 My name is Paige Kluge and I'm a wildlife biologist with the USDA Wildlife Services National Wildlife Research Center. My job is to research tools and methods to reduce Blackbird damage to sunflower. And so as many of you know, there's not an easy solution for that, but by integrating multiple methods by implementing those methods early in the season and by moving those tools around and changing their frequency, hopefully some of the methods that I talk about in the next few minutes, you'll find helpful. So because birds are mobile and able to move great distances, many of the methods can be conducted or thought of at a landscape scale. So for example, how can we reduce the density of birds and move the birds across the landscape? And one way to do that at the landscape scale is by agricultural practices. So planting larger fields by coordinating with your neighbors so that they're planting sunflower at the same time as you, so that the damage is spread out and not one field gets hit really hard, especially in areas where you think you're going to have bird problems. If you plant those areas as early as possible, if you plant early maturing varieties and if you desiccate the crop, you can advance harvest and avoid peak blackbird numbers. In central part of North Dakota, peak blackbird numbers vary every year, but on average they're in mid-October. So if you can get your crop off the field by mid-October, you're going to be doing better. If you're the last field at the end of October, you could expect to see thousands of birds in your field. Another landscape approach is cattail management. So cattail management works because it also spreads birds across the landscape. Less cattail on the landscape means a lower density of birds and you're distributing birds so that there's less damage in one particular area. Cattail management is frustrating in some ways because the cattail that's impacting your field is not always on your property. So again, it's going to be coordinating with neighbors to be able to do that cattail management. Cattail management is frustrating in another way as well in that there's not really the great solution to cattail management either. There's burning, there's grazing, there's mowing, you can apply an herbicide like glyphosate, but they all are expensive and difficult to do as well. And so that leads me to techniques that you can implement at the field scale and where a farmer has more control. So those can include things like frightening devices or chemical repellents as well as like say the crop variety. So with chemical repellents there is a repellent methyl and with an active ingredient methyl anthranolate that's registered for foliar application in sunflower in North Dakota. The difficulty is that you have to get the enough residue of the chemical on the face of the sunflower because that's where the birds are foraging. And with the preferred application strategy being airplane, you don't get enough of that residue on the face of the sunflower for the birds to ingest enough to have a negative reaction. We've tried drop nozzles but still there's not enough residue on those sunflower faces. In addition to chemical repellents we also have frightening devices and frightening devices are those tools that are used most often in North Dakota sunflower fields. Propane cannons, pyrotechnics, and firearms such as shotguns or rifles. So shotguns can be used as a lethal method that can reinforce some of those non-lethal auditory deterrents. Also one of the more novel tools that we've been researching is drones or UAS or UAV. I call them drones and we use them as a tool to haze. The benefit of a drone is that it's mobile and it can reach the interior of large fields. My project has been working on ways of establishing best practices of when we have success. The field size, the flock size, what kind of drone, how should that drone be flown? The shape, the size, the speed. As well as projects where we're integrating drones with other tools to try to increase the negative stimulus. So adding methyl anthranolate to a spraying drone so that we're chasing with a drone and spraying with avian repellent as well as potential of swarming drones or adding other tools such as using drones in addition to shooting. So stay tuned on those recommendations and please feel free to contact USDA Wildlife Services for any assistance you need with propane cannons, pyrotechnics, shooting or drones. Thank you.