A main driver behind what has allowed the waterfowl population to rebound and succeed in North America is the research and conservation efforts that take place behind-the-scenes. Split Reed recently sat down with Ryan Askren, a waterfowl ecologist, research associate, and PhD student at the University of Illinois to gain insight into those efforts. Ryan is involved in several goose research programs that are leading the way towards better understanding the behavior and habits of these birds and shared with us some of the insight he’s found from those studies.
Ben Buchholz for SPLIT REED; Photos Courtesy of Ryan Askren and Forbes Biological Station
SR: Hey Ryan, thanks for taking the time to chat with us. Let’s start with you telling us a bit about your profession and what’s keeping you busy these days.
RA: I’m a PhD student at the University of Illinois in Champaign, IL. I’m a research associate for the Illinois National History Survey, which is a research institute within the University. The Illinois Natural History Survey provide research on the states’ natural resources to help conserve and manage those resources. We have a range of scientists working on aquatic systems, grassland ecosystems, waterfowl ecology and more. I technically work for and am funded through the Forbes Biological Station in Havana, IL. I’m kind of Forbes’ weird step-child. I get to help out with some of their neat projects, but my main focus is on my PhD research in the Chicago area.
SR: Definitely some very interesting research being done at the Forbes Station. We’ll drop a link to their Instagram at the bottom of this article for people to check out. Can you share with us some of the work that the Forbes Station is currently working on?
RA: We’re doing work with a few different captive duck species and looking at how they digest different foods. We do a lot of our habitat planning based on the energy values that these birds can get from different foods, but previous studies have really been focused on Mallards up to this point, and just a few agricultural grains and a couple moist soil seed. We have had several students looking at “Total Metabolizable Energy”, or TME. Those students are looking at TME values in different submerged aquatic plants, different moist soil plants, things like pigweed and other plants that were traditionally considered noxious weeds. Now we are quantifying those TME values with a variety of species, not just mallards. We’ve also got a wood duck project going on right now, focusing on post-breeding movement. We think that one of the things affecting wood duck production in the Illinois River Valley is the brooding habitat. There is not a lot of emergent marsh left, like cattails, lotus, or lily-pad type habitat in the state. Emergent marshes provide important cover and food for raising broods. For that study we have VHF transmitters on a bunch of wood ducks right now. The Forbes crew has been going out to the field and getting a data point once per day and once per night using radio telemetry equipment. In addition to the radio transmitters, they deployed a few GPS transmitters that upload data via the mobile network.
SR: What are these studies finding? Are they finding that the manipulation of rainwater and riverways are playing a big part in this change in habitat?
RA: Well we have a lot of people that tend to blame the Army Corps for this, but a lot of the cause is siltation from agricultural runoff. In the IL River Valley specifically, the main cause is Chicago. When you look at the urban development around the Chicago metro, all of these impervious land uses and parking lots, if they get just a couple inches of rain it means a couple of feet for the rest of the Illinois River Valley. This year for example, there are a bunch of properties along the river that had water over the tops of the levees until the beginning of August. Because of the high river level late into the growing season, food production by moist soil plants or planted crops will be way down this year. That’s really, I think, one of the biggest threats to waterfowl conservation this year in the Midwest. Outside of waterfowl it’s also a huge negative impact to people’s livelihoods, like we saw out West this year. But yeah, pretty bad for waterfowl management as well.
SR: On the topic of manipulation, we’ve seen the use of drain tiles drastically change habitat throughout agricultural land, by rapidly removing water from a large area. Is that the cause of a lot of this siltation as well?
RA: Absolutely, and it all really ties into wetland loss. In the Midwest, the wetlands we had historically are gone or degraded. Flooding was mediated by the slow the release of water from major rain events into rivers that were more natural and had larger flood plains to hold water. Now the transportation of rainwater from the landscape to river systems is much faster. The result is too much water in river systems and the loss of good waterfowl habitat through flooding and sedimentation.
SR: We’ve seen mention of a study you’re working on with urban geese and their wintering habitats. Can you share more on that?
RA: Yeah, so that’s my dissertation research, my PhD project. We’re actually looking at a number of different things. Another graduate started on it before me, along with another student at SIU. The project was initiated to look at the movements of geese around Midway Int’l Airport in Chicago, because there are canals, parks, a bunch of good habitats to concentrate geese in the area. The geese really stack up there in the winter, especially during those cold periods. That was the primary driver of Brett Dorak’s work at the UofI while Kendra’s project at SIU was looking at the differences between urban and rural wintering geese, and how geese are changing their behavior to stay in the city all winter long, compared to the birds that are using the suburban and agricultural interface.
SR: Forbes Bio Station had a post last winter during the Arctic Plunge, showing the GPS transmitter locations for urban Chicago geese, showing that most of them stayed put. Is your research uncovering why they’re “hunkering down” instead of migrating?
RA: This is a lot of what I’m still trying to figure out. They’re using crazy places like rooftops and railyards. Not all of them are doing this, but a lot of them are moving to these novel habitats during cold periods. Obviously there’s no food, and the previous MSc student actually put weather meters up there and showed that it was windier and colder on the rooftops. They might still be getting some thermal benefit just from conductive heat from the building, but it really seems like they’re able to get up there and rest. They can tuck their heads and just conserve energy for those cold periods without being disturbed. There aren’t any coyotes or dogs, people walking up there, or anything. So, we think it’s really that they’re using those rooftops to escape disturbance. Geese also concentrate on the Chicago Shipping Canal during cold periods, as that remains mostly ice free and has several warm water discharges. The shipping canal was artificially connected to the IL river and is what creates issues with waterfowl management downstream. So we see a lot of geese moving to and from the shipping canal during cold periods that could be bringing them into closer proximity with air traffic.
SR: Are there findings from other studies such as the TME study you previously mentioned, that are helping to explain why these birds are not migrating?
RA: That’s the crazy thing, there is a little bit of spilled grain in those railyards, but a lot of these geese never even visit there. My informed guess is that they’re going into winter in pretty good condition and are hedging their bet that they have enough energy to coast through with the energy reserves they have. They’re eating a lot of grass, but that doesn’t have much energy. We actually had a few birds die right around that cold snap at the end of January last winter. They died within the city or just on the outskirts. Why they would stay and just freeze to death on the river as opposed to migrate, we don’t know. We don’t know if it’s that they don’t have the energy at that point and they’ve lost the ability to migrate out, or what’s going on with that. But it’s pretty incredible the decisions they’re making or not making.
SR: Especially when you consider other research that shows just how far geese will fly at one time during migration before stopping to feed.
RA: So I did my Master’s on white-fronts, and pretty much all of our birds hopped straight from Saskatchewan all the way down to Arkansas and Louisiana without stopping. We didn’t have any that stopped in North or South Dakota, and I think we had one dump off in Missouri before they headed south. Even Canada Geese – so for my dissertation – I’m still doing some work associated with the airport, but I’m also looking at urban to rural trade-offs. I’m using accelerometers, similar to a Fitbit, to measure G-force acceleration. I’m using that to quantify behaviors and pairing those data packets to actual video observations. Then I can say, “Okay, well this is what feeding looks like in the data”, and then I can run that out and come up with a time budget for that transmitted bird without ever having to actually go watch it.
SR: So the use of these accelerometers is allowing you to determine whether these birds are flying, feeding, resting…
RA: Exactly. Feeding, flying, resting, and then alert or vigilant behavior which we’re interested in to answer predation risk and disturbance-type questions. I’m using that to look at trade-offs between urban and rural birds. I’m also looking at the effects of harassment, by actually going out and harassing geese in city parks, which we know is not terribly effective based on a lot of other studies. But there hasn’t been much work done looking at harassment during winter, which is when they’re potentially more stressed in terms of energetics. We thought that making them move during those cold periods when they have to expend more energy to stay warm might have more of an effect on their desire to move. But we also wanted to look at how harassment changes their behaviors and their daily time budget of what they’re doing throughout the day.
SR: Are you finding that harassment is significantly changing their patterns or affecting their desire to migrate?
RA: We aren’t finding that harassment is really altering their desire to migrate. We are looking at the effects of nest management urbanization on the likelihood that a bird will molt migrate once its nest has failed. We’re still in the early phases, but we’ve had 32 incidences of molt migration after observing failed nests. This year we obtained permits to physically remove nests within the city from our transmitted birds, to force them to make that decision to molt migrate or not since they don’t have goslings. I’m also working with Chris Sharp of the Canadian Wildlife Service with geese nesting in Toronto. Over half of the birds we removed nests of around Chicago made molt migrations. There’s also some work out of Michigan that showed geese in urban areas are much less likely to migrate, so we are working to expand on why that might be.
SR: Molt migration is a very interesting and less-understood behavior of geese. Are you using this research to look at other aspects of molt migration?
RA: We’ve got a lot of data on molt migrations and mapped that out, figured out timing and paths of molt migrants. Now we’re going through and modeling the effects of landscape, with the idea that birds in urban areas have access to these huge turf lawns and large man-made bodies of water, which are removing the need to molt migrate, as those resources haven’t been available historically.
SR: Of course, with the main reason being to travel to safety and better food. It would make sense that urban geese with those resources already available would be less likely to molt migrate.
RA: Exactly. Better food, less predators and lower disturbance, and some people have thrown out the possibility of longer day length in the Subarctic. They can probably get up and moving to find food whenever they get hungry. We are interested in how harvest of molt migrants during early goose seasons could be affecting the costs of making that molt migration as well.
