The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 490: Duck DNA: Are “Wild” Ducks Really Wild?

Episode Date: October 30, 2023

Steven Rinella talks with Phil Lavretsky, Janis Putelis, Matt McCormick, Brady Davis, Max Barta, Phil Taylor, and Corinne Schneider. Topics discussed: The open-faced sandwich; a red stag hunt in Scotland and skull plates; when you have a genetics lab named after you; “field to gene’; Flying V like the Army Corps of Engineers; get tickets for the MeatEater Live Tour; how the New Jersey black bear hunt is back on; the Cal Pouch and the waterfowl system from FHF, DSD’s waterfowl decoys like fine art, and Phelps duck and geese calls; Montana artist Chuck Black wins the Federal Duck Stamp competition for 2024; when all of the extinct species are in the same drawer; be as good or better than everyone else; how genetic analysis plays into management; releasing pen-raised mallards is a thing; so much hybridization; the Ming Dynasty as the first to domesticate ducks; when you send your wife out to track known game farm mallards; game farm duck DNA mixing with wild duck DNA; Oh, Jersey!; back-crossing; physiological and morphological shifts; volunteers are needed for the new waterfowl research project; calling all duck hunters to apply today to be a citizen scientist!; and more. Connect with Steve and MeatEater Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube Shop MeatEater MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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First Light, go farther, stay longer. Is it on, Phil? Machine's on. Do you want to put your headphones on? Oh. You don't have to. Suggestion. Okay, you good? We're rolling. Definitely got to hit Phil's upcoming show. We already, we've done that.

It's in here. I'm going to give Corinne a compliment sandwich. You ready? You guys know what a compliment sandwich is? No. I'm going to give Corinne a compliment sandwich. You ready? You guys know what a compliment sandwich is? No. I've explained it. If you need to critique someone, you don't just come in

and critique them. Negative. The bad's in the middle. You come in and say something good. Then you say the thing you're trying to get across. And then you end

on something good. Yeah. So, Corinne, that was great that you got that red stag in scotland see thanks sometimes you can do what's called an open face sandwich where you don't end it with a comma so there and then now i'm gonna go corinne this the notes today are it's like eight hours worth of material sloppily arranged and then you so you got that and then now i'm gonna go on god you look great today corinne it's a true pausing okay well we can cut out a fair bit we can cut out a fair bit did you try a new soap what does my face look fresh We can cut out a fair bit. We can cut out a fair bit, Steve. Did you try a new soap?

What does my face look fresh? She bought a new kind of soap in Scotland. Did you have fun in Scotland? For real? I had a fantastic time. Did you like it? It was wonderful. I mean, the hunting process is obviously a bit different.

Yeah, now your deers are like for sale in some market now. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Somebody's eating your deer like that he bought at the store. That's or, or like dog food. Um, but, but yeah, I mean the, the government, the Scottish government tells an estate how much, I mean, it determines how many, um, animals on its property need to be culled. And then you're, uh, you know, so there's a professional stalker at each estate and that's their duty to carry out what's required. And then if you're there hunting it,

you're kind of helping to, you know, fulfill the aim. And each animal is then sold to a game dealer. And I was told that it's sold with the coat on and the head off. When you guys gutted it, you gutted it from the diaphragm back, right? Yes.

Which they got a weird sounding name for, like Glatt, Glock. I don't remember the name of it, but they did it a different way. Look that up, Yanni. I'd type in something like Scottish. I don't know. Gutting.

Gutting method. Diaphragm. That'll get you started. Was it a drive hunt? Was it like driven or were you stalking? Yeah. Ladies and gentlemen, that was the voice of Phil Levretsky. Russian born.

Researcher. Who has a University of phil lavretsky russian-born researcher who has a uh university of texas at el paso corinne has pointed out you have a whole lab named after you sure do explain what you guys do you're here to talk about mallard ducks and some real problems we are no real problems yeah no uh yeah i run a wildlife genetics lab while uh we focus on ducks We are. Yeah. Real problems. Yeah, no. Yeah. I run a wildlife genetics lab. While we focus on ducks, our whole shtick is field to gene. Right now I have crews in Arizona catching Mexican ducks and other crews in Texas catching model ducks. And we do everything from catching, banding, telemetry work, all the way to population genetics, evolution, these types of things.

And basically the difference or the big thing about us is we use genetics to identify individuals correctly. So we have no, you know, you can't run away from your genetics. It is what it is. So by understanding who we're working with, we can better. You mean who as in critters? Critters. Now this is all just a prelude to her answering the question, but I just wanted people to know who they were hearing talking.

Who it is, the foundation. Yeah. So our foundation is genetics. And then we explore everything from migration to morphology, how hybridization causes issues. If so, if not, how releases feral populations in new zealand here in north america europe how how are they establishing why did they establish and how they look like compared to the things that they came from got it we're gonna get into that yeah real heavy cringle on no oh yeah so the animal is sold in full coat to a game dealer and then that game dealer turns it around again and sells it to a butcher but you guys cut it off at the knees right um when i was there they did they gutted it diaphragm back cut it off at the knees and out the door so diaphragm

and guts were cut out left for the eagles and then everything we we um drug out the animal for a little bit and met horses and then we threw it. Oh, head comes off, but nothing was cut off at the knees. It came all the way down back to the house. What about a horse? On a horse, yeah. They come out with horses and one horse holds the head or that's kind of like the horse in training

that eventually might have the body of the animal on it and you walk it down on a horse how many did you guys shoot um morgan morgan potter uh who's been on the show before uh he got two i got one and um our friend david who invited us got one are they gonna do you get to send the head home and keep it? I've got the antlers somewhere in the mail on their way over to Bozeman. With a skull cap or you just sawed them off? So they, it's kind of, yeah, skull cap, like kind of like a yarmulke. There you go.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm tracking. Yeah. Bill's tracking. Yeah. I don't know what you call that, but. That's a skull cap. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I don't know what you call that, but. That's a skull cap.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. That's if you cut a little deep around your yarmulke. Yeah. You wind up with that. But it like slices the eye sockets in the middle. Sure.

It's not like just tight around the. That saves you a lot of cutting. Yeah. When you get the eye sockets into your cut. Well, I think it also makes for a nice flush mount to the wall. Yes, that is right, Yoni. It fits flat against the wall. Years ago, we were hunting in Alabama in Tuskegee National Forest, and I killed a little teeny spike horn that had inch and a half spikes.

And when I skull capped him i just cut this super narrow strip of bone to connect the two little spikes and i'm not joking i went home i flew home with his rack in my shirt pocket probably fit in the ziploc bag i could pull it out and show people out of my shirt pocket man uh holy cow man like i said we got so much to talk about we're gonna um I can pull it out and show people out of my shirt pocket. Holy cow, man. Like I said, we got so much to talk about.

Let's not make the show like two hours and a half. Let's maybe cut a thing out. We can cut the non-waterfowl stuff out. Listen, let me take a look here. The Flying V guys are here. Introduce yourself, boys. You want to go ahead? Matt, Brady. Yep.

Who goes first? Matt McCormick here. Yep. Live in Bozeman. My partner, Brady. Yep. Brady Davis. I also live here in town.

Flying V, Matt and I have a couple companies called Flying V. This year is going to be really fun. We're going to be doing a bunch of waterfowl content with MeatEater and for MeatEater. So we're super pumped about that. And you guys manage land. Yeah, we've got another business where we do land and ranch management. So we do, you know, habitat construction, restoration, and management. And so.

Yeah, these guys like the Army Corps of Engineers, man. I went out on a tour with these guys in terms of like waterfowl habitats. Impressive. Yeah. Yeah. And then waterfowl is the primary focus. Ducks, you know, around here, ducks are a primary focus for us. But there's inherently some elk stuff and some deer stuff and some upland stuff that kind of comes along with it.

Excited to be here to talk a little bit more with you, Phil. But yeah, it's development and restoration, man. And it's for the greater good, you know, providing food, safety, nesting habitat, all that. Yeah. A lot of, a lot of wetlands work you guys get involved in. Yeah.

And we have to work with the Army Corps of Engineers on a lot of that stuff. I was just making a joke. I know. You nailed it. I mean, when you, when you start doing stuff like this, there's natural wetlands and everything. I mean, they got to come out like this, there's natural wetlands and everything.

I mean, they got to come out and they'll bring a big roll of red flags and they'll put it all over the property and say, you cannot touch this. I mean, all the way across the board. You cannot mess with it. You can add to it, but not mess with it. Yep. And if you take some, you have to give some back, but they have parameters around that. There's a bunch of permitting and everything. But, you know, the state of Montana, they,

they love trout. So you kind of lean on the trout thing and trout then everything that trout loves, the duck loves too, so. Oh, so you know how to game it. Yeah, you have to game it. And the brown trout are going to love it. And great spawning beds.

Yeah. Yeah. It's really fascinating. I mean, it's the, it's the same, it's the same answer, but a different question, right? What's good for the trout? What's good for the duck? But it's the same answer, but a different question, right? What's good for the trout? What's good for the duck? But it's the same answer.

Yeah. And then you guys. That's good that that aligns. Yeah. Yeah. You guys. You guys gave up on like basically most kinds of hunting just to focus on ducks over the years.

Yeah. You know, it's, it's funny. We both grew up doing all kinds of hunting. Matt grew up waterfowl hunting when he was young. I did not. I got into waterfowl hunting in my early 20s. Yeah.

Cause you're from the arid West. Yep. Yep into waterfowl hunting in my early 20s because you're from the arid west yeah yeah and i got into it in my early 20s the problem is once i got into it it was over no looking back the very first day i had some decoys called in a few geese i remember you talking about that shot them and the day those geese died i walked into the house i was a newlywed told my wife i'm like, game over. I had hounds. I was hunting lions and bears and stuff with dogs, and those dogs got sold. Next thing you know, I had a Labrador and more decoys and more decoys.

If you ask my wife, more decoys. I'm surprised those lion dogs didn't team up and kill that lab out of spite. I moved them out of the asylum before the next inmate came in. Yeah, they're like, this son of a bitch is going to be trouble. Yeah. Now, I had a question. Now, do you guys go after NACA grants?

Is that how you guys do a lot of the habitat work? Yeah, there is some of that. And we work with a couple different consultant agencies that just focus on permitting, right? Because you need people that can read the fine print. And at the end of the day, we're looking to do macro restoration. And so a lot of those guys are handling the details of that. But yes, to your question. There's some of that. We also, a lot of our clients are people who have purchased the land for the purpose of hunting. So they're willing to invest more money and they're good to put the money in for the end result and so at the end of the day what we care about is that the birds are there

and that the habitat supports holding the birds not just having them there for a shoot or for a hunt and so we're looking at everything from okay how do we get them here but then how do we hold them and maintain and keep them there so you know the wetland stuff is a big part of it, but we also do a ton of farming, you know, planning, consulting, which crops go in the layout on the property where the corn needs to go and the spring wheat and the barley and the peas and how all that lays out on the property and in reference to the water sources as well. I should maybe have you guys take a look at my pumpkin patch. We're here. Would love to. I should maybe have you guys take a look at my pumpkin patch. We're here.

Would love to. I've never done anything with pumpkins except shoot them with a shotgun. My goal is four big pumpkins and I wound up with just two, but we can talk about it later. I got three kids, so this is not going over well. Yanni, I'm sick of doing a Plug the Meat Eater live show. Let me hear you just tear it up. With no notes. No, here, here.

There's no notes in this document that Corinne put together. Well, because Corinne just didn't do a very good job of producing it. I didn't want to spend 17 minutes on us talking about all the locations. Yanni's going to do it in speed version. If you're looking for something really fun to do in December, and you live somewhere between Colorado and philly uh you're in luck because meteor is you know so it makes like a little line across the country yeah totally and i know a lot of people are upset uh from the south southeast texas other parts of the country because they're

like what about us and we only have so much time in our lives and when the pandemic currently you got you keeping track how long we talk about this before the pandemic we were going out the other direction but it all got canceled because of the pandemic yeah and we have hit a you know states and cities all over the country in the past and i think that in in future versions of this we probably will hit the South and we'll hit the West Coast. But this time around, we're in Denver, Kansas City, Missouri, Davenport, Iowa, Kalamazoo, Michigan, Detroit, Michigan, Cleveland, Ohio, Pittsburgh, PA, and Philly, PA. So all VIP tickets are already sold out, but there are general admission tickets left

Come and see us Go to TheMeteor.com if you want to see The dates that we'll be at each one of those It's roughly December 6th Through the December 15th A lot of great guests lined up We got guests lined up all over the damn place Kevin Murphy's coming out

Derek Wolf We're going to have a casting contest at every show In order to win a seat at the trivia table. How long was that, Corinne? Good? Next. You loving? That was great. Phil, over to Phil.

Speaking of live shows, take it away, Phil. Okay, yeah. Very, very generous. I think this is the third time we've talked about this local community theater thing I'm doing. Bill's a thespian. This one's for all you in Michigan. Come on out.

Yellin' Theater, October 20th. Doing a show. It's a 1930s screwball comedy called You Can't Take It With You. Just one? Great job, Phil. Just one. Oh, no, we're doing six or seven shows.

It's two weekends. Two weekends long. Starts the 20th, goes to the 29th. Okay. Yep. Still tickets available? There are still some tickets available, yes. Okay.

Dude, I went to a live show the other night and it was one of my favorite bands but probably the worst show I've ever seen and I didn't mean to stay I told my wife I had a bunch of friends well not a bunch yeah I went down there with a bunch of friends and I said listen I want to have my own car because I'm not staying I'm just going to have a look

like I don't like you know I'm going to have a look and I'm going to go home so if you want to stay drive separate but we all left at the same time early it's a horrible job but he said something that's been keeping me up at night he said

it's good to be back in this part of the country that I love so well that teeters between rugged individualism and common sense please don't let it tip too far now is that why you left early no okay what was keeping me up at night is what way does he mean that it's tipping which is the good way yeah yeah like tip like you know you could read it that he doesn't think it should tip too far in either direction because it teeters on the edge or he feels that it's tipping. Well, the term common sense has like a positive connotation, I would say.

So my gut would be he's saying it's tipping too far towards rugged individualism. He's saying that's not how I read it. Okay. Okay. Keep me up at night. That wasn't even in the talking point. Maybe he's trying to say that he would like us to keep that balance. That's what I, yeah.

And that we should just hold those two qualities near and dear and don't tip out of wherever else we might end up. Stay on the nice edge. Yeah. Stay on the nice edge. Man. stay on the nice edge uh man just lost stuff steve is giving me stink eye no this is all great i don't even know where to begin um i'm gonna jump around for a minute oh here's the thing i want to talk about this is a correction to a correction usually we'll limit it to like

there'll be a statement a correction a correction to a correction a correction to that correction and then we usually drop it yeah that's what this is this is where we're at i don't even want to get into it some number of episodes ago i talked about a piece that came out i believe in free press barry weiss's publication free press uh where i have an article coming out i'll point out uh and it was a researcher who just written a piece about wildfires in california and he was writing and he published it in the journal like there's two the two most prestigious scientific journals on the planet are nature and science you agree i agree okay he agrees you ever had anything in there they don't like ducks well let me give you a tip you want to get something in there listen to what

i'm going to tell you i'm all ears he. He said, he wrote, he published in Nature about the role of climate change in wildfires in California and then published an op-ed saying, if you want to be published in science or nature, you have to focus exclusively on climate. You could, all the myriad factors that go into wildfires like why the increase in human cause wildfires um uh forestry practices lack of forestry practices leading to wildfires electrical transmission practices leading into wildfires and he says

no one's going to care if it's climate change you will get published then some stuff came out where they revealed that in the review process of his article, Nature, the editors at Nature had said, well, have you factored in all this other stuff? And he said, well, I'm going to get to it in later research projects. So they kind of did like a gotcha, meaning, oh, no, we did ask about all of that stuff. And he is going to get to it later, but we specifically asked about all these other factors. Then it came back, he said like, but we would have never had that conversation had I focused on those other factors. Heffelfinger writes in. Your discussion about climate change writing in nature confused me.

When I sent you the link to that guy's blog, I didn't realize that was exactly the story you were talking about in the original podcast, number 478. I sent you that as supporting information for what you were talking about, the positive bias in climate change publishing, which is absolutely a rampant problem. Everything he said in that article was true, completely. I see it all the time.

When researchers are writing a proposal to get a research grant, they have to make everything about climate change. Follow the narrative. That's where the money is. A study on summer precipitation on elk calf recruitment becomes all about climate change, dry summers. The first draft of one of my son's papers from his master's degree mentioned climate change in six of 10 sentences in the abstract because his major professor was trying to get in

a prestigious journal, and it has to be about climate change to accomplish that it was simply a mule deer fawn survival study in nevada and the abstract was all about climate change the narrative again this is a huge problem in scientific writing and he goes on then he goes on to say um basically how could you have been surprised by the thing of the rabbit don't die when it comes to pregnancy tests because it's in Aerosmith? I'll point out, it's Aerosmith's only good song. Where he says, what does he say? Because the rabbit done died.

Meaning a pregnancy, right? Mm-hmm. That's good. Why are you so exasperated this morning? Yeah, you're doing well. What was the time on that? It's like 12 seconds. New Jersey.

Can we hit the screen? Yeah, it'll take a minute. Remember when I said my least favorite politician in america was new jersey's governor murphy who i would know oh no i would know because i remember when he got he was one of those governors that got real telling everybody not to do anything during the pandemic and then he gets caught out in a restaurant without his mask yeah anyways he campaigned on shutting down the black bear hunt new jersey which makes him my least favorite politician in america my current least favorite politician in america is jay inslee

but back then my least favorite politician in america was murphy well the new jersey hunt is back on the new jersey bear hunts back on um new jersey screws with hunters real bad so they'll do a they'll do a black bear hunt. And when you kill a black bear, you have to bring it in. This is quite common across pretty much. I can't think of a single state where you kill a black bear and don't bring the black bear in so they can collect some biometric data off it. Here in the state we're sitting in right now in Montana,

which teeters on the edge of common sense and rugged individualism, when you kill a bear, you take it down to Fish and Game. You go into the front office. You say, hey, I have a bear I'd like to check. Like a biologist will come out. You go in the back. You'll do your bear check and privacy. You go and catch a can of Alaska.

You'll bring your bear in. You go to a place. You go in and some level of privacy. You do your bear check. New Jersey, when they do a bear hunt, they're like, hear ye, hear ye. All bear hunters will have to come walk the gauntlet of protesters to publicly register their bear hunt

while getting, what was that word we talked about the other day? What is the meaning of the word? Accosted. Oh, okay. By? Accosted. By getting accosted. Good job, Giannis. We talk about a lot of words over the years, so it's hard to remember the last one.

So it causes all this trouble and all these protests, and then everybody gets bent out of shape. Meanwhile, it has the highest density of black bears anywhere. New Jersey has the highest density of black bears anywhere in the country. So the controversial black bear hunt is back on in New Jersey following a superior court judge ruling that did not favor animal rights groups and de facto Murphy.

Monday marked the first day of the October hunt. So what the hell Monday was that? Whatever the hell Monday was. I think this came out like last week. So this is like early October. Another is scheduled in December. Hunters brought the bears they killed to the Whittingham Wildlife Management Area in Newton. One limitation is the bears weighing less than 75 pounds can't be harvested.

That's tricky. I like that. You do? Well, I like it because of the alternative. Remember what happened last time when New Jersey did a bear hunt? Someone killed that bear, Petals, that had the deformed feet. Oh, yeah, Petals. Everybody liked it because it had no feet.

John Muellen. John Muellen, who's been on the show twice, and I love the guy to death, I'd like to strangle him for this Wrote an obituary of the bear Oh Great guy Great writer Wrote an obituary

For Petals It was When a hunter killed Pebbles it was reported that pebbles had been a set or petals had been assassinated um so where was i 75 pound limit uh that is tricky wildlife officials say the hunt is the most effective way to prevent bear and human encounters in densely populated New Jersey. I can't remember how many bear complaints they had.

So New Jersey resumed hunting in 2022, or bear hunting so last year, due to reports of the animals causing property damage and being a nuisance with reports of those up nearly 240% since the previous year 2021 yeah that's a lot florida's gonna face a similar situation florida tried a bear hunt they ran it

very conservatively everything went right but they blew past their their harvest quota like if you if you're doing a hunt you have a harvest, a lot of times you'll check every night. Let's say you have a hunt and you say there's a harvest quota of 10 and you open it up in this big area. Well, every day you're counting how many things get registered, but the rule is that it shuts off in 48 hours because you need time to spread the word. Or it shuts off in 24 hours. So Florida hit their quota way quicker than they thought they closed it but then the 24-hour window made them blow past the quota everyone had such a conniption but half the country looked my half the looking biz like man there must be a lot of bears and then the other half looked and be like man they killed all the bears

um and just like different world views right and there like, man, they killed all the bears. And just like different worldviews, right? And are they getting, they're going to take another shot at it, I believe, in Florida? I don't know about that. Can I just jump back to Jersey for a second? So we're really only talking about two short weeks. So October 9th through the 14th and December 4th through the 9th as hunting days. So we're not talking about like a long season of months and months. So, and then it looks like on the first day of the season, 105 bears were killed.

On the first day? Mm-hmm. Wow. Can they bait out there? No way. Probably not. That's a great opener. Probably not.

But I don't know how, I don't know what statistics sound like. Sounds like you just kind of go out and set up your back porch. Yeah. And they don't hibernate over there, apparently? Well, they stay up all year. I don't know if the season's in December.

I bet they go down eventually. They probably intermittently go down. Maybe that's why they did the December hunt, because they know they're all going to get hibernated by then. They're like, all right, y'all go., because they know they're all going to get hit by that. They're like, all right, y'all go. You win this one. We're going to give you a hunt in December.

Oh, check this stuff out. So everybody knows FHF. You should know FHF. FHF gear, fish hunt fight, all American made gear. If you like to hunt ducks, and we're here to talk about ducks, you should check out the, so you know like the bino rigs if you see our stuff you'll always see that that um we wear a lot of fhf bino rigs which are the best bino rigs on the planet paul's been in the bino rig game since the bino rig game began um what's funny is our camera guys discovered that they had been on wasting all of this real

estate on their bodies and so they started wearing bino rigs to carry their junk in it so nice yeah mole's like i can't believe my whole life i just wasted this area in front of my body when i could have had all my shit there so he started wearing bino rigs and just filling a full of batteries and lens wipes and whatever stuff you wanted like he'll he'll be in some restaurant in paris with a bino rig on you know um filming anyhow so eventually the fhf bino rig morphed into like a chest rig just a gear rig and fhf now has the waterproof chest rig so for when you're out hunting ducks or, I don't know, trapping muskrats, you got a total waterproof rig, which I guess has been getting a lot of interest

from various military groups that like that thing as well. So a totally waterproof, submersible chest rig that you can keep so when you dunk and you come up, your phone and all your stuff's still good. And then there's an E4 pouch that attaches to the main rig so you can accessorize you dunk and you come up your phone and all your stuff's still good. And then there's an E4 pouch that attaches to the main rig so you can accessorize the dickens out of it. And then the best

thing on the planet, I don't know how this one, I guess it's fair. It was Cal's idea. The Cal pouch, which has changed my life because the Cal pouch... Oh, that's what it's short for? I thought it was like short for... No, it's short for Cal. I don't know, Cal, Burr, Cal, something else. It was his idea. No kidding.

So it's a shell bag. Okay. Picture this. It's this little square shell bag with a handle on it. No, I saw a picture of it. You can dump three boxes of shells. That's pretty clever. Like I think, you know, it'll hold three boxes of two and three quarters, maybe three boxes

of three inch. I know because we have the bird loads. I can dump 20. Well, okay. Let me say this? I know for a fact that for my kids, I can dump three boxes of 20 gauge six shot in the bag. It zips and it's like this square little bag. And then it's got a slit in it with a clear plastic window. So you cut out of the shell box.

What the hell it is and slide it in the window. And you got like, so there's camo side panels, there's orange side panels. So when I organize mine, I know that the orange is upland shells. The camo is waterfowl shells. Then I took a marker and wrote 1220 because my kids shoot 20s and I shoot a 12. It's the greatest. This year hunting youth duck, I took one of those bags, unzipped it, set it in front of all the kids, and everybody just shoots out of the thing.

You're not messing around with boxes. Thanks, Cal. They get wet and fall apart. Cal pouch. So Phil has a lab named after him, and Cal has a pouch named after him. Cal pouch. Steve, I also use that for dog food. If I'm doing like a day trip or two-day trip, throw dog food in there.

It works out great. I love it. No, it is a great great great idea yeah it's called steve reno doesn't have the same ring though just doesn't have the same ring also dsd's honker maxima line available this fall dsd is uh here's the thing about dsd decoys um in such demand that like... More people are trying to...

I shouldn't say this because it works against DSD. You got to wait in line to get DSD decoys sometimes. Because they're so good. Yeah. I never realized this. People want those decoys. So get in line. Well, they're kind of getting all this taken care of,

but just an enormous amount of demand for DSD decoys. And their Maxima Honker line available this fall. And a brand new Maxima Full Bodies geese, Full Bodies soon. Floaters are in stock now. Stackable sleeper shells will be back in stock soon as well. So if you're sitting around wondering why you gotta wait to get DSD decoys, it sounds like your problems are over.

DSD has also re-released their deadly snow goose decoys with more poses and a brand new motion system that is user friendly and offers even more realistic movement than before. So check all that out. And while you're at it, check out the duck and Goose calls

over at Phelps Game Calls. New Jersey. Should we talk about New Jersey more, Corinne? No, we already, that was enough. I'm joking. Oh, okay. I have something on Duck Calls. You sounded so serious.

Oh, please. So I don't know if you guys have seen it yet, but there's a meat eater collab call coming out from 737 Duck Calls. Okay. That is bad to the bone. Is it good? Yes.

The call runs awesome. We've used their calls for a long time, but Matt just got the proof texted to him yesterday. We were on a call with those guys yesterday, but that call is going to be coming out in November. Yep. You got one in your pocket right now? I got a picture.

It's a limited run. Give me a sneak peek on the picture. So there's only going to be a couple hundred of them. Oh, really? So they're going to go like hotcakes and be gone quick. Can you? You can buy it. It's going to be for sale on the meateater.com.

I'm sure you probably know a guy that could help you acquire one. Yeah. Man, that'd be cool. But they're awesome. Oh, sweet. Single or double? It's going to be a single read. Single read. Yeah. Man, that'd be cool. But they're awesome. Oh, sweet. Single or double read? It's going to be a single read. Single read.

Yeah, so that'll be coming out early November. Yep. Max Barter, really quick, introduce yourself too. You come on all the time. Have you ever won trivia? Yeah. Yeah, you did. Really?

You played a day? A couple times. Yeah. A couple times. A couple times. Well, I've been on the podcast a couple times But I've only won trivia once Great day Was Dr. Randall there?

Dr. Randall was there And you won We need a new nickname for Matt I think the only reason why I'm here Is because I like ducks And I want to talk about ducks And learn more about ducks Yeah this guy

He's taking duck pictures He's like look at all these ducks I killed And I'm where just a spot i'm not gonna tell you a great answer it is a great answer you should be able to block people's numbers based on what they text like it filters like grip and grins you gotta like opt in or out for their grip and grins man right oh what's super cool is a guy right down the road in belgrade montana won the federal duck Like grip and grins, you got to like opt in or out for their grip and grins, man. Right. Oh, what's super cool is a guy right down the road in Belgrade, Montana won the federal duck stamp contest. Had you guys heard of this artist before? I had not heard of him.

No. I hadn't either. Chuck Black. He's going to come on the show, but not for a while, right? Yeah. Early, early in the year. Yeah. I was surprised how young he was. I don't know what I was picturing.

Good for him. You know what I was picturing in my head? Elliot West. Who's in his 70s. I was picturing Elliot West. But yeah, he's been in this business his whole life.

Right? Is that correct? I'm asking you. Yeah, I mean, I guess. He was doing some AV. It looked like he started drawing, at least, when he was a kid. And he doesn't do just ducks either. He does coyotes, birds, elk,

scenic stuff. It's like beautiful wildlife photography. Painting, sorry. This video that Phil's showing right here kind of documents the process, but it also shows him up in Red Rocks up in Montana getting the inspiration video for this duck. So this duck is actually like a Montana duck, which is pretty cool. Steve, do you know what kind of duck that is? It's a pintail.

Okay, I'm just making sure. Tell you what, we ate a we got, uh, we ate a pintail two nights ago that my kid just got. He got an antelope hunting of all things. Oh. With the proper firearm. Wait a second. Great way to get a pintail. Oh, that's cool.

Yeah, it's really cool. So congratulations Chuck Blackford. So he'll be on next year's duck stamp, right? Mm-hmm yeah. Yeah. Twenty, twenty-four. Twenty, twenty-four. Yep. I was hunting, I was hunting antelope with my kids. So I, my, my boy and my daughter, my boy's old enough, but my daughter's not old enough and he gets a buck and we get it all cut up and we're carrying it and we hit a road and I'm like, oh, this road will go

to the truck. So I tell the kids you wait here and and I'm going to go get the truck. And so they want to go up to this little hill to look around. I come back a while later. I had to walk a mile. I come back, and they're nowhere to be seen. So I'm honking the horn. Do-do-do-do-do-do. Like, what the hell happened to them?

All of a sudden, Rosie comes running over the hill. Jimmy got a coyote. Jimmy got a coyote. What? Yeah. Just a flea-ridden. Yeah. So we got all that skinned out.

I'm sure you were happy. Oh, dude, my ears. I had those bugs in my ears for the next two days. Oh. Coming off that thing. And then on the way out, he got himself a pintail. Nice. So he had a quite nice little mixed bag. That's perfect.

Antelope, coyote, pintail. Can we skip this one? Yeah. We can skip the next one too. Well, I don't know. This is bad news. Can we just roll this into the other stuff? I mean, it's all the rest of it is waterfowl. Duck hunter numbers on the decline.

Hmm. So there was an uptick in duck hunter numbers during COVID and then a slight decline afterward. Right. They realized how hard it was. Yeah, no kidding. And they had to go back to work. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, hunters begin, duck hunters drop out at around age 70, which means neither of our presidential candidates

are in the duck hunting mix. Minnesota mallard harvest numbers declining. Now, is this because there aren't as many people out or because of some other issue? You guys should be able to answer this. I have a theory on it. Go ahead go ahead okay let's do a round let's do a round table i think these mallards are just getting smarter and when they're migrating through i think they're just hitting the cities and they just become city birds you obviously can't hunt

them in the cities and i think that's where they're going during the golf courses university campuses well yeah i mean just like town parks too like i mean even just driving around bozeman too there's a bunch of city birds we'll actually get to that really in a little while geez man that's great uh i was talking about this with matt and brady here we were talking about the way that if you go along the i-90 i guess it'd be 94 out there right 94 corridor after goosey's has been around in a while and you see like all the places you'd expect to see a goose and he's not there but they're piled up in the weirdest little spots basically like they got one foot in the highway

they're in like some dude's yard you know i mean like a pretty smart approach to it yeah yeah that's what i would do if i was a goose and all my friends were getting shot i'd hang out somewhere like that for sure like in the highway median yeah yeah somewhere right on the shoulder yeah what what's fascinating is the the population numbers of mallards aren't necessarily down. I mean, they kind of do this number regardless. Yeah, we've been bouncing around, right, with those numbers. I think we went under 10 million this year, but the height was, what, three years ago? We hit like 13 million, 14 million.

But yeah, they basically cycle. A lot of it is cycling with the May ponds up in the Dakotas where they use some of that data to estimate those numbers. are starting to overfly into areas, Nunavut territory, further north where we don't have anybody checking. But I was moose hunting on the Yukon-VC border, and they were everywhere last year. Did you get one? I did. It was great.

How big was it? You know, I don't want to talk about it. No, no, no. I don't want to see it. I was just hoping you'd say, well, how big was your you know i don't want to talk about it no no no no i was just hoping you'd say like well how big was your moose that you just got you got one well let's hear about it well i'll tell you when you go to register a moose online uh-huh there's a drop down where you enter how many brow times it has i had-hmm. I had to go all the way. No. No.

You couldn't get there. You had to lie. The drop down didn't, it ends at nine. It just kept going. It ends at nine. Yeah. I couldn't, the number was not high enough to accommodate the brow times.

So how many brow times did your bull moose have, Steve? 10. Wow. One more than nine. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join.

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you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. This actually tees back up into the duck number thing. Yeah. Oh, please. So Matt can talk about.

We have a theory as well that I think is accurate. Well, and it's more of a question for somebody like yourself, Phil. So if population numbers continue to do this, but hunter harvest numbers are down, when you look at how they actually gather that data for hunter harvest numbers, they use a hip survey, right? Like everybody has to, you know, fill out a hip survey. I got two of those sitting on my desk right now.

Well, here's the thing about a hip survey is they don't, they, they, they max you out. They say 31 or more. To 100, yeah. Oh, is it 31 or more? It's like 0 to 7, 8 to 11, whatever. It goes up like that. 31 or more.

I'm always in the 31 plus. Yeah. Right. Well, and most like guys that are going hard are 31 plus, but how do they get accurate numbers with a 31 or more? Yeah. Let me hit you with a couple, let me hit you with a couple of stats from this deal that we're looking at and then we'll, then we can take off from there.

So for the first time in more than a half century, mallards were not the most common duck. This is from a twin cities. What is this newspaper? Twin cities.com. What the hell is that? Probably the Pioneer Press or something. Okay.

For the first time in more than a half century, mallards were not the most common duck shot by Minnesota waterfowl hunters in 2022. Mallards were topped by both blue-winged teal and ring-necked ducks. Mallards had been the most harvested duck in the state

since at least the 1960s. And that's coming from Steve Kortz, waterfowl specialist for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. So here's some numbers. 125,812 blue-winged teal last last year up from 81,000. So significant incline from 20. Okay. So we're talking about 22 and 21 and 21, 81,000 blue.

I'm rounding. In 21, you had 81,000 blue wing teal. In 22, you had 126,000 blue wing teal. Ringnecks, check this out. These are like wild fluctuations. 21, you had 29,000 ringnecks. 22, 72,000 ringnecks. Wow.

So there you have like, I don't know, over 2, I don't know over two i don't know 2.25 whatever the hell the mallard decline is not nearly as like the as a percentage the mallard decline is not it's stark but it's not like as stark as its other declines so or other increases so you have those big increases then with mallards in 21 84 000 mallards harvested and 22 63 000 mallards harvested and then wood ducks it's kind of like wood ducks are like wood duck number and mallard numbers are like nuts on a dog i mean they're right in tight like you add 84 000 mallards, 84,000 wood ducks, 63,022, 62,000 wood ducks in 22. That's kind of incredible. Is that just coincidence?

That's got to be coincidence, right? So the blue-winged teal, the reason that those numbers, my guess is you have to look at weather severity for that time of year. During that entire hunting season, my guess is it was a milder season. A warm winter. Yeah, so those, otherwise those blue wings. Also they haven't split yet. Exactly. time of year during that entire hunting season my guess is it was a milder season winter yeah so so those otherwise also they haven't split yet exactly so blue wings like if they feel a northern wind they go got it like the only reason that they would stick around in minnesota is it's it's not uh it's not the the weather severity is is not long enough and it's not strong enough for that for to move them same thing for the ring necks.

Although ring necks are doing better now too. Got it. Mike, the interesting part is on the mallard side, that could be a hunter thing. I would imagine a little bit of that where those numbers, because wood ducks are also bred in the state. I actually have a wood duck project right now in Minnesota, trying to ask some

of those questions um but uh wood ducks are mostly bred in the state so those numbers shouldn't fluctuate unless hunter hunter numbers or hunter uh what's the word uh effort day effort is is not equivalent this throws out this hits Max thing where it says it seems more ducks are avoiding Minnesota during their migration. At least when most hunters are in the field. Like they fly over Minnesota like,

Peace! Do they just fly around it? I don't think they do that. That'd be a good ad for Minnesota. Hunters so, not bad, hunters so good that ducks avoid us. Ducks go fly over Wisconsin. Yeah. I've just never been asked ever species-specific surveying on my hip.

Me neither. No. I've never been asked how many ringnecks I've killed this year. How many dorks. Yeah. Well, they must be doing, I mean, they got some pretty precise damn numbers.

They must be doing some kind of, they must be doing some kind of survey information. Yeah, so a lot of those surveys. And again, this is one state, right? Yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah, one state.

Those will come from wing bee harvests. If anybody knows, I think you guys talked about wing bees where you, a random number of waterfowl hunters in this country are,

uh, asked to cut off a wing and send them in. I got, man, they hit me with that for years. One time. That was a lot of paperwork. It was a lot of envelopes.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You just kept shooting them. Didn't you? Well, yeah. It motivated me to hunt more research.

Research. I was like, I don't want these suckers to think I'm no good. So I was like, I gotta go duck hunting. Cause they sent me all these envelopes man they're gonna think i'm lazy on top of it uh they'll have surveys at all of the wmas or wildlife management areas where they'll be where you have to go in and you say and they actually check your bag and they're like okay and then they extrapolate you can extract so they do model it yeah got it a little bit of that they

have not like specifically counted all of these ducks i mean if you if i'm in my backwoods shooting wood ducks and stuff nobody's nobody's asking that because you're right the only other survey direct survey is just a general number of how many ducks did you shoot and which is the hip uh can i tell you a quick thing about wood ducks it's interesting one time when i was a kid uh we would hunt wood ducks in their roost ponds that night and uh with a bb gun super effective i don't mean at night but i mean like it'd be know, I'd hate to go there now and with a game warden and have him with a watch, you know, know what time it was. I mean, I do remember like, we were like, you know, just, it just was different.

I don't know. We just weren't aware of stuff, but I do remember like marveling at the sparks coming out of the shotgun barrel. First light, last light. Right at the sparks coming out of the shotgun barrel. Of the shotgun barrel. Muscle of the shotgun barrel. First light, last light, huh? Yeah, right at the end, man. And it'd be, yeah, you'd be out with a flashlight trying to find down ducks, but it'd be like a great way to ruin a spot. That is for sure. We had enough spots that, you know, we'd keep real busy for like five, six days,

and we'd just blow every spot because it just ruins it. However, one time we were cleaning wood ducks and had a wood duck. Check this out. You know what his crop had in it? What is it? A bunch of salmon eggs. Ooh. Wow.

Yeah? He was down in the creek picking up salmon spawn. Yeah, that's amazing that you're... So I don't know that. So I have a study. Look, using DNA from poop of ducks to do diet.

We're trying to do a different way. The original way is you go you go out you shoot like 200 birds you figure out what they eat like kind of like what crop analysis but instead we're using dna uh analyzing of the feces and we're getting and we're matching up pretty well so far with like crop but we're getting a ton of ton of the veg that you can't analyze because it's just green veg. But the other thing that keeps coming up is fish. Fish keep coming with all the ducks. And my hypothesis

right now is that it's bycatch, right? Fish are putting eggs on all the veg and they're eating the veg and they're taking it as bycatch. Oh, they are not. I got a picture of fish. Fish are the veg. Oh, I'm gonna... And they're taking it as bycatch. Oh, they are not. I gotta pitch your feet. There's no way that they're... Fish or the eggs?

Oh, this was like a full fish. No, you know what a salmon egg looks like? Yeah. No, no, no. This isn't bycatch. No, I understand. That might be, like,

actually target, because mallards do target. This is a big orange egg. I understand. I understand. But you're thinking he's trying to eat weeds and catching fish

Or fish eggs Fish eggs Eggs Eggs Yeah so we're Keep coming up with Now I'm back with you Yeah yeah yeah

Now we're with you Now let's piss for a minute I'm with you now Eggs No eggs Eggs yeah But they're in everything Gadwell

Widgeon Everything we've been studying It keeps coming up It's all just stuck to the Yeah It's all stuck to the vegetation It's a complete different Calorie count That we've been studying it keeps coming out stuck to the yeah so it's a complete different calorie count that we've never really considered as far as i'm as i as i see it so it's kind of interesting that it's that i'm the woody i'm sure maybe mistakenly got him which is an interesting

in itself but we've had mallards on bad diet in minnesota there's a paper out there i think it's minnesota where they would go into salmon ponds and actually catch some of the like fry oh no kidding yeah okay now why do you think that a duck isn't um why do you think that a duck isn't selecting for vegetation that's coated in eggs that's a good question i don't know i i just don't think i mean i don't know i mean they could be but it would be it it just wouldn't make sense right now i guess i don't know i mean they you're saying you're telling me they're like looking around at the veg like oh that one's got a whole bunch of eggs. I'm going to eat that. Yes. They could do that.

Well, I mean, I don't know. That's what I'm, that's what I mean, that's what I would be wondering. Because, I mean, nobody's really tested that. Because the caloric load would be so high. That baby is calorie rich.

I need to dive down and get that. Yeah, because you've got, you've got things like Widgeon that are specialists on just veg, right? So they're not even omnivorous really. Got it. And so, and they're still picking it up so that's got to be by catch but you're right i mean this is completely new like that we that

every time we analyze something fish is like 90 percent in all in all of the feces and understand 90 though too what's that 90 you said yeah like wow of the samples we've collected and that's you know we focus on mallards, Mexican ducks, model ducks because it's in Texas. But we have a sample, you know, widgeon, gadwell, other stuff that we've sampled as well.

It's in 90%. It's not 90% of the... Oh, yeah. It's in 90% of the samples. So that's a high... Some amount of fish egg. Yeah. Got it. You know, you remember when, when they banned lead shot for waterfowl, which had been what, like 80, 80? It was.

The good old days. It was 92. 90. 92? When they banned lead for waterfowl? Yeah. The legislation was late 80s and then it finally went into effect 92, 94.

Around when Kurt Cobain died. Were some states ahead of it though? It was when Kurt Cobain died. Yeah, right around that. I didn't know those were linked. Checks out. I used to tell people but my understanding was that the reason ducks

were ingesting a lot of shot is they were picking it up as grit for their crop. That's correct. Okay, that is. Yeah. So I've heard other people say, no, no, no, no, no, they're just getting it. No, no, they're going. So they would pick shot for their crop.

Yeah, and there's been plenty of studies that showcase that, that it's all accidental pickup because they're going to get rock right grit and it just the the amount of lead shot at that time that was uh at that surface you know at the surface of of of uh the lake sediment was really high so they were the probability of picking it up was really high yeah but then um they did several studies where they just basically churn the sediment over, and all of a sudden they don't pick it up. And then obviously when the lead band went into effect, there were studies two years later, five years later, ten years later,

and a constant decline of lead in waterfowl. Because the sediment kept up. Yeah, burying the lead and the lead settled down. So now all the lead's way down there for someone else to have a problem with later on. Yeah. Speaking of ducks eating stuff, I was always amazed as a fishing guide, you'd be out there during

an amazing hatch. It used to mostly be midges I think, or mayflies. Not so much the caddis. But you'd see those ducks get into an eddy where all those bugs would be getting caught and they would just be pounding away. And he's like, oh, I thought you just ate like white bread and lettuce leaves. Well, the salmon fly hatch for the geese, I mean, you watch those like during the salmon

fly hatch, you see those big broods of geese up on the bank shores, they're just smashing salmon flies. Seriously? Oh man. So cool. fly hatch oh you see those big broods of geese up on the bank shores they're just smashing salmon flies seriously oh man like if you ever hit the salmon fly hatch right which is incredibly challenging regardless like hold on canada geese yeah feeding on those oh man you see whole brood i mean you'll have you know eight groups of groups of eight or whatever and they're just smashing those those salmon flies i mean sam flies this big I'm not a squeamish man. Yeah. But when you open up a crop, I'd never like to see, I don't like to see, I don't like to see critters. Yeah. Especially because when you open up, they're still alive, you know?

Like you open up a hun, there's like grasshoppers that are still moving around. Same with turkeys too. Yeah, I was like, dude, come on, eat some, eat some clovers. Some of the berries. Yeah, turkeys too. Right over there. Yeah come on eat some eat some clover some of the berries i don't need to see all this it's upsetting my meal plan uh phil how'd you get interested in ducks duck hunting yeah so now walk me through take me back to russia yeah it was cold january you never hunted ducks in russia because you were three you were three yeah ducks in Russia because you were too little. You were three. Yeah, I was three when we left. So you were born in Russia. In Moscow. Talking Russian.

Yeah, yeah. So my parents, the way in Russia it works, you just drop your child off in the middle of the woods, and if they come back, it's okay. Yep. Yep, that's what happened. It was January, so it was cold, but I made it. No, so we got over to the States in 89. Okay. uh no so we were we we got over to the states in 89 okay and i think i was telling you uh choice of two evils uh los angeles and new york and because you guys just weren't into the whole

russia scene correct yeah yeah uh i i don't know i don't know if you know note this but um a lot of russians fall out of windows occasionally just by chance and bear attacks every time sure yeah uh as we just learned with when um bringing it back why did i space his name already he's the most interesting man in the world for a few days the wagner group oh the leader of the wagner pergosen yeah airplanes fall like one said like pergosen everybody like, I wouldn't go near an open window. Sure enough. So, yeah. Anyway, so we got over, and then my folks obviously had to work, but then eventually my dad finally got enough cash and bought a shotgun, and we went out. Because how was he even aware that hunting was a thing?

This is the thing I was wondering about my dad. Because my dad was raised by Italian immigrants. Yeah. And the journey of becoming even aware that this is like a thing you can engage in is interesting, right? Yeah. So the interesting thing is Los Angeles has a lot of really great sporting clays area. Okay. And he hunted in Russia. Oh, he did?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he wanted to to do it so he kind of got it we started uh going to some of the sporting clays areas eventually i competed there and and then um really yeah how good are you i i'm i'm 31 plus on ducks every year. You always get checked in. Yeah, that's pretty good. Yeah, he quits at 31. Yeah, so there's a place called Salton Sea. Do you know where that is? I know it well, yeah. That's where I grew up. So that's where we started hunting,

mostly dove initially, and then started to hunt ducks. And that's where i shot my first dove when i was 10 with my dad's 12 gauge and that was probably the most expensive shot ever because you know that set my entire life forward of putting a lot of money into this sport uh and then uh we started hunting ducks and i loved it i mean mean, that's what we did. I didn't really get into big game because California is a hard place, especially without private property and knowing people. I hear this all the time, but I have a little bit of a hard time believing it. Look, I hunted A-Zone a ton. The only thing I got was a two by one all those years.

Okay. I was real proud. As you should have been. and uh it's it's just hard and also my dad hunted big game russian style which is a lot more drive driving with shotguns there's no right i can say with those giant soviet helicopters yeah yeah first you fly in one of those uh so it was completely different, right? The way big game hunting here is. So I didn't really get into it until like 14, 15.

So until then, I was duck hunting most weekends. In LA, I would tell them I'm just fishing because apparently fishing is okay. Hunting is not so much. Like when you had to explain where you'd been. Yeah. Where were you this weekend i was fishing yeah um and so yeah so i got into it and then that sort of set my tone forward i went to uh undergrad at uc davis up in sacramento one of the reasons i

went there besides getting in uh this is the hunting ducks yeah uh sack refuge and all of that is there so it's great hunting so did you know you're gonna be a duck researcher at that point i didn't i thought i was going to be the guy in uh jurassic park that brings back all the dinosaurs but then and that's why i'm a geneticist oh you were interested in that oh yeah do you remain interested in that i i i am but it's impossible although well well so i'm on i'm part of uh yeah it's not the way my kids understand it yeah yeah so it's gonna be interesting so yeah so i'm on the board with revive and restore as well as colossal the ones trying to bring back the mammoth yeah are you on the advisory panel or the board? No, advisory, just like science.

In fact, there's a meeting right now that I'm missing, but that's okay. That's good. Yeah, so I am interested in it. But to be fair, I got into fisheries at UC Davis. So I was doing trout, Sacramento perch, doing genetics on them, creating captive breeding programs For releases and stuff like that Looking at hybridization between red bands

And rainbows and all this And then I realized like I like talking about Fish but I really like talking About ducks And so for graduate school I went to Ohio at Wright State University There was a guy there Had the money that

I needed, told me I could do whatever I want and it was perfect. The only difference is that I became a whitetail hunter for a little while in Ohio. I never understood this field hunting situation. Eventually I figured it out, but it wasn't

for me. I like big open wetlands and calling big spreads these types of things but yeah so and that's where I dove into waterfowl research primarily mallard complex so I don't know if you know this

there are 14 species of mallard like ducks all around the world here in North America we have the mallard, American black duck, two world. Here in North America, we have the mallard, American black duck, two types of model duck, Florida and West Gulf Coast, and the Mexican duck. And those are all real tight? Sister species?

Yeah. Yeah, genetically, yeah. So those are the most recently diverged groups. So they diverged about half a million years ago. The rest of the group, the African black duck, yellow-billed duck, Meller's duck in Africa, a couple spot-billed ducks in Asia, Pacific black duck, New Zealand gray duck, Hawaiian duck, Laysan duck,

those are more old, about a million, two-million-year-old divergence. Yeah, so I started diving deep into it, and we're going to start getting into some, some of this stuff that I am interested in, but more or less what I do is I take genetic information. I ask questions in the evolutionary side, trying to get into nature, you know, now, you know, now I know climate change. And then, but, but I'm really big on uh management right so and it's taken me over a decade to show how genetics can play in management uh more applied aspects and so how that kind of you're gonna have to explain what what you mean by that that means uh when i talk about genetics

to a bunch of of wildlifeers they usually like roll their eyes back and they're like, oh, this is going to be about Drosophila or mice or something like that, because that's, that's what they've known what genetics is. And so they are just like, that's not applied, you know, band recoveries, telemetry units, you know, habitat service that's applied. Yeah, that's right. Uh, and so, and so, you know, we finally come to this time point where these new methods that I was part of developing and kind of bringing to the forefront, lots of people use some of the methods that I do, but what it does is it allows us to get a snapshot of a genome of every individual for low cost and very quick. The turnaround times are quick, quick enough that data can be attained within months and

can go into models or anything else and actually feed into decision making. Before genetics, you go out, you shoot a bunch of birds or, or collect them from hunters. And sometimes it would, it would take five, six years just to get the data. It's, it was hard. Um, computationally, we weren't there, uh, methodologically we weren't there. And, uh, uh, but thankfully when I was coming up, all of that computers, sequencing technology, all of that computers sequencing technology all of that kind of like came to a point where we were able to do some real world uh questions and applications with and obviously i did it on ducks but if you look at what i've done i've anybody anything that's got dna and some money you know we work on so can you run tests real cheap when i send you bones bones bones are going

to be yeah how old are those bones ancient ancient well i'd like them to be a lot of times they're not i would have to i've gotten some disappointing results so i was like but it was so deep so we uh the best we've done and i would have to go to my smithsonian colleagues because they've got an ancient lab there where we work. And we did 1,500 to 1,000-year-old bones out of Hawaii. Okay. Duck bones? Duck bones.

Really? And the fun part about this, in the same cave where Polynesians were eating, there was a Laysan duck, a Hawaiian duck, and something they thought was a Hawaiian duck

based on the bone morphology turned out to be a northern shoveler from alaska really yeah and did they have butcher marks on the bones i don't know i didn't get to look at them uh no yeah so so we sort of so uh the paper that where we're going right now so something something that we can do, we've got a study, hopefully, published in a year or so as we finish up, but we've got mallards now sampled from 1800 to today across space-time. Oh, really?

Yeah. Yeah, so... Where'd you get the 1800 mallard from? They're from 27 partnering national museums, so thank you all. Oh, did you get anything from Cornell?

We did. Dude, we anything from Cornell? We did. Dude, we went to Cornell. We were at Cornell and they opened this door and we're in their bird collection thing. And so, you know, I asked like what apparently everybody on the planet asks is, you guys got any passenger pigeons? No, not passenger.

What the hell am I? Yeah. Yeah. An ivory-billed woodpecker. Everybody asks about the same bird so much they keep in the same drawer They're like, oh yeah, here's a drawer that Every idiot wants to look into And they open it up and it's

Passenger pigeons Ivory-billed woodpecker, who else was in there? Those main ones Yeah, the ones where people were like, extinct species Let me think for a minute Did they have a Labrador duck? Yeah, the ones where people were like, uh, extinct species. Let me think for a minute. Labrador. Did they have a Labrador duck? Yeah, that was the other one. I think it was in that. It might have been in that

thing. The labor drawer. Dude, it was crazy, man, to hold one. And the ivory-billed woodpecker, I used to dog on people. You know when people are like, oh, I saw an ivory-billed woodpecker. And then they come out and be like, ah, you idiot. It was a, um, pileated woodpecker and then they come out and be like oh you idiot it was a um pileated pileated woodpecker well listen i know a lot of people spend a lot of

time out out in the woods i could have laid that down in the woods and they would have said oh pileated woodpecker it's not it's very that is an excusable mistake. But point being, I bet they got some feathers if you hadn't thought of this. No, we're... To get your genes out of them. I suggested to revive and restore... No, I'm talking about the mallards. They probably got some old ass mallards. Oh, they do.

We got eight of them. They're supposed to ship them. So we finished all the genetics. We're doing morphology. So we're doing 3D scanning of their heads to look at change in bill. So their feeding mechanism. and i'll explain why this is important across time and space you've no doubt uh read the book the beak of the finch i have not really yeah oh well you might be like it might be too uh elementary for you yeah probably

yeah it's about we'll go with that no the beak of the fin, it's about how you can watch the bill size on finches. Oh. You can watch the beak size on finches change in the Galapagos. You can. I don't want to say in real time, but I mean, it's amazing. Yeah, the Grant's husband and wife group watched a new species evolve since they started studying Darwin's finches on the galapagos what happened was two species came on one island bread made this thing what we call a hybrid but it the hybrid was so distinct from its parents the way the types of food that they ate that 30 years later genetically they were just their own now their own thing that's what yeah okay this book might detail

for a layman the research but it was these birds are colonizing a new area with different food resources and as they come in and they're like whatever they're trying to get into a seed that's a harder shell correct because they're in an area they hadn't been before and you can watch selective pressures on those birds and watch their beaks change as they become accustomed to and have selective pressures applied around who's really good at getting seeds and and that and that you know i think i had this conversation another podcast about like evolution another podcast what others there's others really

anyways no like people are like oh evolution what's that honestly the only the only name of the game in nature and what evolution is is be as good or better than everybody else right so all you're trying to do is limit competition and the good or better is that you either survive better and or have more babies right the more babies you have the more genes that are in the landscape and thus you're winning and so nature in island systems like the galapagos are so interesting because it's so fast there right the pressures are like nope you didn't eat you, you die. That's what we call a selective pressure of one where it's like, nope, those genes are gone.

And so it's so much faster for adaptations to arise or go extinct because the ecology changes so quickly and everything. God, I was going somewhere with that. What the hell was I talking about? Oh, no, I know what somewhere with that. The hell was I talking about? Hmm, Cornell.

Oh, no, I know what I need to ask you. I want to get to this whole thing with mallards and mallard, like when you let pretend ducks go. Yeah. Okay, I want to get to that. Give me an example of how genetics could play into management. I don't get it. Give me a concrete, specific example of how genetic analysis would play into management like i don't get it like give me a concrete specific example of how genetic analysis would play into management yeah so i'll give you a study that we're doing

right now so the model ducks on the west gulf coaster have been declining in in in size okay slow that down say that again model ducks on the gulf coast regions of texas and louisiana mostly texas are have been declining okay and uh the surveys they were doing um but at the same time in west texas so the brush country of west texas have you been there yep yeah does anybody know what i'm talking about lots of ranch you know that johnny cash song i've been everywhere man that's me that's you yeah um in america in america america uh are and anyway so there's a bunch of brown looking birds so if you've never looked at a model duck it's a it's a brown looking mallard yeah it looks like a head yeah everybody's like people mistake them right yeah but the the texas parks and wildlife

wants to do surveys to be like okay is this a population crash are the population shifting and for that they needed to know what the heck these things are from an aerial perspective so then they contacted me and what we did was we took we took birds we collected in fact you were having a discussion about does anybody go out scientific collecting with a shotgun anymore oh yeah with your fouling piece that's that's what we do you get to do some following in may so we go out scientific collecting with a shotgun anymore. Oh, yeah. With your fouling piece? That's what we do. You get to do some fouling? In May. So we go out... Can I come along and do that sometime?

I'm free. Does that count in the survey too? When you do your hip survey, do you put down No wonder it's 31 plus. Extra? No, so we need to have breeding pairs right so we took hunter harvest we took out anything we could but we needed also what is breeding in this landscape okay so we went all

the way from uh i'm from texas but i i don't know anything about texas so like dallas all the way to the mexico uh texas border right yep uh and so because there's another situation happening mexican ducks which is another type of mallard like duck are expanding out of mexico north kind of like a bomb out of mexico into arizona uh new mexico uh texas there's even breeding pairs that we genetically vetted in colorado they just fly right over the wall they just yeah imagine that yeah they don't need i thought they would dig under um anyway so so we did this so we went uh um from one end to the other and lo and behold both of them came in and so on the one side if you get all the way to about san an and you draw a line, model ducks. Okay. Then something that we didn't expect,

but hypothesized, model duck, Mexican duck hybrids in this tiny band. And then all of a sudden, just Mexican ducks. So they're both coming in and interbreeding in this location. So the model ducks are declining, but what's replacing them is- Is more model

ducks and potentially these hybrids. What do you call the hybrids? A Mexican duck model duck hybrid? Mexican model? What do you call it two generations later? So we're looking at how many generations they can interbreed. It seems like we're picking up back crosses

which means like geographically if you're closer to the model duck group you back cross into model duck and you become more and more model duckish on the other end close to the mexican border they're back crossing into mexican ducks and so they become more mexican duck like yeah but there's this band uh this this really narrow what we call a contact zone um where it's just hybrids, which is completely new. But they're totally healthy. So that's part of the diet analysis with the feces.

We're looking at bill morphology, muscle fiber morphology to understand, can they still fly the same? Do they feed the same? Is there anything that would suggest these are... fiber morphology to understand, can they still fly the same? Do they feed the same? What, you know, is there anything that would suggest these are, um, less adapted than their parents? So anyway, so the, the point of this, how to get back to your question, how does genetics, uh, provide applied aspects? So that data, right? So I plot all that on a map. So everybody understands what's happening. That data is now fed back to Texas Parks and Wildlife to say, okay, we need to go in these regions to ban because our probability of getting a model duck, because that's what

we care about, is really high. And so we're going to ban there. But on top of it, they're shifting, they're going to be shifting surveys over and start counting those ducks. So again, a population decline versus a population range shift have very different management implications, right? So this is how it's feeding into that. And we've got studies in Hawaii, Arizona, American Samoa doing similar things, trying

to tell them what they're working with and how the genetics plays on the landscape. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers

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As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the to the OnX Club, y'all. Here's a question about genetics and how it's applied in management.

It'd be I'll start with a story. Do it. Years ago, almost been in the early 90s, I was hunting ducks on the St.ary's river which separates michigan's upper peninsula from canada um and i remember getting checked by uh a state and federal game warden right i remember i had i was like i'm sitting there with a hen mallard and i remember

they're going what kind of duck is that yeah And I was like, the fact that he asked me that makes me think that that's not what I think it is. So I'm like a black dog. Good. You know, I only said that because you brought it up. So if oftentimes you'll find, um, when people are pointing out end endemics they're pointing out hybrids it's like they're they're really down to the gnat's ass and they're like parsing things out that to a layman they might not even notice if you if you don't know what you're looking for yeah so yeah if you had to take like duck knowledge like average duck knowledge on a yeah and then you put it on a spectrum of one to ten yeah and do you got to be like a 10.5 to go down to this place in texas and

pick up one of those ducks and be wait a minute this is a modeled mexican mexican hybrid or would it just be to a duck hunter it would just be like it would be called a dusky duck because that's what they call them right now okay so texas texas i think arizona has a dusky duck limit and it's usually one or two and they just say anything that's equivalent to a black duck a model duck a mexican duck i'll go here now new mexico okay so they're bundling black ducks model ducks dusky ducks yeah i'm sorry mexican what's it what's the full name mexican duck it's just the mexican duck yeah mexican duck They're bundling black ducks, model ducks, dusky ducks. I'm sorry. Mexican. What's the full name? Yeah, Mexican duck. It's just the Mexican duck.

Yeah, Mexican duck. Okay. That, model duck, a black duck. Yeah. All in one. Called dusky duck. They're just calling them all duskies. That's in the game rules.

Yeah. That's in the hunting regs. And so. So sell me on what you're talking about here. Like the mallard thing the hunting regs. And so. So sell me on the, this, sell me on the, what you're talking about here, like the Mallard thing that we're going to get to,

I get, but sell me on why this matters. Oh, well, I mean, this would matter if we don't find any, if, if model ducks are declining at the rates that they are in the Gulf coast

region, then Texas parks and wildlife is probably going to have to make some serious decisions, but they're being replaced by right. But some serious decisions. But they're being replaced by... Right. But if they're not, they're being replaced, which we didn't know. So now we have to understand, all right, so they're being replaced. They're not being replaced.

They're making more, right? That's what a contact zone. They keep coming together and it's like fringe. They're at the fringe of both of their ranges. And this is what happens. It's kind of like a growler grizzly polars on the fringes are starting to growler like yeah are starting to interbreed more and more right and uh and so now it's a question of all right like so we have this

situation not only do my maps allow people who are really interested in hybrids go there, but also that it dictates, all right, so what do we do with these types of birds? So Texas Parks and Wildlife may have to have additional season or additional information for those areas, those regional areas. On top of it, what do they mean towards model duck or Mexican duck conservation? Do they count towards model duck or mexican duck conservation like how do they count towards those numbers i can't tell you because i know because they're the ones making the rules and i'll leave them to that uh but we're there to supply the information the maps the the idea the knowledge of what's occurring on the landscape and they can then use that to make better decisions outside of just being like they're all brown ducks i guess it's let's just call them so were there human causes is it of interest because it's like human behavior human

landscape changes are leading to this collision because i could see that then you'd be like well now we're forced to pay attention to it because we're making it happen so that's that that's definitely a question so one of the the issue on the gulf coast is eroding habitat that's that's that that's definitely a question so one of the the issue on the gulf coast is eroding habitat that's that's a thing right so the question is then all right so is that eroding habitat causing decline you know survival and and fecundity or baby making and that's why we're seeing a decline or are those birds just leaving right so that was because they're losing x thousands of acres of correct yeah is it wetland or foodstuff? Both.

I mean, it's wetland and then it turns into foodstuff. But what's interesting, as I was driving around West Texas and noticing all these large high-fenced preserves that have really beautiful stock tanks and corn everywhere. And nobody there wants to shoot a mallard because they got to shoot that neil guy over there so my hypothesis currently is they're both moving in because the habitat's actually there it's man-made but it's there year round nobody's shooting them at least as far as we can tell i know one guy that is well in man but only a little bit oh no oh you know he's doing it a little bit on the in the in the places with the nil guy and then the beautiful ponds and you're like my god the ducks yep they'll now and then get some yeah yeah so we and i walk around being like that is all i would do so so yeah so i would uh you know the the funny thing is I contacted a bunch of landowners and I went on some other podcasts asking for help.

And I got contacts. But then like I was in Texas and then nobody like called me up. So I had an outfitter out there. What part of Texas are you interested in? I could probably help you. It's more or less all of West. We went from, like I said, Houston, Dallas area, all the way to the- So West of that is, I'm trying to figure out-

It's West Texas. Yeah. So if you draw a line that way and all the way South, like that triangle- Yeah. Well, have you- Yeah. I feel like I know, well well we'll talk about later yeah yeah

i think i know all kinds of people who'd let you go out there and do it with your father well they say yes and then i'm like i'm i'm in your area you know calling them and nobody's calling me back because they're like oh and i told him i'd always be like look blinders on let me go to your pond what's that what's the what's the remember the guy had, those dudes we had on about the ocelots? Uh-huh. Yeah. Oh, what area are they in? The Cleber.

Yeah. I don't want to name the name. I mean, listen. Yeah. This is going to be my contribution to American science. I will find you a bunch of places to go get your ducks. Well, yeah. That would be great. Because we have a few more, we have a few counties that are pretty poorly

uh uh sampled okay and uh and they're right like you know we could shift that line of where the zone is potentially a few miles this way or a few miles that way by getting them yeah and that would shift there do you like to be close to the gulf coast though no no those are all model ducks like we sampled a ton of a ton of birds doesn't matter anymore yeah we went from to be fair we went from louisiana all the way across gotcha and it was model duck model duck model duck model duck and all of a sudden this like new genetic variant which are which now we know are these hybrids and hybrids and then it goes mexican duck so it's this very clean sort of interesting story that

will be hopefully publishing soon and figuring that can you draw a picture of texas and show me where you wish you could be this is gonna be i'm pulling up some where's that two um draw the little corn kernels in the pond too yeah just i know exactly okay there's texas let's do that i think we that whole area that's where you want i think you have south texas access tip of texas going north oh this way wait no that that way there you go so phil can you turn this camera on? Here's Texas. You know,

everybody points this out. Did you know that you could fit Texas, California, and most of Montana into Alaska? Isn't that amazing? I don't mean to emasculate you Texans, but especially when I'm trying to hit you up. If you're in this little honey hole and you got one of them sweet ponds call dr phil call dr phil dr phil he's gonna be

like hold me what the other dr phil you can also write the meat eater podcast at the meat eater and have the subject line be um fouling peas yeah sure i know what you're talking about anyways yeah so that that's that was a long way of showing how where genetics has come into play i mean you got to understand 10 years ago i would go into a conference of uh it's i it's called the north american duck symposium called ducks nads yeah i didn't want to yeah it really is nads it's called ducks now okay ducks nine is it north american duck society your cup says nads yeah oh i'm aware okay i'm aware and is that like are they they recognize that that's funny or no it's no longer funny

they made it unfunny well yeah the joke wore off the joke wore off okay eight eight eight conferences in anyways yeah so it's gonna be in portland in february you should come anyways uh yeah so um you know some of the first ones that I would go to, I would be like, oh, there's that geneticist, that weird geneticist, dude. Because they just didn't see the like what it couldn't do, what that data can provide. You know, there's so many studies out there. Right. So you're handling all these mallards and you're putting bands on them. You're putting telemetry units and a bird that stays in an urban setting versus a bird

that does migration, you'll be like, oh, maybe that's just part of their population and their history. And genetics allows you to go in and be like, ooh, that one's a feral mallard. And that one was a wild mallard. You're starting to have a better and a true foundation to what you're actually asking. So your future questions will be less biased. You know, uh, before we get into the Mallard thing, do you remember Brady,

Matt, do you guys remember when there used to be, I don't know, 27 kinds of Canada geese. And then all of a sudden one day they're like, Nope, there's three. Or what is it?

Like what is the popular number now? Seven, 11 to seven. But there used to be like ridiculous numbers. I think eleven's pretty commonly agreed on right now. Okay. That came from you folks. That came from me folks.

That came from you. So no, that's not true. You had this discussion with Cornell, I believe. So we folks provide data and we're like, look at how different these things are. Okay. And then there's the american ornithological union here there's the british ornithological union every country has their own unions and then they use that data to say should they be species so they're the taxonomists that

make the decisions but they're looking at what you supplied for them so the mexican duck when this was a good example mexican duck was full species when it was first identified in like 1890 something. Then everybody's like, oh no, there's lots of hybridization in the 60s. So they bumped it down to a subspecies of the mallard. Hybridization with mallards was the problem. And then years later, I came along and I started to use some of this latest and greatest genetic genomic techniques and actually found out that, oh, all of these things that you thought were hybrids are actually juvenile or first year males. And they naturally express malar traits because it's still in their genetics, but they're not hybrids. And then we found lots of unique genetic signatures

that are tied with a desert lifestyle. And so AOU, American Ornithological Union, used that information to then re-elevate them in 2020 back to full species, only recently. So they got bumped back to being their own. They are their own full species. So if you've got the SLAM going, bumped back to being their own. They are their own full species. So if you've got, you know, the slam going, you got to, got to come back there.

Is that what it is now? 41. How many things are in the slam? 41. Mexican ducks are the newest one. Yeah. So is it 42? I think it's 42.

I'm going to say it's 42. How close are you guys? I mean, I was like eight off here for a while. You're eight off? Yeah. Have you closed? You've got, so you've gotten all eight? I need like model ducks and tree ducks and that weird stuff in the south, you know, the stuff he's talking about.

Huh. Did you get them all stuffed? But like, no, I don't have them all stuffed. I wish I did. I wish I would have done it kind of like our friend down the road, Mark Pierce. You know, he's got them all like flying in the same direction. It's like one big flock. That's cool flock i would have loved to have started that yeah because i always think like i've gotten a lot of stuff over the years just whatever and i go in there i'm like no i haven't well it's just tough i mean you know back when we were really shooting them you know

even when i went to alaska i was there on a on a photo shoot and I got to hunt a King Eider and I shot the, you know, the male and the female and, and shot some scoters and stuff like that. But shit, man, I couldn't afford to stuff everything. Like you can't. That's expensive. You know, it's expensive to do it, you know,

four or 500 bucks a piece to do it right. It's more than you got paid for the photo shoot. Yeah, no kidding. Yeah, you'd been running a deficit. Yeah. So years ago we were out out in the East Shore, Chesapeake Bay. And we're driving down the road and we're going over a bridge. Okay.

And I look and it's just like, I even commented on it to my friend. Because it's duck season. I knew it was duck season. And we go over bridge and there's mallard sitting it just didn't seem right and i even said to him like i cannot believe that you know just like how they were sort of occupying this slew and its proximity i even commented like that just seems weird those mallards be doing that right in the middle of duck season it was yeah and he goes well how much time you got you know and it was and i had i didn't know that this was i didn't know that it went on that like the same way you do pheasants where you just

like let pheasants out i had no idea yeah that there is a thing of of pet releasing pen raised mallards it's a thing and the reason i thought like the reason i thought was because pheasants you know pheasants are non-native and i thought it was that one of the reasons they're so widely released like that is because it's a non-native anyways you're not upsetting any kind of wild bird population at least as far as we think okay okay at least as far as i thought maybe you can tell me otherwise and so it just winds up being like here's a species that is out there they require a lot of human assistance if you want to supplement with pen raised birds knock yourself out i guess that you're not interfering with anything but the fact that you could let mallards go was really surprising me but then i've learned since then it is somewhat

a widespread practice yeah and they appoint and he said when like this used to be chesapeake bay was sort of you know in some ways kind of like like the birthplace of American duck hunting. And as bird numbers declined, it just became, they artificially inflated numbers to maintain that. And what you're driving by is these hunt clubs and they have mallards that are just hanging around in a way that just makes them seem like they don't quite know what's going on.

And you've spent some time on this now i sure did is that the segue that's the segue all right that's a good setup yeah so um yes so in a nutshell that's that's more or less what happened but we've i've sort of reconstructed exactly what what potentially happened so if nobody here knows this, the mallard is the wolf of all domestic ducks, right? So like the wolf is of the dog. The mallard is that to all domestic ducks. I got, you lost me. All right.

So Pekin duck. Oh yeah. Rowan. That's what you mean by the wolf of. Yeah. Really? Yeah. They pulled all the domestics off of mallards?

Yeah, just like you could get a chihuahua off of a wolf. Okay, this is interesting because what we pulled cattle from is gone. Orc. Yeah, they're trying to bring it in. Yeah, the orc is gone. What we pulled the pig from is still around. Yeah. Seuss scroffa.

Yeah. What we pulled sheep from, I believe, is still around. Yeah. Seuss Scroffa. Yeah. What we pulled sheep from, I believe, is still around. I think, so that was out of what, Saudi Arabia, Arabia, Northern Africa, that would have been red sheep,

I think is the. The ancestral one. The ancestral one. What we pulled the horse from is, I think, gone. So they,

so, Revive and Restore recently cloned the second, I'm going to say this wrong, Peswick? Peswick? Okay. Yeah. That's like the foundation species. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the, I had no idea, restored recently uh cloned the second i'm gonna say this wrong peswick peswick okay yeah that's like the the foundation species yeah yeah so i had no idea the mallard the mallard is the duck that created that they pulled all the domestics yeah so they were one of the last successful domestication events uh about 5 000 years ago okay so there's only two well three the goose

sort of, but the only other good domestication was in South America with Muscovies. They kind of just look like a Muscovy. That's how you say it? Muscovy. That's all right. Yeah. Either way.

Either is acceptable? In my book. Okay. Yeah. So the Mallard, you know, there's good writings about the Ming dynasty was one of the first ones to start domesticating the process of domestication of mallards. And that was for food, right?

Make them fatter, faster, making more eggs, these types of things. 5,000 years ago. About, yeah. Okay. And now again, domestication is a process. So it ebbs and flows happens all over the once once it's started then those things get transitioned just kind of like uh labs

made themselves you know there's english labs you know american labs there's all sorts of stuff um anyway so so 1631 is the first writing uh King Charles II asking his squires to go get mallard eggs for the purpose of raising and releasing for hunting purposes. So he was a duck hunter. 1631. 1631. 1631. The name Game Farm Mallard was first, as far as I know, recorded in 1890s in England by people ringing them and calling them Game Farm Mallard. I'm going to refer to this thing called a Game Farm Mallard, but all it really is is a domestic variant, right? It's a name. Just like a lab or chihuahua or whatever, beagle is a name.

Peek and duck, row and duck, runners, call ducks, all these things have names, right? So this thing is called a game farm mallard because it was farmed for gaminess. So what they were interested, what people were interested in Europe primarily at the time was to make something flightier. Something that flies faster and is sportier. Than? Than, I don't know, than whatever was around. Just like a pheasant chupa with ducks, right? They're flying more erratic,

more like make a mallard fly like a widgeon. Oh, okay. So the objective, the same way a pigeon fancier wants to make pigeons that have all these crazy colors. Correct. They were like, breed me up a crazy ass. We want to make this hard. Breed me up a crazy flying duck. All right.

So now let's move forward to America. Hold on one sec. Yeah. Did they do what? In Europe, did they do the tower is that what they're doing tower shoots they do both they do so currently um how bad i guess bad is relative i think is bad uh so so they do tower shoots but they also release right before the season yeah france releases three million of these things to have a fall flight now. Oh, wow. No.

Oh, wow. That was last year's numbers, I think. That's a staggering number. That's huge. France cuts loose 3 million mallards? Something like that. Game farm mallards. Game farm mallards.

Things that you breed and you release right before the season, just like you would release pheasants before Thanksgiving, youth, Christmas maybe. Yeah. Well, there's another important distinction here between pheasants, you know, before Thanksgiving, youth, Christmas maybe. Yeah. Well, there's another important distinction here between pheasants though. No, no, no. Like the galiforms. Yeah.

You like that word? Yeah, I like it. That was a trivia question, that media trivia that I got right not too long ago. One of the defining features of the galiforms is they don't really go anywhere. Correct. That's the biggest difference. They have a small home range. When you cut a mallet loose, that son of a bitch takes off yeah so so dogmatically wait can we go to

america now oh i'm ready okay all right so so you're right so the gunning years of the late 1800s early 1900s um you know market hunting uh uh was spelled demise for all our bird populations, including passenger pigeon eventually going extinct, heath hen going extinct for now. Oh, we held one of those. Oh, yeah. Remember that, Corinne? They had it in that drawer I'm talking about. The extinct drawer. I don't think they had the duck.

I think they had the, it was ivory bills ivory bills passengers and heath hen okay in the special i don't i don't totally right by the door i i will note that my contribution uh so far is to revive and restore us so far just suggesting we should bring back the labrador duck okay yeah but i said i would get the first tag yeah um anyways uh okay so we are we are uh gunning years uh population crashes and so uh what did folks do there's two things that are occurring so if you don't know this east of the mississippi river was boreal forest right and the duck mallards were vagrants, which means- Oh, no, no, no, no, no.

We're going back. The east of the Mississippi wasn't boreal forest? Yes, it was. During the Pleistocene? Yeah. Oh. That's what you're talking about? We're going there.

All right. Because we have a very good distinction here. The east of the Mississippi before humans started cutting things down was mostly boreal forest and the ecological replacement, which means the thing that is better than the other thing to the mallard in that area was the American black duck. That is the reason it is completely dark, both males and females,

because you could think of a boreal forest and aerial predator going overhead. The selection pressure isn't to look fancy to the female because you're getting picked off. So now males and females have to look the same. All right. So it's a bunch of black ducks, very few mallards. So mallards tended to go, still go into the Southeast Atlantic flyways, the Eastern seaboard. But the Northeast, it was vagrant, like a cinnamon teal, right?

So you didn't shoot mallards there. But of course, so now let's fast forward to 1920-ish. Duck numbers are down. People are like, all all right what do we do about these numbers but also that area was like we want to shoot mallards too all right so cause mallard is king there it is big green head big green head taste good same thing did you know did everybody see the story of uh the hunter i think she was a thousand years old in nova scotia last last meal mallard yeah yeah chestnuts chestnuts and mallard yeah chestnuts and mallard yeah so we've been doing this for a while everybody loves mallards yeah she was uh what else did she had she'd been eating well she also had a lot of diseases. I remember seeing that. Yeah.

I think her last, they were saying her diet was. I don't remember. I remember the chestnuts and mallard. Went out on a high. Yeah. Pretty much. Anyway, so folks first tried to start breeding programs with our wild birds, mallards and black ducks. They didn't take because it's they're wild it takes time for them to be like okay i'm gonna not stress out i'm gonna

make eggs all these types of things so they that failed and but somebody must have known that the europeans already got this right you know can i let me ask you extra detail about this because you just said something that's interesting they found the opposite with turkeys that which which ones well tell me okay when they started trying to repopulate turkeys out of the out of pa those last turkeys well everywhere they i mean they recovered turkeys a little damn place but what they found initially they were trying to use captive bred yeah birds yeah but the captive bred birds wouldn't take yeah and then they eventually came to the conclusion they had to use wild bred birds correct to distribute them around so you saying that um that they had an

opposite experience with ducks or am i getting this wrong no because that the the point of that was actually establishing populations currently they just want to make ducks okay right so those are two different uh wants right so oh they're not recovering something they're trying to get something going exactly i got it yeah all right so they went so that so someone must have known that the europeans like figured this out and brought game farm mallards here. And I'll explain how I figured that out. So they started propagating them. And from about 1920 to 1960, they released about half a million of these things just in the eastern seaboard every year.

And then 1960 to today is about 250,000 to our best estimates. But my guess is it's way more than that. So these game farm mallards- Still getting released annually. Still getting released. And still of the progeny of these European birds. Yep. Okay.

Yeah, so- Is this the state doing this, or is this just like private people? Currently, it's private. When it first started, it was state, fed, private. Everybody was trying to raise them. In fact, more game birds for America. Do you know who they became?

Anybody? DU. Yeah. I had no idea. There's a good trivia question. Yeah. Do you know who James Ford Bell started? Which other one?

Delta Waterfall. Yeah. So they both initially wanted to do game farm mallards too. And Delta Waterfall had a whole, their first thing in the Delta Marshes. What year? What was it? 1930. They were still trying this stuff, 1930s.

Anyway, so they, but they showed that, but their premise was make ducks that actually make more ducks in the wild okay and delta saw that that was a failing venture because they they didn't survive long enough didn't make the same because they so you take these european ducks yeah these european mallards cut them loose and then the next year just no successful reproduction yeah you're going out there just cut them loose all over again. Correct. Yeah. And never, they never took off. So the dogma since then of why we continue to release them is that they are some, Oh,

the other fun fact is everybody tells me that, Oh, well they're born here. They can like smell their way here. And so they don't leave here. It's like their house, no matter what. And if they do leave,

they die. And if they don't die, they definitely don't breathe that's the dogma that i was under including when i was in school in in uh uc davis i was i was learning about this can you tell me can you tell me that again what the dogma the dogma was that it's okay to release these things sort of like pheasants like look winter's gonna come the the coyotes are gonna get them them. Like nobody's going to survive. Okay.

Right. So the dogma was these things are trained, quote unquote, if you can't see them, to stay on the wetland that you're going to let this sort of like global pandora's box out by taking this animal and it flies and all around the world and spreads itself correct yeah so so that happened for a hundred years and uh i was studying black american black ducks and mallards so if you don't know this american black black duck, again, a very close sister species or relative to the mallard. In fact, off the mallard tree, it was a mallard in North America and then evolved, adapted to boreal forest. And over the last half million years, turned into what we now consider the American black duck. Can you tell, I have such little experience with black dogs can can you

tell the hens from the drakes by looking at them yeah it's tough in flight it's really hard in flight it's hard yeah no green head obviously no it's you have to have what is this what are you looking at bill bill yeah and the only thing yeah that's the only thing and can't you look at the speculum too? You can, but they're not supposed to have a white wing bar. So the white wing bar. So that's the hybrid in between the native and, okay. That's what I know. Yeah, no.

And your thought process was correct. US Fish and Wildlife. So this is the part of this study. We were saying like, okay, so we're at this wing bee where all these things and professionals are calling mallard, black duck, hybrid, based on those characteristics, the amount of weight on them and all this other stuff. So we did the genetics on them. And one of the things, management implication, they're only 60% accurate at calling hybrids from either parental, the other percents where there should have been black ducks or mallards. And on the mallard

and black duck side, 20% of those should have been on the hybrid. So those numbers are going into our models, right? Potentially causing issues in survival estimates, fecundity estimates, and so forth. You know, this is starting to sound like is when you show people a deer's teeth and they tell you how old it is. Yeah.

Opening a can of worms. Without cutting into it. Yeah. Yeah. Why is it being like, maybe. That's a seven and a half year old is. Yeah. Opening a can of worms. Without cutting into it. Yeah. Yeah. Why is it being like, maybe. That's a seven and a half year old book. Yeah, exactly. Anyway, so, but within that study, I started picking up this genetic signature that didn't, that wasn't black duck and it wasn't Western Mallard. So by Western Mallard, I mean West of the mississippi river okay west of the

mississippi river they're all this one genetic cluster and then as you go east this secondary genetic cluster that is mixed with the western genetic cluster started to come in higher and higher abundance and when we looked at black duck hybrids, they tended to backcross with this other genetic signature. So that was 2019. I knew the story of this game farm releases. And of course dogmatically I was like, oh, I shouldn't look at that. Like that's not

a thing. They don't go anywhere. They don't go anywhere. And I saw that. I'm like, no way. So, but to, you know, prove to the scientific community and I had to go and get known game farm mallards. So, but to, you know, prove to the scientific community and I had to go and get known game farm mallards. So I actually sent my wife to New Jersey and a couple other places. And we collected known game farm mallards from some of these preserves.

How did she get them? She shot them. You sent her out as a client. Ah. Did you really? Undercover client. Seriously. Did you really? Undercover client. Seriously. I've heard these stories before.

I knew where this story was about to go, so. You sent your wife to masquerade as a client to bring you the ducks. Well, on top of it, though, she was also giving me information of where these birds that she didn't, didn't just come to the pond go. And they all went to this location.

And when I immediately, in real time, Google mapped where they were going, they're all went to this location and when i immediately in real time google mapped where they were going they're all going to a wildlife refuge you're kidding me yeah so they know where they're going god it's like an undercover component yeah yeah this is this is dark i like it's like a john lecar now yeah yeah so so now those jer so now we're back to jersey uh they're probably about to go kill me uh so so all right so we had that we had known game farm right and then on top of it i'm like well there's park ducks everywhere and the nice thing is uh we were banding mexican ducks and alongside them there were there were khaki campbells which is a different variant of mallard okay uh so we had

those so they are were our proxy other park duck domestic thing right so if this genetic signature was park duck we would be able to tell that or if it was game farm we would be able to tell that because we had that but i also know knew that people were gonna be like well maybe eastern mallards were always genetically different so that's when i went to the smithsonian and picked up mallards harvested from 1860 to 1915. So before all those releases. So I want to thank all hunters from before and today that were depositing birds into museum collections.

Hunting is conservation. It is. There you go. So we got genetics off of those birds. Okay. And so we compared everybody. First thing, that other genetic signature, game farm mallard.

I was like, all right, so we know that. But were they always like that? No. They were the genetic signature of a mallard, 150-year-old mallard, was that which you have here in montana okay uh in the prairies so for now uh and um and this other genetic signature was causing that the eastern mallard to be completely different than uh what is western mallard today and historically

hmm so is it acting different well that's where we're going to go. Okay. So our North American wild mallard, the premise of that 2020 paper was that the release of game farm mallards had foundationally transformed the genetic integrity of a wild mallard. All right. So then I was like, all right right let's look at how this occurs across the world um and for that we had to go to europe and and on top of it be like okay our

rr game farm mallards from europe you know had to prove that so you had to send your wife there so i just no i would have gone no i had colleagues in Europe. They sent me a whole bunch of DNA and blood and all this other stuff from Sweden. Almost, what did we do? 12 countries? It's in that paper right there. Can we back up for one sec? Your wife, is she a duck hunter? She is.

Okay. Yeah. Did she bring friends? No. She was just solo climbing. I'm just here. it's a bit strange like a single woman shows up to the hunting club with her fouling piece and just like let's go well we also requested that the dogs handle the birds uh uh carefully because we were making a mount a mount oh that's good

wow yeah i have a quick question backing up real quick uh khaki campbell yeah i've never heard of Because we were making a mount. Oh, that's good. Wow. Yeah. I have a quick question backing up real quick. Kaki Campbell. Yeah. I've never heard of this before. Is it? No, I see it. I'm curious if that is commonly known as a blonde mallard.

Maybe. So eventually we're going to get into- And I'm not trying to like deviate. However, like this is- Yeah. In my mind as a hunter, this is very interesting to me. Yeah. Because like the blonde mallard was always like genetics and like it was just losing its color.

Yeah. We've always thought it was like a leucistic mallard if that's even a real thing. So this is the domestic tree of life for mallards. Because a blonde mallard is a prized piece for a mallard hunter. You should hold that up to one of Phil's cameras. Here's one right here. There you go, Matt.

I have a quick question as well. So as you're talking about east of Mississippi, so many of these mallards have game farm bird genetics in them. Matt and I have a lot of friends east of the east and south, east of the Mississippi and in the southern United States who claim that they know ducks

better than anybody in the world. It's a culture that prides itself on being duck hunters. Would it be fair in your scientific opinion for us when we are hunting with them to let them know that the birds that they so love

and shoot are in fact genetically inferior to what we have? I'll let them know that the birds that they so love and shoot are in fact genetically inferior to what we have. I'll let you make that conclusion. Okay. You mean your game farm ducks? The game farm ducks you guys got. Can you write me a note after?

I won't prove that I'm telling you. The man said this. Dr. Phil tells you. Because I want to have, I would like to have some Bragging rights Yeah, we're hunting purebreds It's game farm ducks, dude

No wonder you got them I'd hope you'd be able to get one Yeah, you guys don't even need calls You just go quack quack And they come over Okay, we're going to talk more about this Put white bread out. Actually, don't feed, that causes them,

yeah, it doesn't matter. All right, all right. So we were doing it, so where was I? 2020 paper, yeah. You were global. Global. So I also knew that they released game farm mallards in New Zealand.

They stopped in 19, what was it? 1970s or so, I think is the date. So- What was their duck? We record show both Game Farm Mallards were bought from Europe and brought there. That was the first time- Did they have, what native ducks did they have?

Oh- Did they have a mallard like- Yeah, yeah. It's called the New Zealand gray duck. Okay. It's part of the Pacific black duck group. But it's a mallard off- It's a mallard like? Yeah, yeah. It's called the New Zealand gray duck. Okay. It's part of the Pacific black duck group. But it's a mallard offshoot. It's a mallard offshoot.

Yeah. It looks totally different though. Yeah. All right. So we call this mallard complex. It's like a mallard complex, but actually the mallard was not the source for all of these other ducks. It's an African species, which was was completely we probably extinct but most likely

part of like the african black duck yellow bill duck group we call it the mallard complex because we have a complex with mallards yeah uh and we everybody knows what you're talking about yeah it's like mallard oh yeah anyway so so uh so we i had done a scientific collecting trip in new zealand where we collected 400 birds all around the South Island. With your fowling piece. Fowling piece, yeah. Did you do it out of season or in season? No, in season, yeah.

Just straight up hunting. It's called scientific collecting. I mean, you guys are like decoying. I'm a scientist. You're decoying and calling. Well, that's how you get them in, yeah. Well, I don't know if you get some other thing, like you're shooting them out of golf course ponds.

I don't know. No, maybe in Mexico we did that. I've been in New Zealand. But you're like, I would have looked and been like, those guys are duck hunting. But in fact, you were collecting specimens. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah, so we did this whole thing. So I had a bunch of mallards that are, so their population, I think their last estimate was also three it's about three million so they're doing well the question is where did they come from right so we know that they had two efforts of bringing in mallards into new zealand one came out of europe and another one they came to north america and they bought mallards from north america really thinking assuming they were different hey uh uh when i was in new zealand i shot with my rifle a canada goose did you yeah which are like wide open with a rifle that's same deal right i mean it is okay those those were canada geese that were probably i don't know where

they were brought from but i'm assuming from the states they just brought like just cut them loose same thing yeah you know the moose that they brought there was, I think, Newfie. They think they're gone. Yeah, but every so often they like pop up. Yeah, it's become their Tasmanian tiger. Yeah, yeah. I think, yeah. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

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As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. So, Phil, I was in New Zealand, and I did a duck hunt as well. And their prize duck is the mallard, right? Everybody wants to shoot the mallard down there. And would you look and be like, that's a mallard? Well, so here's my thing.

So I wanted to shoot parries because parries are super cool. Yeah. What's that duck? Paradise duck? A paradise shell duck. Yep. Super pretty.

Fascinating. And that's native to there. Yeah. Yep. And it's fascinating that with the paradise shell duck, not to get off subject, but the drake is actually black. Yeah.

And the hen is all colored up. Yeah. I got to believe it has to do with no land predators. But so I was looking at the mallard there. You're good. Yeah, really cool duck. So the female is the one with the white head. Yeah.

Huh. So I was looking at the mallards there, and the mallards don't fly high. They fly really low to the ground, right? And so I was like, gosh and the mallards don't fly high. They fly really low to the ground. Right. And so I was like, gosh, these mallards are kind of weird. They work a little bit funny over the decoys, work to the call a little bit different. We get them in.

And I was convinced that the legs of the mallard were further towards the head than of the ducks that we usually shoot. And the only thing that I could come up with was that maybe on the nesting site, because they don't have any land predators, they don't have to stand straight up, so they're more adept for hanging out on the ground and feeding and doing that sort of thing. But I could tell a very distinct difference

between not only the way they acted, but the way they looked. Yeah. In New Zealand specifically. I'm assuming you never saw one perfectly looking green head. I mean, they all looked the same. They looked different. Yeah.

Not like a farm duck, but like different. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So New Zealand had their source was game farm mallards from Europe and from North America. Another one we went, I have a study looking at Hawaiian ducks and this issue with hybridization with domestic mallards there. So I had mallards from Hawaii as well. I thought those were going to be park ducks.

So let's just like move forward into what we now know. Feral populations on Hawaii as well as well as new zealand source population were game farm mallards okay the interesting thing there is both of those locations had a stop on release right so for for 50 60 years formal stop a formal stop right so you weren't adding stuff into it we i know that new zealand New Zealand's like the best situation to compare because it's at a larger scale. But they went with 30,000 birds. They had a drop in population size and now have 3 million.

So obviously there was enough genetic variation, enough situation where they were able to survive through the like, oh, we have really bad genetics and then come out the other end. Now, our work also suggests that they interbred with those New Zealand gray ducks. And it looks like they got some of those functionally important genes from them. Got it. Which is super cool. But the other part of it, there's no predators, right? That gives them time to be like, oh, we are really bad at life, but we'll survive long enough.

Yeah. Feral cats are the only thing that kill them yeah and new zealanders as if you guys have been there man they like to just shoot everything off like cats everything you know they they're they're there to shoot stuff um so anyway so europe we we were able to confirm is the game, the wild mallard from Europe is the ancestor of all mallards, including in North America. Now we got birds,

the only genetic difference was mallards out of Greenland. Don't know exactly what that's about, but it's most likely that a bunch of mallards went there and sort of like, probably a long time ago and turned into you know genetically changed through time the the important thing here is that game farm mallards from europe are the thing that is here in hawaii new zealand and elsewhere so this single lineage it't, it wasn't khaki Campbell's or any,

any other, all the genetics, this alternative non-wild genetics came from game farm mallards. Yeah. So their release across the world at this point has resulted

not only in feral populations, but also just geographically widespread hybridization with local populations. And in our case, the wild mallard so coming to so because we had so that study was 2 000 samples to about 2 000 1916 samples

worldwide about 1300 samples here in north america mostly atlantic flyway mississippi flyway and then we put about 400 birds uh mostly uh from the canadian provinces that go all the way to alaska okay all right so what happens in north america is you have a decrease in this genetic signature east to west right exactly where the releases are so then if we zoom in where we had where we identified hot spots so kind of like epicenters of of hybridization this situation can anybody guess in north america where the epicenter is chesapeake bay almost yeah jersey oh jersey looks like fr genetically. It's there every time, no matter what year I go, no matter what year I go, Jersey will always have feral game farm.

Now I have to explain. Where are they coming from there? Some of the major release groups are there. So they got like the dark. It's numbers. They do the dark stocking. Yeah. So that location, They got like the duck. It's numbers. They do the duck stocking. Yeah. So. Huh.

So that location and now some of our newer studies in the Great Lakes region is starting to find that the Great Lakes region is starting to look like Jersey and France. And these are three locations that are not doing great in duck number, in mallard numbers. This is going to bring back the whole freedom fry thing again, man. So anyway, so sticking with North America, just to give you some numbers. The Atlantic Flyway. So we had hunting season, non-hunting season. So summer banding time. So like what are we banding in the states?

And we did it state. We have every single state. Because banding is so like what are we banding in in the states and and we did it state we have every single state because banding is always done in the summer correct okay yeah there's winter banding as well now but um the majority of the banding is summer because when they're molting it's easy to get them yeah you think that that represents your uh production production of that state, right? So that's the production. So there's... All right, so Jersey, Massachusetts, and whether it's hunting or non-hunting, I can't find a wild mallard. It's like 0%.

What? Really? Or Massachusetts, Jersey, Connecticut. I'm missing, but that whole little... You're saying in the summer in the summer what's your band if you in the summer you go out to a state game refuge in new jersey you're handling either a feral bird or a hybrid thunk a mallard over the head that's not a wild mallard yeah genetically well okay you're funny i mean i don't know so yeah so it's not a north american

wild mallard anymore so new y York's a little bit better. I think they were like 60, 40, 60%, mostly wild, 40. But New York's an interesting piece because we now know that there is a substantial number of Canadian birds, Canadian birds, mallards out of Canada moving in to those states when we didn't think they were. So they're adding to the production and what i can tell you is that canada is is more is like quebec is 60 40 60 wild 40 hybrid feral uh i did want to mention now has they has quebec does quebec have a history of cutting birds loose not that we know of no it's it's a so it's it's okay so

they didn't create this it's just happening to them so that's the whole epicenter of what we find so what a feral bird is is a bird that is in the wild right they're not in the cage anymore they're in the wild i don't know if they're in the wild this year last year whatever so i just have to call them feral just like you would call a feral pig right if you let loose pigs and then you had no idea and you came out to some property in West Texas, you'd be like, oh, feral pigs. Right? Because you had no idea. But you don't know the individual's history. Correct.

He could be 10th generation in the wild, first generation, but he's just feral. Right. And so where you expect, so the epicenter would always have feral birds as well as things that are backcrossing genetically interbreeding with these game farm lineages so you have things that are moving uh like between wild and game farm but more game farmy yeah and and so that's an epicenter that and that's jersey what happens as you move away from jersey is it sort of dissipates so these genes are being perpetuated through the landscape, but then what they're doing is eventually backcrossing into wild.

So they're becoming more wild. Now, the problem with Atlantic Flyway in the U.S. side is there's no more parental. The average, if you go out somewhere in the Atlantic Flyway, the average, just general average, some states are better, obviously. You look at a mallard currently, well at least in 2023, yeah currently, 22,

it's 2%. Wild. Wild. You gotta, you drop a mallard out of the sky in the Atlantic flyway, it's about 2%. Again, some states are better than others. The fake, not fake, The feral ducks have effectively, in these areas, they have replaced wild mallards. More or less, yeah.

Let me hit you with the, let's say you're not interested. Let's say you don't care about endemism and you just like to hunt ducks. And you don't care about the genetics of the duck. Yeah. So let me hit you with the who cares i mean is is new jersey just kicking ass at duck recruitment no no no that's the problem so the atlantic flyway has been declining two percent in its annual production over the last 20 years just constantly ticking ticking ticking ticking in fact they were down 480 500 i think they somehow found like regardless of the genetic background we're just talking like ducks no

mallards we're talking about i'm sorry i'm sorry okay and then mallards like mallards regardless of what what you're counting if you're, there are fewer and fewer mallards there every year. Regardless of whether you're dividing them into wild or... Well, we didn't know what was the cause. Yeah. But you know that they all have... Their heritage is all

farm-raised and their numbers are going down. So the next question is obviously, does it matter? Yeah, sure. Alright. farm raised and their numbers are going down so the next questions obviously doesn't matter yeah right sure um all right so it's about two percent there but then as you go to the mississippi flyway there's an interesting aspect and we uh uh some work between brian davis at mississippi state rick kaminsky and others uh kevin ringelman we we did a sort of like lower Mississippi, Alluvial Valley, if you know that area, Georgia, Louisiana, parts of Missouri. We got a bunch of birds there. And then I've partnered with Ben Lukinen out of Michigan State.

Got a whole bunch, hundreds of birds out of the Great Lakes. And there's this interesting dynamic. You go south of Tennessee, 94% of those birds are wild, just wild, straight up wild. Go north of Tennessee towards the Great Lakes, it's increasingly becoming more and more game farmy. So current estimates, general, again, average 70, 30, 70% game farmy, feral versus- Out of the Great Lakes. Yeah.

And the Great Lakes is the next place where those populations have been declining exactly those locations so again you could say oh you have no data for association

of that sort sure but my hypothesis is at least provide something is happening so again so what's

so alright so now everybody's on track I got a question yeah are you grabbing these ducks during the breeding season like so yeah from all these different states yeah so so that works so they're they're breeding the two two two separate separate types of sampling so we do hunter harvest sampling yeah hunters are just you know during the hunting season we get a bunch of samples uh but then there's banding crews again ben lukinan and his his crew out of the great

lakes uh doug osborne out of university of arkansas uh uh brad cohen out of tennessee tech and brian brian davis out of mississippi state they are constantly catching putting telemetry units and banding and all that stuff up and those states. And swabbing these birds as they hold them. So then I partnered with them and be like, all right, just bleed them a little bit and get me that sample, right? We're not killing those birds. So then we have those two comparisons. What are we banding during summer? And then what are we harvesting? So we have those types of comparisons. So we're building those data sets to answer how does the mixture between

Canada raised mallards and US mallards occur across the hunting time span. Because if you go to folks in the Mississippi they'd be like, all our ducks are stopping in the north. Yeah, for sure. Yeah.

Because yeah, I was just thinking about migration and i'm like how do you know where this exact duck came from yeah like yeah so so that was our question all right so we know this so we we now we publish these papers and we know this like different population dynamics going on we you know um so i partnered with them and we've got telemetry units on them right can anybody guess trivia where those birds in the lower mississippi alluvia valley are from uh given their genetics of wild i made a hypothesis and thankfully i was right more to the west more periphotal region yeah periphotal region yeah exactly dakota every every bird that was uh More to the west. More prairie-foddle region. Yeah. Prairie-foddle region, yeah. Exactly, Dakota. Every bird that was, I think every bird, maybe except for one, that was a hybrid, went to the Great Lakes. Really, yeah. And then the Great Lakes birds, do you think they have, so we have four years now of telemetry units tied with genetics. So we know what's happening.

What do you think those birds are doing? Are they migrating? Are they, what would you expect? Which birds? Uh, like Great Lakes birds, given that I told you about this, like increasingly game farming situation. Yeah, they should be holding. They should be holding strong.

Where? Somewhere up in the Great Lakes, somewhere up in that region. Cause they're not going to migrate all the way south. Yeah, they do a random walk. A walk? It's called random walk. There isn't a straight path. Some birds go to the Atlantic.

Some birds go south. But then there's this wall in Tennessee that they do not cross. Don't understand why. Trying to figure that out. And they go straight back up. All of the birds with 30 percent so they'll scatter off in various directions just it's more random yeah it's completely random it's it's not significantly different from random right so the birds in the lower mississippi have this like

straight path well have you have you been able to watch any of these ducks and see what he does is he doing this is he is an individual duck doing the same thing or is an individual duck doing different directions all the time? Individual duck is doing random walks. Okay. So in 2021,

he does this. In 2022, he does. They survive. Well, so it's, these ones are all females. I wish we would put males

because they're the, males and waterfowl are the dispersing sex. So if you've got a game farming male or a game farming female, it's the male that's mostfowl are the dispersing sex. So if you've got a game-farmy male or a game-farmy female, it's the male that's most likely to move the genes. But nobody wants to put telemetry units on males, apparently. It's unfortunate.

Because they always get shot. Yeah. No, because then you can look at nesting, propensity nesting, and that's the main question that they're all asking. These populations are declining, so they're always just like, okay, what are the females doing that they're all asking. Like, you know, these populations are declining. So they're always just like, okay, what are the females doing? Like, what is the problem with these females? Yeah, I understand.

I have a, I have a timeline question. Cause I'm just kind of tracking what you're saying. So boreal forest go way back. You had said that there was no mallards in the northern Atlantic. Northeast. Region. Yeah. Yeah.

Anyways. Yeah. That there was a bunch down south of Tennessee. Naturally, there was a bunch of wild down there already. There was none up in the New Jersey area. Yeah. So they brought them in. We have the American black duck who's not getting messed with, with, you know, what's going on here.

And now all of a sudden there's mallards. Again, it kind of goes back to the who cares. Like now all of a sudden we have a bunch of mallards there that we didn't have before yeah and they weren't migrating in because they're staying in canada or coming around the great lakes or whatever so like that region there there's a population that was never there before and now it is and yes it's a game farm mallard so is it more the the widespread of that that's the issue, or is it? It's the spreading. It's the spreading that we don't like, because having a mallard in New Jersey seems like it's a success story. Yeah, but when you say that all the mallards in New Jersey are game farm mallards, but was there ever a difference?

Meaning they went from no mallards to just only game farm mallards. So I hope to answer that question soon with those 1800, so we did, we redid that study. We have 800 historical samples from 1800 to today to answer that question. How did it happen? We know what we have now. But you know

where the samples came from. And we know exactly where the samples came from, what the dates, location. So there were mallards that got killed out of New Jersey in the 1800s. okay yeah some number some number yeah yeah yeah i mean people shoot still shoot cinnamon teal in there every so often right so these things got collected i'm sure at that time you shot a mallard you're like oh man put this thing into the museum it was you were surprised yeah i see i see yeah, some strays would go through there. Yeah, exactly. Um, yeah.

So, so, so the, so now we're seeing these migratory differences that are, that at least to some extent are genetically associated. Cause we have this nice association of an individual that's, and it's very weird. Don't know why yet, but 30% or more game farm makes them do weird things. All right. So now we've got, so now we have sort of this like situation. Oh, the other thing is, is birds in the Atlantic flyway had a connect connectivity to the Atlantic flyway. There's birds that are interchanging.

So the question is like, why is there increasing game farm in the Great Lakes? Is it people releasing them? Or is it just this like kind of ebb and flow between the atlantic flyway and and the great lakes region kind of this natural semi-natural ebb and flow that's the question that we hope to answer are there people releasing uh if they're releasing them they're not supposed to be that's a state that's a state by state kind of situation i mean how would you not know if they're releasing them in the great lakes nobody's keeping track of that as far as I can tell. Okay.

Yeah. So, so someone could be, I mean, the, the great lakes is, I don't know what it is, five or six States,

whatever the hell. Yeah. So Michigan, um, are there, there, there are not to your knowledge. There are not places in Michigan that like advertise that they're dumping

mallards. Not to my knowledge. Yeah, so the genetic signatures that I see there make me believe that people are because it looks like Jersey. It looks like France. Then the whole thing is like these things have a low survival, right? So a colleague of mine in Sweden kind of did a survival estimate. They said like 3%. But look, 3% of 250,000 or half a million or more throughout time is more than enough.

Yeah. Right? And it isn't really that. It's the trickle effect. It's every single year, you're continuing to move those genes into the population over and over and over. We can go back to rainbow trout. So the fisheries are far ahead of where we are because they've been studying this.

It takes only three generations for rainbow trout to be in a stock tank for 50% of the eggs to be inviolable. Because what happens in this- Really? Yeah. And the same thing with quail only three or four generations of being in captivity the viability decreases that much and the reason for that is because everybody wins in a cage right so you're perpetuating these genes that would have been

lost every single year by natural processes in the wild but now you're pushing the putting them into the wild you know the unabomber got into this oh yeah you read the unibomber manifesto i know i know the universe yeah no well i'll just give it to you oh my god didn't i didn't see this coming he rates levels of difficulty uh one to five in his manifesto and he's like um one is i can't remember it was inverse or not but let's say one is uh try as hard as you can you'll never succeed okay five is you don't even need to try and you'll succeed his deal is that technology that human survival used to hover like at the two three you gotta try pretty hard yeah if you try pretty hard you'll be okay yeah now you can do the opposite to try you just sit there and just be

fine yeah and and that's part of his gripe with technology everybody wins in the cage everybody wins so yeah he tied that to all the neuroses. You know what I mean? I'm with you. There's nothing cleaning anything out anymore. Title. Yeah. Korean title. Well, we got away from it. We don't do good titles anymore.

This is the second podcast this month where Steve's made the guest uncomfortable by being kind of like pro-unabomber. Yeah, he basically- I'm not pro-unabomber. I'm not at all pro-unabomber. It's just- Bringing it in. I'm not pro-unabomber. It's just... It's bringing it in. I'm not pro Unabomber at all.

I took a class in college called Political Rhetoric, and we read political rhetoric, everything from Dr. King, Camille Paglia, the Unabomber. We read it all, and I think a lot of people know about the Unabomber, but not a lot of people had to read the Unabomber's Manifesto. No. So you had to read the Unabomber's Manifesto.

Are we going to talk about Charlie Manson now? We didn't read anything about Charlie. I'll have to write Dr. Gillis a note and tell him that he should have had some Charlie Manson writings in there. But no, I'm not pro-Unabomber. He had motivating thoughts. No, yeah. Agree with him or not.

In a cage, everybody wins. I teach similar things is it not unabomber things uh i teach you know like look humans everybody everybody is surprised always that the effective population size of humans is 10 000 people that's how many people there should be and it hasn't changed. And everybody's like, well, why is that? That's because genetic variation doesn't come up that fast. Our populations exploded only in the last 200 years, really. And so for 99% of our history, we were at an effective population size of 10,000 breeding pairs.

And that's what the earth was more or less okay with. And so- There was a stability. There was a stability. And society, domestication, all of these things allowed that populations to grow. But it's only that- God, I got lost of where I was going with this. But I'm going to.

It is because... I threw you off that Unabomber shit, didn't I? Society is... Derailed you. Society is our cage. And it becomes... We go further and further to the four or five. Well, earlier on,

as long as you were kings and stuff like that, you were really at a five. Everybody else was still kind of at a two. Yeah. You know. So what's the, if the situation goes and continues to happen. Yeah. Do you picture that, do you picture that they'll continue to move westward?

That's exactly. Because there's some amount of stray, like. Exactly. Like when I look at the salmon, a lot of salmon make a wrong turn. Correct. And that's how they colonize new rivers.

Correct. Like they just go at the wrong river. Most of the time they do that. It doesn't work out. Now and then one does that and he's like, sweet. Yep. Yeah.

No, lo and behold, a new salmon stream. No, no, absolutely. And that's exactly what's happening. It's, we, Ben Senninger and I looked at banding data we recently published in Journal of Wildlife Management.

And we saw that there's a 25% emigration rate. So leaving the Atlantic flyweight on the U.S. side into the Mississippi. So this is one way that things are moving west. And so most likely what's happening is those genetics are coming over. They're pair bonding with something that goes to the prairies and they're moving it into the prairies. And that is exactly what we're seeing through time. And that'll jump to the Rocky Mountain.

That'll jump to Pacific. The unfortunate thing is, so, okay. So getting back to, is this a bad thing? Let me, let me premise this. So study between Michael Schumer at SUNY ESF and his master student Susanna Halligrand, Brian Davis out of Mississippi State, Ariel

Fournier with Forbes Biological Station. This is very generous. It's like someone receiving an Oscar. I want to thank everybody. As well as California Waterfowl association with caroline brady and brian huber um all right i got all those out uh so we did a study we wanted you can't be like well what i did yeah i on this silver tower by myself no no that's not how i

work i'm like we got to get this you know stuff i almost said you know the s stuff done uh and i work with by bringing in the people who know how to do it quickly and that's what i do you know um so anyways so we so we're like okay we need to get wild strain birds and game farm birds into captivity to test like the first thing that we started seeing is their bill and we're like this bill on this game farm mallard sure looks like it's better at pecking than it is at straining so we had a hypothesis that in captivity where you throw grains out potentially over the last 400 years we've been selecting for things that can a run, run over to that, and B, peck at it. And so we're like, all right, let's see what this looks like. So we got birds out of California,

and this gets back to your comment about going west, and I'm like, oh, for sure those are wild birds. And lo and behold, there's game farm mallards there. Somebody's releasing them in California. Unfortunate. Really? Didn't see that coming. So I called up some friends and they're like

yeah there's some people I don't know who they are then you sent your wife in? really? so now I'm gonna have to send my wife back to California anyways so we brought these in captivity we genetically vetted everyone meaning we did Ancestry.com on everybody

knew everybody these are hybrids, these are wild these are the game farms on top of it we got game by doing this we got game farms from like other states everybody same exact genetic signature still old world eurasian signature right still from over there so we brought them in and what we were doing were these feeding trials uh And what we would do is we would take the individual and we would give them food, wild seeds,

what they would actually eat in the wild in a bowl. And we would force them to strain it, right? And then we would see how much food was left over so much time. To the crux of it,

we found that game farm mallards are 50% inefficient in eating wild seeds, straining wild seeds as a wild mallard. And the worst of them were female game farm mallards. So that means in the wild,

you can extrapolate this to they need twice as much food and twice as much time to get the same calories. Got it. On top of it, anecd anecdotally because we were just watching this you could go into a cage and be like that's a game farm female because what would happen is every day there'd just be eggs randomly placed places there at times she would make a nest, but it would be like half made. Right? So like she's not, she has been transformed to be a chicken. Because in domestic settings, you don't want them to nest. You want them to just poop eggs out and you put them into your incubators.

Wild bird, you knew exactly what it is. The nest is there. There's almost never an egg because they're stressed out. Right? nest is there, there's almost never an egg because they're stressed out. So anyway, so now we have this association of genetics, morphology, and now it's causing issues on their ability to feed. On top of all this, what we found out is what's happened is they actually have made these things flightier. So you have a mallard about the same length, but the wings are shorter. The legs are longer. So they run faster or that's that when you see the tarsus get longer, it's,

it's what you see in island species where they're become more terrestrial. Yep. Spend more time on the ground. Exactly. And so, but the wings are shorter. That was an interesting one. Cause I had to go to our, our, uh, aeronautics team. I was like, what does this do? And they're like, oh, you took a jumbo jet and you put fighter wings on it. You made it flightier. So these things can maneuver at faster rates.

But here's the kicker. When we finished our feeding trials, we put them back on Purina Chow to get them fat. And the hybrids- You mean literally- Purina chow. Okay. So a high protein diet to get them back to fat because we wanted to know what they would do. And anything that had 30% more game farm or just straight up game farm, almost never put fat on. They just stayed the same.

So they're like a 7,900 gram bird, whereas a wild mallard at full fat, you're looking at 900 to 1,200 gram birds. They're not getting properly geared up for movement. And that's physiologically, they do not put fat on, it seems. Again, anecdotally, just because of what we've done. Wild mallards, you put them on Purine chow in four days they're like 1200

grams right they're putting that fat on just as you would expect so now let's put all this into a winter situation in michigan a freak storm comes in you got a bird with no fuel shorter wings that can fly fast but can't migrate far uh and and would have to refuel almost every stop, right? That's a bad thing. So now going back to the telemetry units, what did they actually tell us? That. So not only are these females,

we've had females with 30% or more game farm in them. They had a statistically significant, I'm pretty sure I'm saying this okay, statistically significant uh uh um abandonment of nest statistically significant tied to urbanization and they were the ones that are doing the random walk and that's big and when we looked at stopover rates they had statistically significantly higher rates of stopover these things things are burning fuel as they hopscotch across the country, so they can't go very far.

So they're going city to city almost. That's the random walk. That's why they come back. Campus to campus. Yeah, they're like, oh, I got to go back to the bread lady, you know, like refuel. Except bread gives ducks angel wings,

so don't give them bread. You're actually killing them by giving them bread. Really? Yeah. So if they had just done one of these introductions 50 years ago. Yeah, it would have been swamped out by the wild. Because of all these problems. Yeah.

But the fact that you're just doing it and doing it and doing it and doing it, and once it's in there, it doesn't go away. That's the New Zealand situation where you had an indation you put these things out there and then you like let let's see what mother nature basically would do yeah and obviously they but again an interesting situation it's an island island ecosystem there are there um there aren't needs for migration because you know uh uh seasonality isn't the same uh no predators all these it's it's sort of like a perfect situation it's not this like complex web of all these correct intercontinental migration parallel migration paths you know exactly and so

so yeah so what we know now is that at minimum, there are physiological, morphological, which means like their bill, their body, all this stuff. And they're physiological. I forgot. So when we started seeing some of this changes in migration, I have a master's student, Nico, who's working on getting muscle fibers off of the ducks of these different genetic heritage, looking at, uh, I might get this wrong, quick, uh, quick twitch or slow twitch muscle fibers. So you would want a quick twitch for faster movement, slow twitch for that elongated migration pattern is the hypothesis.

And we're seeing exactly that that these birds have higher uh proportions of quick twitch as compared to uh or fast twitch versus slow twitch that's it uh the more slow twitch or sorry more fast twitch in the game farm mallards as compared to the slow twitch in wild mallards are doing these my long distance migration and able to make these long distance migration so basically what this game farm mallard is is a fighter jet that goes really fast short bursts uh and that's about it that's but that's what we bred it for right that unintentionally or intentionally we got what we wanted. Yeah. I have a question for you. So when I hear this, this is from my perspective,

it sounds a little doom and gloom, right? Like we're screwed. My question is, with all of this data that you have right now, is there legislation in place or being pushed to stop game farm releases? And even if they did, let's just say, you know, you're king of the world, you waved a wand, there's not another game farm bird released in North America today, are we screwed?

Like, is this going to eventually be fully bled out as it gets into the West and other regions of the country? I got a solution. Go ahead. Well, to Brady's point, if the new ones were to end i mean can you start bringing ones from the west and yeah cutting them back loose right i mean that's what it looks like right if they're eventually if they're so weak that they're not going to be able to withstand the winters and they're not putting on the fat etc i'm just curious like forward face forward looking what's the play here that's a great question more data uh he's not he's not policy guys yeah that's right i am not allowed to comment on those kinds of questions what are the policy

guys think about are they interested i am not allowed to come uh those kinds of questions. What do the policy guys think about it? Are they interested? I am not allowed to comment. So I do not comment. I don't know about the Atlantic Flyway. Come on. Don't give me that you don't comment on the policy. The Mississippi Flyway has reached out. They are supposed to be putting a comment out being like, we do not support this, I believe.

Mississippi Flyway. Mississippi Flyway. The game farm. Yeah. What about the Atlantic Flyway people? I don't know. What about the US Flyway people? I don't know. What about the USGS? I feel like you're pleading the fifth right now.

Yeah, he definitely is. Let's say you said... No, no. Let's say you said exactly what you think, what would happen to you that was bad. Alright, so like everybody... No, pay attention attention listen to the

question yeah the flyways ask me if if this is going to be like how do you know if it's going to be bad i won't know until it happens but we can easily go back and ask well what happened with all the fisheries and uh quail releases and and pheasants and anything else we've tried to release with captive bred birds that have been domesticated for a while. Like the track record's not great. Not great. Not great. And all of those signatures are popping up, not just here, but like we can just look at what's happening in Europe, right?

So France is releasing a few million birds just to have a fall flight. You know, that's, and they have complex ecologies, right? They have needs for migration they have seasonality very similar to us so given the situation there and the constant inundation the pot the probability of the same situation happening is high what's that we're like really close to beyond at a time oh all right sorry i feel like we could talk about this for five more hours yeah who uh you work for the university i do okay we had a usgs guy on a long time ago about grizzly bear yeah his job was to count his his job was to tell

people how many bears are there but he's like my job is not to tell you what to do about it i'll tell you how many i think are there but what you do with that is your business. You're not held by that. You're a university guy. Yeah, but I work with every state and federal agency in this country and in Canada, and I leave it to them. I provide data,

and they do what they want with it. Are you tenured? I am. I am. Oh, well, then let's hear it. Let's cut it loose. What do you really think about a guy like Giannis yeah so

so people ask we gotta wrap it up we gotta do trivia Pete ah I've already done trivia with you guys like right here

you did I asked you questions a couple questions oh yeah well okay anyways yeah what do you do so we have a project in hawaii i'll wrap it up quickly like where we're testing this can you artificially

move back a hybrid population towards something different that's what i want to hear yeah so in hawaii can you we're we just got funding although we're 250 000 short if there are any donors on this podcast, please contact me at plovretsky at utab.edu. Anyways, so we are actually going to try, we know exactly the population. It's on Oahu. We're going to try to move pure Hawaiian ducks into this hybrid population and see generationally how many generations does it take for us to get Hawaiian ducks again. So it's kind of like a genetic, pseudo genetic rescue thing. Our models suggest it's only three or four generations. So that's three, four breeding events and we'll have pure Hawaiian ducks again. If that works, like that's a closed system, right? We can control so much of that. If that works,

then we can extrapolate what would we have to do in North America to turn the tide. Got it. Now, the significant size of the prairie hole population is what is stopping this thing from just constantly moving west. Got it. Because it's essentially- Because you're in a mallard stronghold. Exactly.

What happened in the east, hypothesis now, hopefully I'll have data with all the historical stuff is that there weren't that many to begin with. And whatever was there, you essentially bred out. Right. And so now it's just these hybrid thingies. And so, and you're constantly putting it in where mother nature can't just be like, all right, let's just keep some of this wild in there. Yeah. Because you're just constantly pushing it in. And so again, I don't think it's gloom and doom. The Atlantic Flyway, I'm not, you're right. Like there's no parental population there. You would have to. Create one. Create one. I lived in that flyway for a couple of years. It felt like doom and gloom when I was there.

So I'm glad to be here. Now, you were mentioning the Chesapeake Bay and that those ducks are funny. Now you know that- They are funny. They are funny. Their behavior, everything about them is just, you know, it looks like a mallard,

but it's a chihuahua, a dog. Okay, we're going to close with a role play. We're in a hotel bar. I don't know anything about you. Yeah. Okay? And I got no way of finding out about you. And I'm just thinking out loud in a hotel bar. I don't know anything about you. Yeah. Okay. And I got no way of finding out about you. And I'm just thinking out loud in this hotel bar.

And I'm like, man, I live in New Jersey. I'm thinking about getting into this whole deal of, uh, turn game farm mallards out. Cause I like to hunt ducks. Uh,

you're just a stranger. What do you think I ought to do? Don't do it. That's what you'd say? Yeah. Dr. Phil says, don't do it that's what you'd say yeah dr phil says don't do it oh dr phil says i was giving you anonymity as just a dude in a hotel bar um yeah i mean i caught you in a trap so you did tell what you oh my god yeah i mean here's the thing it's now sort of a a pastime right? In a lot of part of this country. I'm not going to say like, oh, let's shut it all down. But what I can say is our maps, our data flow are so at nice fine scales

that there are management actions that we can have. Like, for example, you have a place that is releasing and we can find these hotspots for any state and be like, okay, we're going to have special seasons in September. We're going to allow you to shoot 10 mallards or whatever it is when you're there. You're just basically trying to push that 3-4%

survival rate to zero of mallards coming out of there. That's what I would suggest. You're not going to shut this thing down. It's a moneymaker. Are you going to really? No. But there are things that we can do, I think. And I think that segues to can we segue to duck dna now i was gonna do we got a segway to being done no that's that's the done but it's an action item for duck dna like one minute and then we need it we're gonna so

it's gonna pull the plug so literally where is the plug phil mean, there's just one right here that gives us the whole thing. Phil's got a master switch. So, yeah. So, this is a citizen science project that has been in my mind for almost a decade. Mike Brazier and I have been talking, who's with Ducks Unlimited, over the last couple of years. And then we went forward with this thing called Duck DNA. Go to www.duckdna.com. You got the URL, DuckDNA. DuckDNA.

Congratulations. Yeah. Well, to DU. So DU, I have to thank Ashley Tunstall, Kai Victor, DU Communications Department, IT Department, and Development. This is where I play the music. And of course, Mike Brady. And my crew, Virgie Muncy, Lauren Mcfarland sarah gonzalez they're all working right now as we speak to get this thing going so this is a everybody go to duckdna.com and sign up today and you will get a kit with five vials and you could put a tongue in that vial and we

will tell you the ancestry of that duck we will be be using it for research purposes, but you will get a certificate. Congratulations. I did. I'll give some to these guys. We were supposed to do it on air. You're going to need to get a warehouse for all these guys. I was going to do a show how. I even had to take latex

gloves out of my kill kit because I forgot others. You just put um the tongue in there of your favorite duck if you're you know little jimmy little suzy shot their first duck we can give you the ancestry of that right now it's only ducks soon we'll do all the geese because uh we're building the data set the reference data set for all those 11 canada geese and all the snow geese and rosses and everybody else. But right now it's ducks and primarily mallards, which we're asking the hunters out there

to become hunter scientists and provide their data. Give us the opportunity to make waterfowl at the forefront of wildlife conservation. Nobody's ever tried something like this. There's duck hunters all over. I know we're at like 950,000, but if everybody signs up, there's only 300.

And I want to thank all the donors to DU that made this possible. It's free this year to sign up, free to get your kit. Hopefully we have a mass amount of people and interest, and we will make this hopefully viable into the future.

But I'm just super excited about it because this has been a dream, right? Amass all the duck hunters to provide at landscape and time intervals that would be impossible for any researcher to do, right? We would be able to study where are there hot spots of hybridization, pintail mallard, these types of things, as well as obviously my interest right now, where this came about, is getting a countrywide sampling of mallards to get after and get ahead of this question with this whole game farm release

and what it means to our wild North American mallards. DarkDNA.com. That's cool. Curtain closed. Thank you to Dr. Phil. Thank you to the Flying B guys. Don't leave without your vials. Oh, I'm grabbing like 10 of them.

It takes 10 seconds to sign up. Yeah. I signed up last night. Thank you, Dr. Phil. Thanks, Phil. Thank you all. Oh, ride on. Ride on, little blood. I want to see your gray hair shine like silver in the sun.

Ride on, ride on, my love. Sweetheart, we're done beat this damn horse to death so take your new one and ride on we're done beat this damn horse to death so take your new

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