By Libby Riddle, UM News Service
CENTENNIAL VALLEY – On an early summer morning at Red Rock Lakes National Wildlife Refuge in a remote corner of southwest Montana, Liv Lundin, a recent graduate of the University of Montana Wildlife Biology Program, hunted for a rare bird nest among the cattails. While navigating the knee-deep mud, Lundin spotted a small bowl of flattened vegetation with three small eggs inside.
“It’s a lot of hard work,” Lundin said. “Every morning we try to be on the water by 7 a.m. – some days paddling over 14 miles. But the first nest I found, I was like, ‘This is worth it. This is so worth it.’”
Lundin grew up in Alaska and worked as a structural firefighter for eight years. Lundin planned to work in fire full time after college but fell in love with wildlife biology through UM’s program.
After graduating in May 2024, Lundin took part in a long-term project on the breeding success of lesser scaup, a diving duck native to Montana. Populations are dwindling across North America but thriving on Lower Lake at Red Rock Lakes National Wildlife Refuge. UM researchers and conservation partners aim to find out why.
Jeff Warren, a wildlife biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, established the Lesser Scaup Project at Red Rock Lakes in 2003. Amidst a wildfire in the Centennial Valley, he wrote a funding proposal to study the population dynamics of the declining duck species.
“In wildlife, most of our knowledge comes from short studies – often just 2 to 3 years,” Warren said. “To truly understand how populations respond over time, we need longer studies that capture the variability driven by weather and wetland dynamics.”
Warren’s two decades of work uncovered essential insights into the reproductive success and survival strategies of lesser scaup on Lower Lake. The scaup project established a long-term dataset that helps managers design conservation efforts that can be implemented in places where scaup populations face challenges.
“This project started because there’s been such a significant loss of western mountain wetlands,” said Laura Wallace, a UM Wildlife Biology master’s student and a technician on the scaup project. “These safe havens for breeding and migrating birds are incredibly important.”
Wallace and Lundin spent their summer monitoring scaup nests for Warren’s nest success project, which is part of the larger scaup conservation effort. And this project is not the only long-term data collection on scaup populations Warren has spearheaded at the refuge. Every year, volunteers from around the state converge in the Centennial Valley for the annual banding drive at the end of the summer.
As a survival strategy, female scaup and their ducklings form groups of hundreds of ducks. On an early September morning, UM students, refuge staff and volunteers from government agencies and conservation organizations climbed into canoes to capture the ducks to be marked and released.
“It’s a lot like a cattle drive,” Lundin said.
Thomas Riecke, the James K. Ringelman Chair in Waterfowl Conservation at UM, led the drive. After Riecke and volunteers quietly paddled a few miles to locate scaup, the normally soft-spoken professor shouted orders across the lake, instructing the canoes to form a U-shape around the ducks.
The canoes approached the ducks carefully, trying not to scare them into diving underwater. Volunteers had to be careful not to paddle too slowly, or the ducks could weave around the canoes and hide in the grassy islands that dot the lake. Once in position, Riecke and volunteers used their canoes to drive the birds toward a wire mesh trap bracketed on either side by 20-meter-long wing nets.
“As we get closer to the trap, we get them to ball up,” Lundin said. “We’ve got this ball of 300 ducks … and we just push them into the trap.”
This was the tipping point of the drive. Canoes slowly peeled away as the ducks moved down the funnel formed by the nets. Once one or two birds made the plunge into the trap, the rest followed. The students jumped out of their boats and waded waist deep to join the ducks in the trap. What followed was a mad dash to scoop birds into perforated boxes and onto canoes that would ferry them to shore as quickly as possible.
Once back at the boat launch, deemed “Banding Landing,” volunteers on deck with experience in sex identification of ducks helped sort the birds into male and female boxes. From there, volunteer banders set up in the shade of vehicles to protect the ducks from the hot sun and began the hours-long task of banding nearly 300 birds.
On one team, Cooper Heaton, a UM senior and founder of Griz Ducks Unlimited, carefully weighed a duckling – 300 grams, equal to the weight of a can of soup. On another team, Riley Stedman – who took time off work as a wildlife biologist with the Bureau of Land Management to attend the banding weekend – read off the number on a small silver band before using specialized pliers to close the band around a duckling’s leg, twisting it in circles to make sure it wasn’t too tight.
The duck will wear this band for the rest of its life.
“It’s really cool to be a part of banding whenever you can because it’s one of the oldest and [most] well-kept records we have for wildlife,” Stedman said.
When a banded bird is spotted or harvested, and that band number is reported, scientists and managers can learn more about the survival rates and migration of the whole population. This helps wildlife professionals make important decisions for the future of the species. Over half of the lesser scaup marked prior to the hunting season in North America are banded at Lower Red Rock Lake.
Equally important to the demographic data is the community created around the volunteer banding drive. Among the hundreds of volunteers who have contributed to the Lesser Scaup Project over the years are children and students who had the chance to hold a duckling in their hands.
“Having volunteers come out to band ducks is not just about collecting data,” Warren said. “It’s about connecting people to the land and the birds.”
As the volunteers prepared to release the banded scaup back into the lake, Warren and Riecke explained to the assembled crowd that in a month these ducklings will begin their migration to Mexico. By participating in this project, volunteers helped USFWS gain essential insights into the habitat available to these ducks, which is important in aiding their annual migration.
“This research isn’t just about the scaup,” Warren said. “It’s about the larger landscape and what it takes to conserve migratory species across their journey.”
UM students are making a tangible impact on waterfowl conservation while also learning important skills for future careers in wildlife work.
“Students have the opportunity to go to this place, learn but also make an impact,” Riecke said. “It’s a great way for students to say, ‘I worked on a wilderness area on foot and kayak, so I do have those skills.’”
Although new to waterfowl research this past summer, by the end of the banding effort, Lundin helped lead the drive and taught visiting students proper duck-handling techniques. Across the two weeks of banding drives, UM students, faculty and alumni, as well as volunteers from other agencies and nonprofits, contributed over 1,200 volunteer hours. They also helped release 800 newly banded birds.
“This project has been going on for 20 years, and I hope it continues until the lake dries up – hopefully never,” Wallace said. “There are trends in these populations that you can’t see without long-term data [like this].”
At the end of a long day of banding, Lundin watched volunteers line up along the lake’s shore, each with a box of birds in their hands. Warren counted to three, and the boxes flew open, releasing the birds back onto the water in a flurry of flapping wings and feet. The ducklings quickly formed ranks behind the adult females and swam off in a line.
In the spring, Lundin will begin master’s research with Riecke, investigating population trends in waterfowl using these long-term banding datasets. But more importantly, Lundin eagerly awaits returning to the Centennial Valley next summer for the annual banding drive.
“This experience really brings home the point that conservation isn’t just in your backyard,” Lundin said. “It’s continent-wide and everywhere in between.”
