Charting a New Course for Waterfowl Management
Managing Ducks in the 21st Century: It’s Time for A New Direction

By Rob Olson
President, Delta Waterfowl

I knelt at the crest of the hill to catch my breath, then lifted my binoculars to scan the wetland below. The ducks I was hoping to see weren’t there.

The scene was repeated numerous times that week, always with the same disappointing results. Day after day, wetland after wetland, the ducks we sought were nowhere to be found.

Years of hard work were at stake. Everyone in waterfowl management was watching and waiting. We had to find those ducks.

It happened in the summer of 1994 when I was working as a field assistant at Delta Waterfowl’s famed Minnedosa Research Station in western Manitoba. I was part of a team of Delta students searching for the hen mallards we’d released as ducklings the previous year.

The extreme drought of the 1980s had taken a heavy toll on the duck population, and Delta’s Board of Trustees hoped to “kick-start” the local breeding population by releasing pen-raised birds. We even built a large hatchery facility at our Delta Marsh Research Station to raise the ducklings.

If the project proved successful, we’d have a new tool that could be replicated across the prairies. If not, all the work, energy, passion and money we’d invested in the program would have been wasted.

Critics of the program were everywhere, and they watching our every move.

“Maybe you released the ducklings when it was cloudy and couldn’t orient themselves,” staff told us. “Maybe wetlands were too big. Maybe the wetlands were too small.”

After examining all the maybes, we had to face the reality that despite our good intentions and passion, despite the investment and energy expended, maybe the release program was a failure.

This was a painful realization, but when we washed away all the excuses and all the good intentions, one cold, hard truth remained—the program didn’t work, and had to be killed.

We suffered from that decision. Some of our best donors turned from Delta, and we endured criticism and ridicule from the waterfowl management community. Still, we didn’t look at the release program as failure, but rather as a learning experience.

Only if we hadn’t learned anything from our efforts—if we’d continued on the same dead-end course—could the release program have been considered a failure.

Today’s setbacks are the building blocks for tomorrow’s success.

The Habitat Approach

The North American Waterfowl Management Plan (NAWMP) was ratified by the United States and Canada in 1986. The goal of the North American Plan was to restore waterfowl production to the levels that existed back in the 1970s by focusing conservation efforts within the Canadian portion of the prairie pothole region (PPR).

The idea was to secure a large continental flock of ducks by establishing and securing the breeding habitat ducks need—uplands for nesting cover and wetlands.

It made perfect sense to work in Canada because there was more permanent water there, which meant that breeding ducks would have access to conserved habitat more years than not.

Habitat was seen as the solution to a very big and very complicated problem:

Too little grass to buffer nesting ducks from ever-growing populations of fox, skunks, raccoons and other egg- and hen-eating predators.

Ducks Unlimited was the principal delivery agent of NAWMP. DU was the logical choice because it’s been working to conserve waterfowl habitat since 1937 when it secured Manitoba’s Big Grass Marsh.

Ducks Unlimited worked diligently and passionately securing farmland and reclaiming it as nesting cover. They called these blocks of land dense nesting cover (DNC). The idea was that the tall, dense cover would attract nesting hens, and because of the quality and quantity of the cover, many would hatch, increasing nest success.

Increased nest success translates into larger fall flights, which was exactly what all the donors—many of them duck hunters—wanted to see.

Unfortunately, DNC hasn’t produced the desired results.

DNC Was a Failed Model

Between 1993 and 2000, DU conducted an evaluation of its habitat programs, and what it discovered is that DNC doesn’t work. The Prairie Habitat Joint Venture Assessment Study was conducted on 27 study sites spread across Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Alberta.

The results were disappointing for all Canadian NAWMP partners, including Delta. Nest success for mallards exceeded the 15 percent necessary just to maintain the existing population at just five of 27 sites, and 19 of the sites fell below 10 percent.

At 19 of the 27 sites, hen mortality (the percentage of hens that died during the breeding season) exceeded hen success (the percentage of hens that brought off a successful nest).

That these results were recorded at a time when the PPR was enjoying an unprecedented wet cycle and duck numbers were expanding across the continent should be of great concern to waterfowl managers and duck hunters.

We Couldn’t Have Known

No one can blame DU for the failure of DNC to increase duck production. After all, it wasn’t until near the end of the PHJV Assessment Study—when Fish and Wildlife researcher Ron Reynolds published a groundbreaking study revealing the “habitat threshold—that scientists understood how much grass is necessary to increase recruitment.

Reynolds’ work showed that unless 40 percent of the landscape has grass nesting cover, ducks typically fail to achieve population-expanding nest success. Reynolds’ research explained why DNC wasn’t producing ducks—nesting ducks need big blocks of grass cover, not little ones.

Just Buy More Land

So why don’t we just go out and buy up enough of the Canadian prairie to reach the 40 percent habitat threshold?

The simple answer is that farmers don’t want waterfowl groups to buy any more farmland. In fact, provincial farming groups in Saskatchewan have enacted foreign-land ownership laws to place a moratorium on DU and others buying more farmland for waterfowl.

Let’s think about the same dilemma in a different locale. Let’s say you live in Stuttgart, AR and you want to reestablish a population of prairie chickens on the Grand Prairie.

Assuming that prairie chickens need the same grass threshold as ducks, try to imagine converting 40 percent of your local, intensively farmed county to grass. It doesn’t take an ag economist to understand the enormity of that challenge. Most farmers wouldn’t want to sell, and even if they did, the cost to buy the land, plant and maintain the grass, and pay the taxes would be prohibitive.

These economic realities are no different on the Canadian prairie.

We’ve Protected Less Than 1 Percent

NAWMP targeted 37 million acres of the 140-million-acre Canadian PPR as high-priority real estate for ducks. To date, waterfowl conservation has permanently protected less than one percent of that, and the prospects of achieving our goals are slim.

Because of low commodity prices, today’s farmers have to get bigger to be profitable. When land comes up for sale, they see purchases by DU as competing with their own operations and not in keeping with the direction they want their communities to go. Farmers want actively farmed landscapes that keep kids in schools and towns intact, not a Buffalo Commons that would drive folks off of the idled land.

Prairie Canadian is not uninhabited tundra, it is over 90 percent privately owned. We simply cannot dictate to landowners how conservation practices will be applied—it must happen on their terms to be successful.

Delta’s Four-Step Vision for Success

How can we hope to reach our duck-production goals if waterfowl management isn’t even close to securing enough nesting cover and if farmers aren’t likely to allow us to buy more land?

Delta Waterfowl has developed a four-step approach to getting the job done. Those steps are:

Follow the Research

Research has been the backbone of Delta Waterfowl’s mission since Al Hochbaum became our first scientific director way back in 1938, and it will continue to be our main focus in the years to come.

Unfortunately much of the recent research conducted by Delta and other scientists has been ignored by conservationists who have been focused strictly on habitat-based solutions.

Reynolds’ breakthrough research revealing a habitat threshold was one of several critically important studies conducted in the 1990s. These studies must guide our way during the years ahead.

Delta is a science-based organization, and we believe the conservation community has a responsibility to its constituents—ducks and duck hunters—to follow the science.

Re-focus Habitat Efforts on the Prairies

Delta believes it’s critically important that our habitat-restoration work be focused in the prairie pothole region. We believe a greater percentage of duck-stamp and North American Wetland Conservation Act (NAWCA) dollars should be earmarked for the pothole region, where they’ll yield the greatest return measured in duck production (see NAWCA story).

ALUS: Farm-Friendly Conservation Policy

Delta believes conservation organizations must work to achieve waterfowl-friendly government policy by working with—rather than against—agricultural interests. More than 90 percent of our ducks still come from private land, and it’s imperative that we develop win-win, farm-friendly programs.

Delta is currently promoting such a program—Alternate Land Use Services (ALUS), a CRP-type program for Canada. Delta also has been actively involved in the fights to protect the Clean Water Act and to continue the conservation titles of the farm bill.

The five million acres of grass provided by the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) in the two Dakotas far exceeded the habitat secured by conservation organizations over the last 70 years, but the future of CRP is uncertain.

All conservation organizations, as well as the sportsmen they represent, should become actively involved in the effort to develop wildlife-friendly government policy on both sides of the border.

Preserve the Best, Manage the Rest

Because the Canadian economy is much smaller than that of the US, ALUS isn’t likely to impact as great a percentage of the Canadian prairie as CRP has in the US. Besides, even programs like ALUS and CRP can’t affect the entire PPR.

Delta’s vision for the future of waterfowl management is to preserve every square inch of habitat possible, hopefully achieving the habitat threshold in key areas across the pothole region. But where tying up 40 percent of the landscape in grass cover isn’t possible—where it will never be possible—it’s imperative that we aggressively manage for duck production.

Ducks will continue to nest in areas where their chances of bringing off a brood are slight. We can either abandon those birds, or we can implement intensive management tools like predator management, nesting structures, nesting islands and predator exclosures to give them a helping hand.

Does it make any sense to spend millions of dollars on a wildlife refuge or Waterfowl Production Areas that are attracting ducks but experiencing little or no production? Isn’t it more logical to devote a small portion of our duck dollars to management tools that will allow those areas to produce ducks?

Delta’s research has proven time and again that predator management increases nest success dramatically—two- to three-fold over similar areas where predators aren’t managed. Hen Houses are another proven tool for boosting nest success.

A Call to Action

Delta is aggressively pursuing its vision for the future of waterfowl management, and calls for all conservation groups to join us in this endeavor. We are ready, willing and able to support conservation agencies in any way we can to achieve the population goals of all duck hunters on this continent.

We acknowledge all of the beneficial efforts of DU and other good groups working for ducks. We understand that in some discrete areas like the US side of the PPR, the combined small-scale efforts of groups like DU can have a positive impact. But in prairie Canada, the old approaches alone aren’t enough.

The record water conditions of the ‘90s produced strong fall flights that were enjoyed by duck hunters across the continent. Still, most waterfowl biologists agree that if those record spring water conditions of the ‘90s had existed in the ‘50s or ‘70s, duck production would have been higher because we had better habitat in those earlier eras.

We can’t count on seeing record water conditions anytime soon, and we can’t control water conditions. We have too little grass to offset the impact of an unnatural mix and density of predators. We can’t buy our way out of this problem with costly land acquisitions.

It’s time to focus on the factors we can control. It’s time to serve our primary constituency—the duck hunter.

And, like we did with Delta’s failed hatchery program, it’s time to change what we’re doing and pursue a new course.