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[Background: You're looking for coarse flecking throughout this portion of the wing]
Khristi: It's a takeoff of the idea of a quilting bee where people would get together to complete
a project, so we have 40 or 50 people come in and work together for a week to process
all these wings, so we call it a wingbee.
[background talking]
Paul: It's the, the last part of a survey called the Waterfowl Parts Collection Survey,
which is a survey where we ask a sample of usually 6-8,000 hunters nationwide to send
in a wing from every duck they shoot and the tail feathers and wing tips from every goose
they shoot.
Khristi: So we get the bag of mail that contains envelopes with the wings in it, and we have
a person or group of people at each site who is responsible for processing the mail. They
look inside and see what species it is, write the species name on the outside and we store
them in the freezer. And this goes on throughout the hunting season, and then at the end of
the hunting season, end of January and into February is when we meet to process all the
parts.
Paul: And we get help from a lot of Fish and Wildlife Service employees, but also from
state agency employees. We can tell what species composition of the harvest is, so that's one
purpose of the survey, but then the age and sex information is value added. Age information,
what we're able to tell from these parts is whether this was a young of the year bird
or an adult bird. So that gives us a pretty good index every year of what productivity
was on the breeding grounds the previous breeding season, during the spring.