Dr. Ryan Askren is the Director of the Five Oaks Agriculture Research and Education Center—one of Arkansas’s most renowned duck hunting lodges. As a waterfowl and wetland conservationist and an expert in habitat management, he joins David Hill in this episode of In Our Expert Opinion Podcast for a conversation that dives deep into waterfowl preservation. They explore the vital role of wintering grounds, greentree reservoir management, and the Farm Bill, along with practical steps private landowners and hunters can take to support healthier duck habitats.
Below are excerpts from the episode. Listen above for the full podcast.
Ryan Askren, Research Center Director at
Five Oaks
What are you seeing in duck populations and migration? Winter weather severity is kind of the number one driver of hunter success and how many ducks people are shooting. So absolutely, depending on the weather, we see changes in migration. How much of that is just natural variation from year to year versus a directional shift? It's hard to say, but that's certainly part of it.
The population is down. I mean, the population is a fraction of what it used to be. That's not to say that's all unnatural; we know there should be waves in the population. Those prairies are kind of boom or bust. We know in really wet years, they're incredible, but one of the big drivers is that wetting and drying cycle–it’s really important for the nutrient cycling and for the food that ducks need up there.
These dry years are important for the nutrient cycling. Then, when we get a wet year, there are a lot more invertebrates produced in those wetlands, there are a lot more of these shallowly flooded areas, and that's really what's driving the success of those hens and brood survival.
So I'm not saying everything's bad and doom and gloom because we're at a low population right now. Some of that's natural, but we're definitely at a low point. There's no doubt in that.
How can government intervention improve duck populations? A strong Farm Bill. I don't want to cast stones–I grew up in corn country in the Midwest–but ever since the ethanol boom in 2008, we've just lost millions of acres of grassland that ducks need and that all sorts of grassland nesting songbirds need. That's really where we've seen the crash.
We've had major habitat loss in the past, and we've lost a lot of species. One of the other things we get hung up on is harvest management, and I think it's important to understand those dynamics and how hunting influences populations, but we have so many other species outside of game birds that we've lost. Their populations have crashed without any hunting, without the gun taking them out, and it's all driven by habitat. That's where I'm going to focus my energy.
Dr. Ryan Askren joins David Hill on the In Our Expert Opinion Podcast to share insights on duck habitat preservation, the importance of wintering grounds, and the role of conservation-focused land management in supporting long-term waterfowl health.
Habitat, migration, and agriculture. The wintering grounds are important for the population. There's been some great research, and Mitch Weegman and his lab produced a paper that really tied winter flooding to population productivity up on the breeding ground.
When we have a lot of water down here, when we have a lot of habitat, ducks do better. That's because of something we call cross-seasonal effects, or carry-over effects, which basically means that when we're sending ducks out of the south in better condition, they're getting to the breeding grounds in better condition and are able to have better nest success, produce more babies, and do all those great things. That's really key in why what we're doing here on the wintering grounds is important, as well as ensuring that these distributions don't shift so much and that the economies, culture, and people that rely on duck hunting like we have here in Arkansas, that we don't lose that.
We really haven't seen that with ducks yet, but we have seen that with geese, where the Canada geese have shifted further north. We've seen a lot of the snow geese and white-fronted geese shift out of Texas to Louisiana and now to Arkansas.
Since I've been an Arkansas resident, we've been seeing changes. In the last couple of years around here, it's been really alarming how many people are working fields as soon as they're done harvesting. I mean, we're cutting rice in the first week of August in some cases, and that means there's no waste rice left for waterfowl once they get there–the blackbirds have hit it, it's decomposed, rotted, or re-sprouted.
Part of why Arkansas has been so great for mallards is because of the relationship with rice and agriculture, and I'm really concerned about how those changes could impact waterfowl. Hopefully, we can find solutions to improve the working landscape or work within the agricultural landscape to provide some good quality habitat for them.