The Socio-Political Threshold A Roadblock to Habitat Acquisition

By John L. Devney
Group Manager Communications, Marketing and Development

Each spring Delta Waterfowl hosts tours of the prairie breeding grounds to give students, volunteers, media and supporters a better understanding of the challenges facing nesting ducks.

Our guests are walked—step by step—through 65 years of scientific discovery. One of those discoveries is the “habitat threshold” uncovered by Ron Reynolds of the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Reynolds’ break-through research revealed that unless 40 percent of the landscape has grass cover, ducks are typically unable to achieve population-expanding nest success.

“Then why don’t we just put more of the landscape into grass cover?” one of our guests interrupted, waving his hand as if to magically convert the landscape back to its original sea of grass.

It was a fair question, one that reflects the conventional wisdom of waterfowl management: That habitat holds the key to resolving our production problems.

If the question was straightforward, the answer is not.

Anyone who spends any time with the staff at Delta Waterfowl quickly realizes that science runs in our blood. Scientific discovery through independent research was the core of our founding, and continues to be the foundation of our organization.

Science guides our thought process, produces new tools for waterfowl management and is the basis our belief system. Science is the clearinghouse in which decisions are made; the foot soldier that gathers new and critically important information.

Knowledge is power, and science provides that knowledge.

But while science is the key element in Delta Waterfowl’s programs, we cannot ignore the social, economic and political realities facing waterfowl management. To address the limiting factors facing ducks and duck management one must acknowledge not only the biological barriers, but the socio-political realities as well.

Reynolds’ research is a good example. It showed that ducks need much larger blocks of nesting cover than scientists once believed. The prime breeding range for most duck species almost perfectly overlaps the breadbasket of North America—the prairie states of North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana in the US, and the prairie provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta.

The prairie pothole region—aka the “duck factory”—is an incredibly important source of food and fiber for the rest of society, and home to countless farmers and ranchers trying to make a living in the difficult world of modern agriculture.

Agriculture has altered the landscape in a manner that benefits crops but often works to the detriment of breeding ducks. The days of the pristine prairie and the shaggy buffalo are so far removed that most of us can’t even lament the loss.

The unfathomable numbers of wetlands and vast sea of prairie grass that once served as nurseries for our flocks are mostly gone, replaced by a severely fragmented landscape that falls woefully short of the habitat threshold.

Waterfowl management has responded by trying to conserve and enhance wetland and upland habitats, and that’s a truly noble effort. This response was borne of the long-accepted model that when problems occur with wildlife, the reestablishment of habitat will restore sagging populations.

Unfortunately, the if-you-build-it-they-will-come approach ignores the socio-political realities of a rural economy. Farmers and ranchers are becoming increasingly frustrated—and in some cases angered—with conservation interests competing for land. This frustration has manifested itself in laws against land purchases by conservation interests, legislation limiting easements for conservation purposes and even lawsuits to establish barriers to land acquisition.

In a growing number of insances, our conservation efforts have fallen short of the habitat threshold but exceed the social and political thresholds.

Habitat projects can’t make ducks in these intensively farmed landscapes because local interests won’t allow the activities to occur on the necessary scale.

What does this mean for the future of waterfowl management? It means we must recognize that the traditional land-acquisition model may never achieve meaningful landscape change, especially in the vast majority of the prairie pothole region that is intensively farmed. If we want to produce ducks on those landscapes, we will have to look to tools that can increase production without extensive land-holdings.

We need to incorporate programs like predator management, hen houses and other intensive tools that produce the maximum yield from the limited habitat at our disposal. We need to foster land-use change through farm-friendly ag policy like the Conservation Reserve Program in the US and Alternate Land Use Services in Canada.

Waterfowl management must retool if it hopes to achieve the desired results from a landscape that serves many. Agriculture and waterfowl must coexist, using new approaches that are acceptable to local interests.

Only when we give equal consideration to the biological, social and political realities of the prairies can we hope to affect positive change for our flocks.