Okay, so a "brood" is essentially a family of offspring and in the context that I'm speaking in relates to duck broods. In order to complete our survey we had to wake up at the crack of dawn minus a few hours to go out on these Waterfowl Production Areas (WPA) when its nice and dark out
side. These WPA's are tracts of land, typically off refuge land, whose purpose are to breed ducks so that hunters can shoot them for fun during the duck season. Our goal was to walk out to these open pools of water and wait for a few minutes to find out how many we could see. Most of the pools of water where we stood a chance of seeing duck broods were far from the road and required us to walk in chest waders through vegetation that sometimes was taller than I was.
We saw very few broods the few days we conducted the survey but it was exciting nonetheless. I still learned about the different classifications of a marsh's coverage, density, and water level. I was also surprised by the amazing sunrise over the marsh, who would have thought cattails could look so good!
