Central Flyway

And when we go below a certain threshold, That's when they're going to change our seasons.

So like right now in the Central Flyway, I think we're at a 74-day season.

We're like the Mississippi Flyways typically have a 60-day season.

You go west and the season gets longer.

Yeah, we don't.

We're in both flyways, Pacific and Central Flyway here.

Make splits in Choteau County line, east of town here, halfway to Lewistown.

But mainly our waterfowl hunting is on our river systems and around our reservoirs before they freeze in the grain country.

Yeah.

Yeah, I'm from Pennsylvania, so that's a rare occurrence, so I have to go out to the central flyway.

We don't have an early teal season here, so for the last handful of years I've been going out to the central flyway and taking advantage of that September, I guess it's September 5th start this year.

And, uh, yeah, got a, got a limit three days in a row.

So, it's a good way to start the duck season.

So that, and that's something that, you know, I think I, I haven't looked at personally, so that's, that's good.

I think, um, you know, from a, from like a traveling standpoint, right, and, and expanding and having guests on from other flyways on your podcast, right, before you started to really travel, like, did any of the techniques from, from outside, outside your flyway or outside your local area where we can spend, right, you can spend a lot of time in your core area till you start to travel, did any of that stuff really resonate or, or did it not necessarily apply because of the, the habitat that you're hunting in?

in?Well, the hardest thing with hunting in Pennsylvania is the number of ducks that we have, right? So if you go out to the Central Flyway, for instance, there's a lot more ducks funneling through that flyway than there is where I live.

Edwards is the communications director for Denver Audubon, a group that's spending the next couple of weeks tracking birds migrating through the state.

We have about 300 to 500 species that come through here in the Central Flyway, which is one of the main migratory paths in the country.

The Denver Audubon Kingery Nature Center is hosting bird banding sessions through October, helping scientists track migrating birds and giving the public a behind-the-scenes look.

The birds will get caught gently in the mist nets.

So go have a look and find that cool graphic.

The summary is that the average numbers of days a duck hunter takes to shoot a hen from 1999 to 2022 was nine days for the Atlantic Flyway, 6.4 days for the Central Flyway, 5.5 days for the Mississippi Flyway, and 4.1 days for the Pacific Flyway.

Also, every flyway saw a statistical increase in the numbers of days of duck hunting it took to shoot a hen mallard during this period.

At a 3.14% increase per year for the Atlantic Flyway, a 1.52% for Central, 1.49% for Mississippi, and 1.48% for the Pacific Flyway.

Cranes.

To help us unpack that, I'm joined by Dr. Andy Kaven, Director of Central Flyway programs for the International Crane Foundation.

After the break, Andy takes us to a river in Nebraska and gives us a number I made him say twice.

We get into what a wet meadow actually is and why soggy grassland is worth fighting over, and we talk about what it takes to bring a bird back from almost nothing and how fragile that comeback still is.