A Tale of Two Duck Factories US Output of Ducks in the ‘90s Masked Problems on Canadian Prairies
By Dan Nelson - Editor

When future waterfowl historians describe the wet cycle of 1994 to 2000, it’s inevitable someone will quote the opening lines from Charles Dickens’ classic book A Tale of Two Cities.

“It was the best of times,” is how they’ll characterize events on the United States side of the pothole region, where duck breeding populations soared to record highs during the latest wet cycle.

The US produced so many ducks that no one seemed to notice “it was the worst of times” in prairie Canada, where excellent wetland conditions produced sub-par breeding populations.

“All those ducks coming out of the US obscured the fact that the Canadian duck factory is broken,” says Delta Waterfowl President Rob Olson.  “That’s not a message some folks will want to hear, but ignoring the problem won’t make it go away. 

“If we want to secure the future of ducks and duck hunting, it’s absolutely critical we find ways to fix prairie Canada.  The US may not be in a position to pick up the slack for Canada when the next wet cycle rolls around.”

Olson says a glance at the breeding population goals established by the authors of the North American Waterfowl Management Plan (NAWMP) confirms the “tale of two duck factories” contrast between the US and Canadian prairies.

For readers unfamiliar with the North American Plan, a brief history lesson is in order.

NAWMP—you can call it nay-womp— was ratified by the United States and Canada in 1986 to address the loss of waterfowl habitat that had led to alarming declines in some species of ducks.  A year earlier the total breeding population of ducks had skidded to 25.6 million, the second-lowest total to that point, and the mallard population had slipped below 5 million for the first and only time since the breeding population survey was launched in 1955.

Those early- to mid-1980’s numbers were alarming because they came at a time when the prairie breeding grounds enjoyed average to above-average wetland conditions four out of five years.  Something was wrong, and NAWMP was a continental effort to set it right. 

The North American Plan aimed for the stars.  The most celestial of its goals was to restore adequate breeding habitat to assure spring populations equal to the average breeding populations of the 1970s.  

But the NAWMP space shot stalled on the launch pad.  That’s hardly surprising considering the elaborate blueprint had no source of funding, and the duck factory had  lapsed into what would become a seven-year drought.

Congress authorized funding when it passed the North American Wetland Conservation Act (NAWCA) in 1989, and the drought mercifully ended in summer of 1993.  The prolonged wet cycle that followed sent waterfowl production into orbit, and within a few years NAWMP’s pie-in-the-sky Y2K goals had turned to ducks-in-the-sky. 

Some say that the 1990s spike in duck numbers confirms the job has been completed and the habitat necessary to produce bumper crops of ducks is in place, just waiting for Mother Nature to add the water.  Indeed, a snapshot taken with a wide-angle lens would suggest that NAWMP’s mallard population goals were achieved five out of seven years.

But when we zoom in on mallard numbers and examine individual areas, a vastly different picture comes into focus.  It becomes apparent that the US portion of the breeding grounds has far exceeded its NAWMP mallard goal every year since 1994, but prairie Canada has failed to equal it NAWMP target even once.

Why is that important?  Who cares if the ducks came from Canada, the US or Timbuktu , as long as they came?

Distribution Tells the Story

“Distribution of ducks is important because it’s the only thing we have to tell us what part of the machine is broken,” explains Ron Reynolds, who heads up Fish and Wildlife’s Habitat and Population Evaluation Team (HAPET) in Bismarck, ND. 

“If we only fix certain portions of the pothole region, we’re putting all our eggs in one basket, so to speak, and that’s not a good way to do things.  We need all the reference areas (regions) to be productive, because the water isn’t always going to be where the upland habitat is good.”           

Isolating the duck response to NAWMP’s conservation efforts on a region-by-region basis can be accomplished by calculating the average number of breeding ducks that settled in any given reference area (state, province or region) during the wet cycle of the 1970s and comparing that number to 1990s breeding populations.

For example, in the decade of the ‘70s the surveyed portion of the PPR in the US—the Dakotas and northeastern Montana —attracted an average of 1.2 million breeding mallards.* 

During the wet cycle that lasted from 1994 to 2000, those same strata attracted an average of 2.7 million breeding mallards, more than twice their goal.  North Dakota alone attracted enough mallards to achieve the US’ NAWMP goal.

The Canadian PPR—which includes southern Manitoba, Alberta and Saskatchewan—attracted an average of 4.5 million nesting mallards during the ‘70s, but during the last wet cycle averaged just 3.5 million mallards, about a million birds shy of its NAWMP target.

In fact, prairie Canada never did achieve its mallard target.  Even in 1996 and 1997, two of the wettest years since May ponds have been counted, prairie Canada fell short of its goal.  Going into the current nesting season, the US had exceeded its NAWMP target 11 straight years.

Not only did prairie Canada attract fewer nesting mallards, but a brood index developed by the US Fish and Wildlife Service shows that Canadian production lagged the US.

The total population of ducks showed a similar distribution swing.  Between 1994 and 1999, the US portion of the PPR averaged 10.5 million ducks, nearly double the 5.5 million it attracted during the ‘70s.  Prairie Canada averaged 13.8 million total ducks in the ‘90s, about 20 percent below its NAWMP target.

Blue-winged teal, gadwalls and pintails also fared better in the US than prairie Canada during the ‘90s.

The Perfect Storm

Why the disparity? Why did the US far exceed its NAWMP goals while prairie Canada underperformed? To find out what happened, we went to Delta Scientific Director Dr. Frank Rohwer for a crash course in breeding ecology.

“It’s small wetlands that attract breeding ducks,” says Rohwer. “The more wetlands, the more ducks.  Thanks to decades of wetland protection through easements taken with duck stamp dollars and through federal regulations, the US had lots of wetlands when the pothole region came out of the drought in 1994.

“As long as there are lots of wetlands, ducks will nest, even if the cover is lousy.  But while they’ll nest in poor cover, they usually aren’t successful.  To be successful, ducks need large blocks of grass, and thanks to CRP they found it in the US. 

“Five million acres of CRP allowed duck populations in the US to expand to levels even the framers of NAWMP probably hadn’t envisioned.

“It was the perfect storm,” Rohwer says. “Great farm policy, duck stamp dollars and a prolonged wet cycle all came together on the US prairies. 

“Canada also got wet in the 1990s, but many of the ‘70s ponds had been drained, and the remaining ponds were not surrounded by nesting cover anything like CRP.  As a result, duck numbers didn’t respond in Canada like they did in the US.”

Does the lack of a duck response north of the border suggest conservationists haven’t achieved their habitat goals in Canada?  “The duck numbers don’t lie,” says Rohwer.  “In prairie Canada, NAWMP efforts have conserved some habitat, but not nearly enough to achieve our duck-production goals.”

Some might argue that the US was wetter (compared to long-term May pond averages) than prairie Canada during the ‘90s.  It was, but Canada’s May pond average for 1994 to 1999 was almost identical to what it was in the 1970s, the decade used to establish NAWMP goals.

Rohwer says he’s “inclined to believe the explosion in US mallard numbers was mostly a function of regional recruitment and philopatry.”  In other words, the US attracted and—thanks to CRP—produced a lot of mallards, and those birds kept homing in on the same areas year after wet year, the population growing like money earning compound interest.

A study conducted by Reynolds in the 1990s showed that CRP was responsible for an additional 2 million ducks a year—that’s ducks that wouldn’t have existed without CRP. 

Conversely, exhaustive research conducted between 1993 and 2000 by the Institute for Wetland and Waterfowl Research (IWWR) revealed sobering results north of the 49th parallel.  At 19 of 27 assessed sites, a higher percentage of hen mallards died during the breeding season than successfully hatched a nest.

“Prairie Canada didn’t participate in the 1990s duck boom like it did in the ‘50s or the ‘70s,” says Olson.  “The breeding population survey confirms that without the US, we wouldn’t have had near the ducks we had in the ‘90s. 

“That’s a critical piece of information to understand, because there’s no guarantee we’ll have CRP when the next wet cycle rolls around.  If we lose CRP, who’ll pick up the  slack then?”

Too Few Duck Dollars to Go Around

Olson says the challenges facing waterfowl production are too overwhelming to be addressed solely by the North American Plan.  The dollars spent by the Prairie Habitat Joint Venture (PHJV)—the conservation partnership that delivers the North American Plan in Canada—pale compared to what the US Department of Agriculture has spent on CRP alone the last 20 years.

“We have to be realistic,” Olson says.  “There aren’t enough duck dollars to get the job done. Bottom line, we need the federal governments of Canada and the US to pick up the tab for habitat conservation because hunters will never be able to hold enough fundraising dinners or give enough donations to acquire the vast amount of habitat required to affect duck production.”

“On the other hand,” Olson says, “far more acres have been permanently protected by the duck stamp in the US PPR than have been secured across the Canadian prairie, and for a lot less money, and that’s a concern.”

Olson says waterfowl management is an adaptive process, which is another way of saying trial-and-error.  “You try different management techniques and carefully monitor the results,” he says.  “You keep the ones that produce ducks, and you replace the ones that don’t.  I think it’s time to re-evaluate what we’re doing in prairie Canada and try something different, because it’s clear that what we’ve been doing isn’t working.

“With the limited dollars at our disposal, it’s critical that we invest our money in programs that earn the highest rate of return, and that return must be measured in ducks, because waterfowl hunters have always been the primary consumer and client of the North American Plan.”

 To learn more about NAWMP efforts to secure habitat north of the border, see Executive Vice President Jonathan Scarth’s feature article, Oh, Canada! in this issue of Delta Waterfowl Magazine.

*  In previous discussions Delta has been criticized for not including Minnesota, Iowa and Nebraska as part of the PPR.  We acknowledge that Minnesota, Iowa and Nebraska are part of the Prairie Pothole Joint Venture (PPJV), but they are not included in the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s spring breeding population survey. In an ongoing attempt to compare apple-to-apples, this article examines breeding populations from surveyed areas.