the time, or at least I do, but I want to know if there's any truth to it. There was a big paper came out a year or so ago that looked at changes in distributions of ban recovery from 1965, I believe, to like 2020. You can see a pretty good shift north and a little bit to the west, but it's mostly just a northward shift. And there's nothing that really spells out wholesale shift in ducks westward. It's more of, ducks are just staying a little

further north. And there's a lot of reasons potentially for that weather principle among those. But I got curious because to me, I find it super interesting to think about how things have changed since I was a young duck hunter in the 90s and early 2000s. When I was a kid and Duts Unlimited was keeping the ducks from coming down south and everything, I was whole hog into it, you know, because that's what everybody older than me was telling me, you know? Yeah, yeah. And I think with social media, obviously things can spread faster, but when you're shooting a ton of mallors in Arkansas and, you know,

it doesn't seem like the old days, but it's still good, unless you went over there to Oklahoma or Kansas, I don't really know that you would know anything about it. True. And unless you're in desperate measures to shoot ducks, you know. So these pictures and things on social media just push that narrative. Like, oh my God, look how many ducks. I've never heard of people shooting ducks in Oklahoma.

And now there's these people shooting them like crazy in Oklahoma and Kansas. And so total Marlard harvest just kind of for Kansas from when I hit, data was a thing. It looks like, you know, in 2000, they were shooting about the same number of mallards per hunter as they did in 2020, and now they're shooting less now than they had. The hunter numbers have increased over that time, period. And that's one reason raw harvest data doesn't mean as much until you put that effort in there, you know. Right. You have to have the, like, how many hunters were out there. And so in Oklahoma, again, same trend in hunter numbers. Waterfow hunters in Oklahoma has increased over the last 25 years.

And their harvest shows no discernible trend as far as total ducks over that 20-year period. And actually Mallard specific harvest seems to have declined over time. And so I may be completely wrong, but at least from the harvest data and looking at it from as far as an average duck for hunter number per year over time, nothing out of this data tells me they're shooting more now than they were 20 years ago. In Mallards, it says they're shooting less, at least in Oklahoma. So is the flyway shifting west? Who's to say?

I can say, according to James, there's not any data to support that it's happening. And more interestingly, is the fact that states like Kansas and Oklahoma that often get brought up in this conversation show that Mallard Harvest has showed no change or even slight declines in the past 25 years. The only thing that has increased is hunter numbers. So y'all draw whatever conclusions you want to from that. But me personally, that leads me to believe that the problem lies elsewhere. So let's move on to another heavily discussed theory on this topic about changes in the flyway.

Some suggest that mallards simply aren't migrating as far south as they used to. And this one comes with all kinds of colorful ideas. I've been hearing this for as long as I can remember, that Ducks Unlimited has heated ponds in the north that completely halts the mallard migration. or that the number of flooded cornfields in the north has become so vast that it is the sole reason that Mallards don't come down this far south anymore. Is there any truth to all this hearsay? James, you've got to help us out with all this. I've been hearing the heated ponds thing since the 90s.

I've been hearing that and heard it when I became a state duck biologist. I used to get that. You know, the younger me was all full in it. Like I said before, I was like, I can't believe they heat those ponds up there. That's just ridiculous. And now D.U's headquarters is Memphis. Their largest office is near Jackson, Mississippi, in Ridgeland. And they have field offices stretched across the southeast.

And they consistently are some of the most productive office as far as when you talk about deliverables, like acres, you know, conserved in that region and all that. So it doesn't line up with why would you heat ponds up north when you're putting all these acres of habitat on the ground on public refuges and public WMAs. It doesn't make a lot of sense. And when you raise probably most of your money in the Southeast, too, I don't know that that's still a thing, but at one time, I know it was like kind of more of their dollars, you know, reported or kind of coming out of those.

So, and they invest heavily in the breeding grounds, obviously, just as much, you know, and the southern states, you know, have grant programs, D.U. Canada, has a tremendous work in Saskatchewan, which is so. super important in Mississippi Mallards. And so, yeah, all those things together just kind of don't support the notion that DU itself is trying to ruin your duck on it. A lot of evidence to show that Ducks Unlimited is not keeping ducks up north. So the follow-up question of that is what actually is keeping them up north. I think the biggest driver is the weather. Some of the farmers I grew up with and folks that I think would have never.

ever told you that the climate's changing or telling you the climate's changing. See, that was going to be my follow-up question. And you have to ask it these days. When someone talks about long-term weather effects, the question is, are we talking climate change type weather strips? Or we're talking like year-to-year fluctuation? No, it's, it's the trend seems to be we're trending warmer. And we do get, so, you know, I think everybody needs to step back and think about, okay, in the 90s and early 2000s. how many times were you breaking ice through the season?

And then now, how many times do you do it? And so we're trending milder, and when we do get a weather event, it's super severe. The last several years are good examples of that. Super severe cold events. And they're occurring at times where you're like, okay, I got about eight to ten days left in this duck season to hunt what this gave us. Yeah. And so unless you're out there in the field on that thing, we may hit peak abundance of ducks, typical to an average year.

But did we see it in the blind? No, probably not. Not unless you're out there taking advantage of it that whole time after that occurred. And the question is, too, how long do those to northern latitudes that would be holding birds waiting for that, how long are those freezes?

You've got to have consecutive days of freeze. That's a pretty quick event, and it thaw is quick. Sometimes those birds can ride it out. And so there's a lot of things at play there. But yeah, that's what I always go back to. And I think about now, like every Halloween I think about it.

Every kid's coming up to our doorstep, you know, in their costumes and everything. And I think back to the 90s when I used to get irritated because my mom would make me wear a jacket over my Halloween costume. He's like, man, nobody can see my Halloween costume, you know? And I know kids wearing jackets at Halloween these days, you know. I told you all earlier how much I hate when weather is a contributing factor. Do you want to know what I hate even more when you have to bring up climate change on a podcast or even worse when you have to label it as a contributing factor to mallor declines?

So I humbly ask you to let go of any of your predetermined thoughts that you might have when you hear that term or forget that I said it all together if you need to. But just think about some of the questions and examples that James brought up. How much do you bust ice during duck season compared to 10 years ago? How often do you see kids wearing jackets on Halloween these days? You got to admit, the man has a point. Duck hunting seems to be, this is anecdotal, seems to be growing popularity among the younger group of hunters, right?

The younger group of hunters doesn't have quite the hindsight that someone with a little bit more years on them, and not that I'm an old sage, but I'm 33 years old. And when I was in high school and we were hunting all public land in Mississippi, we didn't have access to any private ground type stuff. So we hunted all private ground. It was definitely colder. We dealt with sub-freezing degrees much more often,

and they would stay for longer amounts of time. Yep. We killed more ducks. And this is when I was 16 years old. We didn't kill more ducks because I knew what I was doing. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. You know what I mean?

It had nothing to do with my skill level. They just seemed to be more available, right? When you talk about climate change, for a while now, in different topics where it would come up in the wildlife space, I'm almost scared to say it sometimes because, you know, it's gotten so, like, charged as such like a loaded term. Yeah. But it's, you got to at some point you have to address it when these things are becoming more and more evident. I have no idea what to do about it. I just know that it's happening. And so the way I think about it is we've swapped on a lot of things because it is a contentious topic.

And it still is. I think most people are going to say, yes, the climate's changing. It's the why that's still contentious. So regardless of what the cause is or anybody's belief on the calls or how much evidence there is to anything for the cause, the fact that it's happening, I think is pretty well established. You know, and so that's why, you know, I had somebody asked me about that on LinkedIn that he read the article. And they said that feel nervous to say that most farmers would agree with. And I was like, I feel like most farmers would agree with that the climate's changing.

I think it's just that why that's contentious now. So I don't think we have to dance around it as much as before. The why is not as important to me at this very moment other than just saying, yes, it is. And we've got to figure out how to adapt somewhat to it. I remember when I was a kid, not even in the hunting space, but in grade school, learning that ducks fly south for the winter. Some of you listening out there probably got that same lesson. However, ducks don't just fly south because our calendar says it's winter. We actually have to have a winter to drive them to do it.

Particularly a good proportion of the mallards, you know. It's not just freezing temperatures. Snow has to occur up north that covers food so they can't get to it. So when you're at latitudes where they field feed, if there ain't no snow on the ground, they can hang out on open, deep water, and then go feed. and they ain't got to move, you know. It's more than just freezing temps. It's freezing temps plus snow cover to a certain latitude.

And then as you get more mid latitude, it's freezing, but it's for duration long enough to push them. And it's always been that just happened more frequently. You know, and there's been some research with some of the GPS transmitted ducks. They've marked up there. Like, if a mallard hasn't left North Dakota by winter solstice, they're probably not leaving. Okay, let's do a quick review before we turn to a different topic.

Big and broad contributing factors to this lower Mississippi alluvial valley mallard decline. One, weather and or climate change if you're fine with using that terminology. And two, problems in the breeding grounds that lead to there being simply less mallards overall. As I stated, start broad and work our way inward. We've covered what's going on on the outside. And now it's time that we focus on what's going on what's going. going on in the Mississippi Alluvial Valley itself. One thing that we don't know as much about right now is the landscape changes here.

Anecdotally, I would say it's obvious to me spending as much time in the Delta as I spend and my time flying aerial waterfowl surveys in the Delta. And, you know, my father's family, farmers in Tallahatchie County. And so I had made a lot of trips driving through the Delta even from a lot of. a very, very young kid. And coming over to Duck Hunt, and I duck hunted public lands all over the Delta for most of my young childhood through college and grad school and get research in the Delta and grad school and all that and worked.

So I've spent a lot of time over there. And it's fairly evident to me that two things. One, we don't have near the winter water we used to have. There were times I could drive from Batesville to Tuttweiler. and as you were getting closer to Marks on six, you would see flooded fields. And then all down Highway 3, you would see flooded fields. I can make that same trip now in January and I can count on both hands how many flooded fields I see, probably on one hand. Yeah, if you can make it for hand number two, you're doing better than I do.

Yeah. And I haven't been up in the airplane. I think it would almost make me sick if I had because the last time I flew an aerial waterfowl survey in the Delta was probably the 14-15 winter. And even then, I mean, you know, you'd fly over Bolivar County and be like, there's more rice in Bolivar County than there is anywhere else sitting. It's like, well, and there are more winter water here. Same thing kind of Washington County and some others, but all across the Delta. It's just a dry landscape. And historically, that wasn't the case.

There was a lot more winter water, you know, and there's lots of reasons behind that, you know. You probably think, you know, farm families, you know, kids move off. They're not coming back and duck hunting, you know, farmers aging and that sort of thing. and then you've got other people that are, you know, maybe that's just not what they do that are farming some of that ground now or whatever. But you don't see people winter flood. You also, we plant crops super early, you know,

and probably in the 90s when I was duck cutting, I remember my uncle's still talking about, are they going to get their beans out by November? And that's not a thing anymore. And every bit of corn that's left is germinated well before, you know, you would flood. it. And so there's a lot less food out there if you do flood it and too we do fall tillage now, you know, getting the fields ready so you don't have to worry about the risk of spring rains.

And so there's a lot of things going against the duts in the delta. And a lot more winter water would help even if you're just flooding, you know, a bean field that doesn't have much food left in it. And I think that would certainly help. And if you could reduce some fall tillage and some barriers, that would be helpful too. But, you know, you got to make that work with producers because we don't we can't do things that are counterproductive for them but we have a bad problem sometimes of looking at our own wma the wma that we hunt or whatever it is and say nothing's changed well nothing may have changed on your property you look in within a duck's you know movement patterns surrounding your property lots change and so is the delta as sticky

for ducks you know as it used to be i don't know if it is there's a lot there Some hard scientific data, some anecdotal evidence, but what's clear is the landscape has changed. And honestly, this is something that we kind of already know. We already referenced Dr. Mark McConnell as one of the authors of this main article that we've been referencing, and we referred back to his Bob White Quill episode, which was the second episode ever of Backwoods University. And if you remember in that episode, we learned how much large-scale agriculture and agricultural practices made changes to the landscape. The Mississippi Delta and the whole Mississippi Alluvial Valley simply does not have as much or as high of quality waterfowl habitat as it once did. It's a sad fact, but it is a fact, and one that folks like James Calicut are working to be able to quantify.

I want to round this conversation with James off by simply asking him, where do we go from here? What do we do with this information? Is there any silver lining or hope that we Mallard enthusiast can hold on to? To summarize all of it best I can, it's much like anything else in terms of wildlife, especially when there's a problem with it, people tend to want to find like one large smoking gun. Yeah, and while there may be, you know, a couple of predominant factors, there's several that's making the state of the mallards down here in the Mississippi, Alluvial Valley, the way that it is.

Yeah, and it's that you want an easy answer to a complex question. And I totally get that. When you're passionate, because every one of these individuals that is wholesale on flyway shifts or standing corn, how I shut up in it, it's like anger or it's love disguised as anger. Yeah. Because I get it. Waterfowling is a part of who we are. And when something that is to that level of passion for you and you seem to be losing it, you know, it's scary and you get upset and you get mad.

You know, we've all long talked about like in wildlife, what's the fascination with silver bullets? I didn't take any psychology in college, so I'm probably off base here. But I've got to think that there's in human nature that the solution to your problem about something that you care immensely about needs to be something I can change. You want it to be something that's quick. instant kind of gratification, a regulation change or a law outlawing something, that if we can make that happen, that doesn't. But things like we need to make our landscape back what it used to be

a long time ago and we need to make the prairies look like they looked like, you know, 10 years ago, that takes time and that's not a quick fix either. And, you know, all these folks, I totally get where they're coming from. And I don't want to discount them at all. That's why we're looking into the corn thing, try to quantify that so we can say, okay, if it's impacting something, let's do something. But if it's not, then we really need to focus on these other things. You know, I don't think because of the weather factor, I don't think unless that changes somehow, I don't think we're ever going to be back to us having mallards to the numbers we did 20, 30 years ago. But we certainly could have more than we have now, I think. If we work on

on the issues and at the prairies and we look into these other things and figure out one way or the other do we need to be focused on that and we work on our own landscape I think we certainly could be in better shape like it's not lost all hope's not lost it's just that when we say adapt to new normals in that article I think what we mean is that even if we figure out all the answers that you know the weather is the one thing we can't change and there's going to be some level of new normal you know we don't kill a million mallards in one state, you know? Maybe it's just we're going to have to settle with what the weather will push to us after we've solved the habitat issue, because that's always what it is. Most often the time when somebody complains about something with a wildlife issue, the answer is habitat. And for right now, I'd say that that's habitat here, but most certainly habitat to the north. I think right now we've got the evidence on the flyway shifting portion,

at least reduce that uncertainty enough to feel like that's not one of the things driving this. But we're looking into the other. We're not just dismissing folks' arguments. We're going to look at it and we're going to figure out what it means to us. And we're going to make actionable items out of that like we do with any other conservation issue that we have. If there's one part of this I want you to hang on to, it's that all hope is not lost. We'll likely have to adjust, but there is hope, my friends. Hold on to it because it's there.

And if there's any action items that you can walk away with, it's waterfowl conservation organizations are of high importance. For instance, if you're wondering how someone who hunts down south can help the breeding grounds up north, then join a conservation organization like Ducks Unlimited or Delta Waterfowel or both, and donate and get involved. I want to thank all of you for listening to Backwoods University, as well as bear grease in this country life.

I can't tell you how much I appreciate it. If you like this episode, share it with someone this week. A friend, a family member, a buddy who's no good at blowing a duck call, take your pick. And stick around, because if this podcast was a duck hunt, we've scratched out a few, but there's a group of mallards working up top, and I think they're going to do it on this next pass. There's a whole lot more on the way. 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 back, 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 witnesses, 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 two of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, Iheart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.