What's Cool About Shooting Banded Ducks?

To shoot a duck with a band on it, everybody knows it's cool as shit. Like I know that. Everybody wants to shoot a band. Most people listening don't know that. It's cool as shit if you get a banded duck. Why is that? Well, it's a little bit social science because long ago, like we used to not understand. This is kind of a little bit tricky to explain. We used to not understand how migrations worked because everyone only knew what they saw. Okay. And there wasn't someone who was sort of like coalescing all of this information. People would know very well, like, you know, wherever you live along the Mississippi River. Okay. And you might know very well that like in November shit loads of ducks that you haven't seen. They haven't been here all year are coming from the North and going to the South. And you knew that very well. You knew that ducks moved. You knew that they moved through here, but you didn't put all of the, you had no way to put all the pieces together. Over time, we wanted to understand like animal migrations better. And one of the early, this is way pre collars like GPS collars and pit tags and shit. We started this banding system where you could go and catch a duck in its we're in its nesting area. There's like times a year when it's really easy to catch ducks. One you can catch them when they're young and you can catch them when they mold. So people would go out and put a band on a duck and you'd go, you could go up in the Arctic or the upper Midwest anywhere and throw a band on a baby duck. And that band would have a phone number on it. And you were encouraged to when you got a banded duck, it was like they made it be that it was a good thing. And you were encouraged to call that 1-800 number, whatever the hell they were before 1-800 numbers and give them the band, the band number. And then we started to really with like great detail map out flyways, how ducks migrated. Like the ducks in on the Arctic slope in Alaska tend to follow along this path and they tend to end up here at this date. And they're down in, you know, whatever they're down in Texas all of a sudden or they're down in Southern California and they're hanging out in rice fields around Sacramento, whatever the hell it is. We started to put together this whole detailed picture and it was one of the great achievements in wildlife biology was what we learned from the duck banding system. So I think that over time it became, like I said, it was sort of like social engineering where people were taught to think it was cool and you would wear a band. You would, if you had a lanyard where you keep your duck calls on, this still goes on. If you got a lanyard, you have a duck calls on any banded bird you get, you put that band on your lanyard. I even met these knuckleheads from North Dakota who have a lot of bands on their lanyards from banded birds they've shot. And you'd be like, dude, that's a lot of bands. And he goes, yeah, not one of them's reported. They think that it, that it remains more pure to do. I don't know. That's the dumbest shit I've ever heard. It's the dumbest shit. I wish you guys did like call. How would anybody want to contribute to all this? I don't know. You'd have to have like a calling component to your show and we would call one of these dudes and have them explaining greater detail. But I remember thinking like that's the most, that's the most fucked up thing I've ever heard. But yeah, I don't think you'd want to talk to that guy. It was like, he's like, yeah, they're all unreported anyways. I don't know if it's like an anti-science thing. You love to argue. Did you talk to that guy about this? You know, it was long ago I could take a warehouse stand and I was in my brother's kitchen in Miles city, Montana beneath this crazy chandelier he bought online. And I remember everything about it, but I don't remember when I, if I challenged him on the sense of, of being proud of having not contributed to our scientific understanding of waterfowl migrations and why maybe like a sort of anti-government sentiment, like some black helicopter stuff. Okay. Regardless. Yeah. It's a malicious shit. It's cool to have bands and I have like in my sort of, I have like a box where I put important stuff to me. But imagine if you had a box of deer collars. Dude, there's no way. If I, I wouldn't put a deer collar. That's what I'm getting at is like, those are cool, but collars are not. And we had a friend, there's a, there's a friend of mine who's a, she's a, does a lot of carnivore research and other research projects named Carmen van Bianchi, which is a cool name. But she says that, you know, I'm someone that collars animals. And I even think that she's like, when you get one with a collar on it, she said, it was cool. We talked about this the other day, she's like, someone has already got the best of them, that they become tainted when they've been held by someone else. And that's a little bit how I view it where like a wild animal, you want to imagine it being like the wildest wild animal. And once it has a collar, it's like someone it's, it's all sloppy seconds, man.