Wildlife Vocalizations: Jessi Tapp

By far, the best way to learn is by doing.

There are just some concepts that one can fully understand only through experience. For example, the drive up to Yorkton, Saskatchewan, from St. Louis, Missouri, was an eye opener for me. On this drive, I traveled across most of the Prairie Pothole region, a massive expanse of historic shortgrass and some tallgrass prairie dotted with wetlands that are currently dominated by agriculture. One might not realize how much of this region, which waterfowl enthusiasts have affectionately named the “duck factory,” has been altered by humans unless they’ve made this trek.

I was headed to Canada for five weeks to band waterfowl as a part of the Western Canada Cooperative Waterfowl Banding Program. This joint effort involves the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Canadian Wildlife Service, state and provincial wildlife management agencies, the flyway councils, First Nations, nongovernmental waterfowl advocacy and research organizations, and hunters.

The success of this operation is critical to the management of waterfowl species and, in my opinion, is the epitome of why partnerships are key to wildlife conservation. Wildlife have no use for arbitrary state lines or country borders, and migratory birds cross those lines like it’s their job.

Overall, this was an incredible experience and far more physical work than I imagined. We had to move traps several times and adjust our schedules—sometimes working more than 12 hours per day—to avoid losing birds to predators.

The stress and fatigue, however, faded away when I had a bird in my hand and pondered about the journey that each one has been on and is about to take. Additionally, I realized there’s few places one can get the skills I attained in a month’s time by practicing the identification and determining age and sex of around 800 ducks in eclipse plumage. 

We ended up with around 2,500 total birds banded, consisting of about 1,000 mallards (Anas platyrhynchos), 1,450 blue-winged teals (Spatula discors), and a few other species. The real icing on the cake was the occasional call of a sandhill crane (Grus canadensis) and the daily opportunity to refine my shorebird and other waterbird identification skills at our trap sites. 

For someone that loves waterbird ecology and hunting, being involved in this project is about as intimate with the management of this group of birds as one can get. I’d do it over again in a heartbeat. 

Wildlife Vocalizations is a collection of short personal perspectives from people in the field of wildlife sciences. 

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