Canadian Mallard Numbers Have Fallen to 1960’s Levels
How Bad Were the Bad Old Days?

Anyone who thinks duck hunting has been tough the last few years should have been around in the early 1960s.           

Duck hunters hoping the 1960s would be an instant replay of the 1950s were in for a rude awakening.  As it turned out, the early ‘60s were more reminiscent of the Dirty ‘30s than the Fabulous ‘50s. 

The duck factory went dry—bone dry—in the early ‘60s.  The 2.4 million mallards showed up in prairie Canada in 1962 were less than a third the 7.7 million of just four years earlier. 

Waterfowl managers responded to this stunning drop in breeding ducks by implementing the most restrictive regulations in history. In 1962 the Mississippi Flyway season lasted just 23 days and hunters were saddled with a two-duck, one-mallard bag limit. US duck stamp sales plummeted to 1.1 million, less than half what they were just a few years earlier, and disillusioned hunters spent fewer days in the marsh than any other season in recorded history.

Harvest figures confirmed what the breeding population survey suggested: The mallard harvest of 1.4 million birds was the lowest ever, and a fraction of the nearly 5 million mallards killed 40 years later in 2002.

The take-home message from those numbers is that no matter how bad duck hunting has been the last few years, it was a whole lot better than it was in the early 1960s. 

That may be true, but there’s no evidence that Canada contributed to the bounty, at least not at its former levels. 

Waterfowl hunters—and perhaps a few managers as well—might be stunned to learn that the 1962 breeding population of mallards across prairie Canada was about the same as the number that settled there in 2002. Worse, the average number of mallards that settled in Canada between 1961 and 1965 was almost identical to the number that showed up between 2000 and 2004.

In fact, the 3.48 million mallards that settled in prairie Canada on average during the entire decade of the ‘60s were only fractionally less than the 3.51 million that nested there on average during the incredible wet cycle of the 1994-99.

Considering that nest success was higher in the 1960s than it was in the ‘90s, it’s not unreasonable to suspect that prairie Canada may have sent more mallards south during the ‘60s than it did during the glory years of the ‘90s.

Ouch!