Oh, Canada! Land-Use Changes in Canada Overwhelm Limited ‘Duck Dollars’
By Jonathan Scarth Executive Vice President

The Canadian prairie, sweeping from the dry foothills of the Rockies east to the clear lakes of the Canadian Shield, has seen its share of change.  Retreating glaciers rearranged the landscape and left behind the countless wetlands making up the Prairie Pothole Region (PPR) some 10,000 years ago.  The arrival of European settlers near the end of the 19th century ended the reign of the bison, ended the widespread prairie fires, and began the process of converting the sea of native prairie to crops and pastures.

Viewed from this perspective of geological time, the more recent influences on the Canadian prairie are subtle by comparison.  Changes to this landscape over the past generation, however, must be examined to understand both progress made and challenges ahead for those interested in sustaining duck populations. 

Given the significant investments made by duck hunters in this region over the last twenty years, this retrospective is particularly important to better understand what influence the waterfowl management community has had on this landscape, and what role we can play in the future.

When the North American Waterfowl Management Plan (NAWMP) was signed in 1986 with the goal of restoring continental waterfowl populations, the high priority given to the Canadian prairie was reflected in an allocation of 70 percent of the total funding earmarked for Canada.  This amounted to a budget originally anticipated to be $1.1 billion, to be spent within the three prairie provinces of Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan over 15 years.

A number of elements of the NAWMP were unique.  Firstly, there had never been a program of this scale in waterfowl management.  Secondly, the longstanding contributions made by U.S. duck hunters to waterfowl management programs in Canada were greatly enhanced by a Congressional appropriation under the North American Wetlands Conservation Act (NAWCA), one of the few examples of U.S. taxpayers funding work in a developed country.  Thirdly, these two sources of funding initially attracted a broad-based partnership of conservation agencies focused on addressing the problems faced by ducks trying to raise broods on the Canadian Prairies.

This partnership included both levels of government in Canada—the Canadian Wildlife Service of the federal government and the provincial departments responsible for wildlife and habitat programs.  Non-government organizations such as Ducks Unlimited, Delta Waterfowl and the Nature Conservancy of Canada were included in the partnership.  To coordinate these efforts within the Canadian prairies, an advisory group known as the Prairie Habitat Joint Venture (PHJV) was formed.

The funding mechanism for this effort rivals the Internal Revenue Code in complexity, but in simple terms it resulted in three different sources of funding flowing in a coordinated manner to prairie Canada:  Money from Canadian taxpayers and private donors; grants of U.S. tax dollars authorized by NAWCA, and bedrock support from “non-federal” U.S. sources, primarily duck hunters through duck stamps and donations. In prairie Canada, these three sources contributed approximately equal amounts of funding.

Although the partnership was broadly based, the international matching requirement meant that the vast majority of the new funding was received and delivered by Ducks Unlimited Canada because of its access to matching funds from its counterpart in the U.S.

A sense of the scale of this landscape is an important backdrop to an assessment of the progress made by the NAWMP north of the 49th parallel.  The Canadian portion of the PPR (see figure) encompasses 140 million acres, of which some 37 million acres are considered high-quality waterfowl habitat due to the large concentrations of wetlands.

A $530 Million Investment

What programs were implemented with these funds in prairie Canada?  When the initial plans were developed, it was assumed the main problem facing ducks was declining nest success caused by the loss of upland cover, and a number of programs were developed and delivered across the privately owned landscape. 

Some land was acquired through purchase or donation, either for conversion to upland cover or retention of native cover.  Perpetual conservation easements began to be used alongside outright purchase as a means of securing wetland and upland habitat in the 1990s after enabling legislation in the three prairie provinces.

Predator fences were installed and then abandoned as a result of problems encountered by ducklings trying to exit the fences.  A variety of shorter-term agreements were used to provide incentives to farmers and ranchers to enhance or retain upland cover by planting cover, modifying grazing practices, delaying hay cuts until after the waterfowl nesting period or planting winter crops that provide spring nesting cover.

Alongside these management efforts, a significant amount of effort was expended on an extension program aimed at persuading farmers and ranchers to adopt conservation practices.  This extension effort included financial incentives, demonstration farms, public workshops and promotional materials describing the benefits associated with farming and ranching practices that create conservation benefits. 

Between 1986 and 2003, about half of the original projected budget—a total of $530 million—was spent on these programs in prairie Canada.

330,000 ‘Secured’ Acres

 The waterfowl production legacy of the NAWMP in prairie Canada has been the source of some controversy within the waterfowl management community, and different assessments abound depending on one’s perspective.  To get a complete understanding of the NAWMP accomplishments, it is important to separate out the particular impact of these various programs in turn.

Some 200,000 acres have been converted from cultivated land to nesting cover and permanently secured, mostly by outright purchase.  These represent the only acreage that has indisputably contributed incremental duck production attributable to the Canadian NAWMP efforts.  

In addition to these converted acres, another 130,000 acres of existing habitat have been permanently secured through purchase, donation or perpetual easement. The 330,000 acres that have been permanently protected constitute about one-quarter of one percent of the Canadian PPR.

Impact on Ducks Difficult to Measure

Discerning the incremental effect of other elements of the Canadian NAWMP is even more difficult and lies very much in the eye of the beholder.  A large portion of the additional acreage often described as “secured” refers to long-term agreements with provincial and federal governments relating to publicly-owned land, including large staging marshes and public grazing lands, but these acres do not produce incremental ducks. 

NAWMP cannot fairly be said to have secured these acres because in most cases these areas are existing habitat purchased by provincial and federal governments in an earlier era, and not at risk of being converted to other uses.  In addition, some of these acres represent staging marshes that are not particularly important from the perspective of waterfowl production.

In fact, a major theme of the initial NAWMP effort was to focus waterfowl management efforts away from these areas and into the small-wetland pothole region where waterfowl densities and duck production are higher. 

The other large category of acreage referenced as “secured” relates to agreements with landowners to implement managed grazing systems over about one million acres of rangeland.  The most common arrangement involved an incentive in the form of a contribution by NAWMP to the additional capital costs of fencing and watering systems and an agreement on the part of the landowner to maintain the grazing system for a period of time, usually ten years.

It is unknown whether these areas contribute incremental ducks, or whether these agreements contribute to their long-term retention as permanent upland-cover areas.  A smaller program to encourage a delay in the harvest of forage crops to allow nesting hens to hatch their nests affected over 80,000 acres, and flushing bars were provided to reduce hen mortality on some 230,000 acres of hayland. The long-term fate of acres under these agreements is largely unknown, but as they expire these areas must either be picked up in a form of permanent protection or revert back to their original use.

The role of the extension program in influencing land-use decisions by prairie landowners is largely unknown, given the challenges inherent in assessing the extent to which landowners modified their practices because of this communications effort, and whether any incremental duck production resulted.   To its advocates, it is a source of much frustration that the extension effort is not given credit for a substantial effect on the landscape.  Given the economic pressures on farmers and ranchers that influence land-use decisions, however, it is at best problematic to attribute incremental ducks to this effort.

The expenditures devoted to the land-management programs constituted about 70 percent of the $530 million spent by the end of 2003; the balance of the funds were spent on communications associated with the extension program, evaluation efforts, program coordination, crop depredation programs and project endowment funds.

The latter endowment funds represent money put in the bank in order to generate revenues that are then used to pay for the significant annual expenses associated with habitat ownership, including local property taxes, weed control and cover management.

Policy Changes Beneficial

At the same time as these NAWMP efforts got underway in the late 1980s, some significant policy changes were under discussion by Canadian governments.  By the mid-1990s several policies that had encouraged the expansion of annually cropped acres on the prairies had changed substantially. 

The Canadian Wheat Board’s marketing system was reformed to remove cultivated acres as a determinant of grain marketing quotas.  The Crow “benefit”—an annual transportation subsidy of some $800 million aimed at encouraging export grain production—was discontinued. Other federal and provincial programs encouraging the expansion of cultivated acreage were cancelled. 

Taken together, these policy changes created the impetus for significant changes to the prairie landscape.  From 1986 to 2003, large conversions of cultivated acreage to pasture or forage resulted in about 6 million acres of additional upland cover on the prairie landscape. 

While these policy-driven land-use changes have had a positive impact on waterfowl production, they have been undermined by wetland losses that reduced the duck carrying-capacity by 4.1 to 11.4 percent regionally to as much as 90 percent in localized areas.

Another concern is that grazed pasture and hay land isn’t as productive as undisturbed grass like the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) cover in the United State.

Further, the federal policy changes that were the catalyst for the conversion of cropland to pasture and hay land were independent of NAWMP activities.

Results are Sobering

When viewed through the lens of incremental duck production, the main legacy of the NAWMP in prairie Canada up until the end of 2003 consists of some 200,000 acres of additional nesting habitat converted from agricultural production and secured by purchase or perpetual easement.  Most of the balance of the effort has been spent on habitat areas that existed previous to the NAWMP, short-term agreements or efforts to influence landowners’ behavior through extension efforts. 

Given the breadth of the prairie landscape and the other influences affecting its land use, the incremental acres permanently secured by the NAWMP in prairie Canada constitute little more than a rounding error. 

These results are sobering, particularly when put together with the negative reaction to the NAWMP acquisition program that has manifested itself in areas of the prairies.  In Saskatchewan, a moratorium on NAWMP purchases was imposed at the urging of the province’s main farm lobby, the Agricultural Producers’ Association of Saskatchewan (APAS). 

In other parts of the prairies, local governments are seeking vetoes over habitat acquisition efforts within their jurisdiction.  These developments do not mean that the NAWMP acquisition effort is at an end, but they certainly indicate the limited acres that can be incrementally secured through purchase and ownership by conservation organizations.

This “farmer pushback” is problematic because 90 percent of the continent’s ducks are produced on private land.   While it’s obvious that the road to more ducks will take conservationists through millions of acres of agricultural land, convincing farmers and ranchers to set aside large blocks of cropland to raise ducks is becoming increasingly difficult.

That’s not surprising given Canada has no subsidy payments, no incentives to conserve wildlife habitat and no disincentives to wetland drainage. In order to survive, Canadian farmers are forced to maximize production, and that means even small wetlands and narrow strips of cover are an encumbrance on their operations.

On the surface, this analysis will be disconcerting for the many advocates of the NAWMP.  In a very real sense, however, this result is neither surprising nor discouraging, and it does provide us with valuable lessons moving forward. 

Many of the original framers of the NAWMP understood that its land-management programs would not secure much habitat, and that changes in public policy were required to ultimately create landscape-scale change.  In effect, that story has unfolded according to the script over the past two decades in prairie Canada.  Land-use changes resulting from policy reforms have overwhelmed the relatively small budgets and programs available to the NAWMP.

To be sure, there are significant challenges ahead.  We must find the proper mix of programs and policies that can work together to sustain duck populations in this critical landscape over the long term, and in doing so define a realistic contribution for the NAWMP partnership.  Most of all, we must do so in a manner acceptable to the farmers and ranchers who own this landscape.  What does the prescription for the next twenty years look like?

We’ll look at Delta’s vision for the future in the third and final installment of our special report on Canada.  Look for it in the winter issue of Delta Waterfowl magazine.