European Gamekeeper Vs. The Conservation Ethic
Would The European Model Produce More Ducks Here?

By John L Devney
Group Manager Communications, Marketing and Development

A Delta Waterfowl member who happens to be a successful businessman recently tossed out an observation that was pointed as an English pub dart. “Waterfowl management,” he said, “is the only business in the world where success is measured in terms of input rather than output.

“Think about it,” he continued. “All we hear about is how many acres of wetlands or grasslands have been secured, or how many dollars have been spent on habitat projects. Those are inputs, like raw goods into a manufacturing plant.

“We never hear about outputs—how many ducks are actually being produced? How long to you think a business would survive if it measured success in raw goods rather than finished products?”

This thought-provoking question resurfaced a few days later during a spirited exchange among a distinguished group of waterfowl scientists. The centerpiece of the roundtable was the merits of game keeping, the accepted management model used in Europe.

Game keeping in Europe spans generations of English, German, Spanish, Hungarian and other peoples who desired to pursue game with a dog and a gun. Hunting land is in short supply across Europe’s densely population interior, so the desire of Europeans to hunt partridge, pheasant, big game and waterfowl demanded a system for “manufacturing” wildlife on small tracts of land. Gamekeepers employ every method at their disposal to produce bumper crops of birds and other game for sport.

This production-oriented model is the same approach used by US farmers trying to achieve the maximum yield from a finite tract of land. Where farmers employ fertilizer, the gamekeeper uses fire to manage his cover. Where the modern farmer sprays pesticides to protect his crops from insects, the gamekeeper conducts predator management to protect his brood stock and young.

This is game farming European-style. It doesn’t involve pen-raised or released birds, just a determined, focused effort to produce the maximum amount of game on a limited piece of ground. There, success is measured by the abundance of game.

By contrast, the goal of the North American conservation movement has been to hopscotch across the landscape, securing habitat critical to wildlife populations. The impressive amount of land conserved through the efforts of agencies and organizations should be viewed as a means (input) to an end (output), but in many cases the input alone has become the yardstick for success.

The word “conservation” has been part of our vocabulary since Aldo Leopold and his contemporaries established the concept to provide for the maintenance of wilderness and ensure an abundance of wildlife.

Years later Leopold’s vision would be called biodiversity, which means to restore and maintain ecosystems as close to their natural state as possible for the benefit of the wildlife that depends on those systems.

Leopold believed, “very intensive management of game or fish lowers the unit value of a trophy by artificializing it,” and generations of wildlife managers agreed.

Exactly how Leopold defined “very intensive management” is unknown. What, for instance, would “the father of wildlife management” have said about giant Canada goose restoration project, which even some of Leopold’s students call one of the great successes of 20th century wildlife management?

When a remnant flock of giant Canada geese was discovered near Rochester, MN, back in the 1960s, a dedicated team of biologists set out to reestablish the presumed-extirpated race of birds. They established resident flocks by re-locating young-of-the-year birds and erected artificial nesting structures where appropriate. Would Leopold have approved, or would he have allowed the deep-throated haa-runk of the Canada to become an echo across the pages of history?

The midcontinent snow goose population has been spiraling out of control for two decades. The birds are so abundant they’re destroying its arctic breeding grounds a morsel at a time. Management’s reaction to the problem was decisive and intensive: Bag limits and hunting regulations were drastically liberalized in an effort to bring the population into check.

Wood duck houses, which are typically erected by sportsmen, are another example of how a specie has benefited from the intensive, game-cropping approach.

Today, populations of several ducks are in jeopardy. Seven of the 10 most popular species are now below the goals set by the North American Waterfowl Management Plan nearly 20 years ago. Pintails are at an all-time low, scaup numbers have been tumbling for two decades and canvasbacks have fallen below huntable levels. Even the mallard, the most resilient of all duck species, has slipped below the North American Plan goals.

While no one has ever suggested abandoning landscape-level solutions to our duck woes, has the time come to undertake more intensive management practices for the benefit of these species?

Identifying the Problem

“The first move in stepping up production of a depleted species is understanding why that species is declining,” said H. Albert Hochbaum, Delta Waterfowl’s first scientific director and a colleague of Leopold’s. Nearly all scientists agree the most significant threat to duck populations today is lack of production: Nest success across the prairie breeding grounds fell from a population-expanding 33 percent in 1935 to population-depleting 10 percent by 1992.

Countless studies have shown predation is the primary cause of poor nest success, which is why Delta Waterfowl has advocated and practiced predator management on the nesting grounds.

Critics claim it’s immoral to kill furry critters for the sake of raising more ducks for hunters to kill, but one of the leading waterfowl experts on the continent disagrees.

“Maintaining huntable numbers of ducks is exactly what the goal of management should be,” says Dr. Norman Seymour of St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia. “As far as the general public is concerned, we already have enough ducks, even beleaguered species like pintails, scaup and canvasbacks. But non-hunters aren’t footing the bill, hunters are.”

If controlling predator populations for the benefit of ducks may sound like an abominable practice to the animal rights crowd, it’s an admirable goal in the minds of most sportsmen.

Achieving ‘True’ Biodiversity

Critics further claim money and energy devoted to direct management techniques like predator control detract from the more important task of achieving biodiversity. But prairie ducks didn’t evolve with predators like foxes, raccoons and skunks, which existed in very limited numbers on the US side of the pothole region and were virtually non-existent across prairie Canada. Because they didn’t evolve with these small mammalian predators, ducks are not equipped to deal with them.

The biodiversity we seek includes more than the wetlands and flora of the region, it also includes the fauna. Is it possible to achieve true biodiversity on a landscape that’s overrun with predators that were not part of the pre-settlement landscape?

H. Albert Hochbaum, Delta’s first scientific director and a close friend of Leopold, addressed the moral dilemma facing wildlife managers decades ago. “Although common now, the crow was just about as rare as fence lines when man first broke the prairie sod,” Hochbaum observed. “The crow is an alien here and not part of any plan. He is an intruder.
“In the face of this changing world should we have the right to reduce the numbers of this species where we know its pressure is heavy on other species, such as ducks?”

Hochbaum’s thoughtful answer: “Many of the truths of nature are hidden and not readily apparent at first glance. The most beautiful truth is that, provided with natural marshland, ducks will reproduce their numbers successfully despite the presence of their natural predators. The ugly truth is that man has unnaturalized many of the marshlands.”

Hochbaum recalled the 1950s when 100,000 to 400,000 mallards that visited Delta Marsh each fall, and lamented the fact that by 1981 fewer than 24,000 birds visited the marsh.

“So we ask ourselves, ‘How will the dollars invested in dams, dikes and pumps to make marshes bring about the recovery of the hundreds of thousands of mallards that came here every fall…?’

Hochbaum realized it’s unlikely the conservation community will ever have the financial resources to buy its way out of the problems associated with wildlife and its habitats. Indeed, the US Department of Agriculture, through programs like the Conservation Reserve Program and Wetlands Reserve Program, has had a greater impact on duck production since 1985 than all the dollars spent by agencies and organizations during that time.

Given that sobering reality, doesn’t it seem reasonable to invest a small portion of our collective financial and intellectual resources into the European model to ensure the legacy of conservation is not simply open spaces, but open spaces rich with game?