Special Report: Status of Prairie Canada III

Fixing the Canadian Duck Factory - Delta’s Vision for the Future

By Rob Olson - Delta President

Duck hunters take note: The path to restoring the glorious fall flights of yesteryear leads to the Canadian prairies.

Burn the message in your minds.  Plaster it on bumper stickers, tee-shirts and hats. Shout it from your duck blind. The Canadian duck factory is broken, and hunters aren’t likely to see fall flights like those of the 1950s, the 1970s or even the 1990s until conservation leaders find ways to fix it.

The summer issue of Delta Waterfowl magazine contained two stories that clearly showed the problems we’re facing on the Canadian prairie.  An article by Editor Dan Nelson revealed that the Canadian portion of the Prairie Pothole Region (PPR) is attracting ducks at a level far below the goals of the North American Waterfowl Management Plan (NAWMP), and that the US side of the region picked up the slack during the 1990s.

A companion piece, written by Delta Executive Vice President Jonathan Scarth, provided a partial explanation of how such a thing could happen: Only 330,000 acres of waterfowl habitat have been permanently protected across the Canadian PPR.

The figures are well documented, and as Delta Scientific Director Frank Rohwer confirmed, “the numbers don’t lie”.

So where does that leave hunters?  Given the fact that three-fourths of the duck factory lies in prairie Canada, is there hope for ducks and duck hunters?  We’ll attempt to answer those questions as we spell out Delta’s vision for the future of waterfowl management in this third and final installment of our Status of Prairie Canada series.

Canada at a Crossroads

The North American Waterfowl Management Plan—the blueprint to fix duck production in Canada—is at a pivotal point in its lifespan.  Fixing the Canadian duck factory will require a major change in direction of NAWMP, and the future of waterfowling may be riding on the outcome.

Jonathan’s article revealed that since 1987, NAWMP in Canada had only established 200,000 new acres of nesting habitat and “protected” another 130,000 acres of existing habitat. It further explained that many millions of additional acres have been treated by a variety of programs ranging from managed grazing to outreach efforts to farmers. All told, the duck response to these programs is either unknown or marginal.

Clearly, change is needed if the Canadian NAWMP is to achieve its original goal of impacting waterfowl populations and securing our waterfowling future.

Those working within the NAWMP system in Canada might accuse Delta of being anti-NAWMP. We’re not anti-NAWMP.  We’re realists who understand that before you can fix a problem, you have to acknowledge that a problem exists.

We’re idealists who believe duck hunters deserve something in return for the decades of support and trust they’ve invested in waterfowl conservation.

Many of us on the Delta team are fiercely proud Canadians who were born and raised on the prairie, and our goal is to restore the health of our landscape so it will produce ducks for future generations of waterfowlers.

We’re not anti-NAWMP, we’re anti-status quo, and we believe it’s time for change.

Change vs. Status Quo

Before we can create positive change within the Canadian NAWMP, we must understand the large obstacles in front of us. NAWMP is comprised of many partners including non-governmental organizations (primarily Ducks Unlimited, but also The Nature Conservancy of Canada and Delta Waterfowl), the US and Canadian federal governments, and state and provincial governments. This partnership is called the Prairie Habitat Joint Venture (PHJV).

The sheer mass and complexity of the partnership demands that change requires incredible amounts of consultation, communication and lobbying. Imagine trying to achieve consensus on tough issues among so many diverse interests.  So far, we’ve not yet been able to overcome the phenomenal institutional inertia inherent in the system.

Obviously, it’s more comfortable to focus on the good that has come from NAWMP than it is to address its shortcomings.  Further, the conservation community is made up of nice people trying to do good things. As a result, self-critique is often replaced by self-defense; innovative action is replaced by institutional inertia.    

Defenders of the status quo often say, “Every extra acre is one more than we had before”. That’s true, but as hunters and conservationists we must set the bar higher, and we should begin by agreeing that if we’re going to achieve our goals, we must admit to our shortcomings and tackle our challenges head-on.

The opportunity-cost of not changing the NAWMP in Canada is far too high. The NAWMP currently receives funds from at least 29 States, the Canadian government, US federal government through the North American Wetlands Conservation Act (NAWCA),  and countless hundreds of thousands of waterfowlers through private donations or local fundraising efforts.

With so many critical programs on the US side of the region under-funded (easements in the Missouri Coteau of South Dakota are a prime example), waterfowl hunters can ill afford to have their investment in the Canadian NAWMP failing to secure breeding habitat or to enhance the fall flight of ducks.

Change may be painful, but for the sake of current and future generations of hunters, the status quo is no longer an option. 

How do we get Canada Back on track?

In fairness to all the partners involved in conservation in Canada (including us), changing the Canadian prairie landscape will be a monumental task. However, we feel that it is possible. We are here to provide positive solutions for waterfowl managers, and to offer hope for hunters.

Our vision to solve the problems in Canada is based on the collective thinking of our staff, which has synthesized the critical research and ideas from the waterfowl world over the past 65 years. Our broad vision for prairie Canada is based on the array of experiences and learning that has taken place within waterfowl management during that span. The following is a description of some of the most important ideas we have come up with that should guide the necessary rethinking of Canadian conservation.

Learning from the Past

During the late 1950s, the US Fish and Wildlife Service embarked on what is one of the greatest conservation success stories of the century when it created the Small Wetlands Acquisition Program. Since then, the Service has used duck stamp dollars to permanently protect over 2.7 million acres of vulnerable waterfowl breeding habitat.  That figure represents over 90 percent of the “secured” habitat in the US pothole region, and it was achieved at a cost of only $137 million dollars.

This experience taught us that significant amounts of habitat can be permanently protected when funds are delivered in a highly efficient manner with strong accountability, and when local farmers are supportive of the effort. Clearly, we’ve not witnessed the same success in Canada, either since the launch of conservation efforts in the 1930s or since the Canadian NAWMP was launched in 1987.

About the time the NAWMP was kicking off in Canada (1987), the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) was on its way to setting aside approximately 5 million acres of grass nesting cover in the Dakotas and Montana. When the breeding grounds got wet in the 1990s, the combination of wetlands conserved by duck stamp dollars and nesting cover provided by CRP gave duck production a much-needed shot in the arm.

The response of duck populations to CRP in the Dakotas during the 1990s dramatically illustrates the power of landscape-level government programs to increase duck production.

CRP in the U.S. is the best example to date where a conservation program has established enough upland cover to significantly increase duck populations. Conversely, the lack of such a program in Canada has illustrated how duck populations will decline without habitat delivery on a large, landscape scale. As duck hunting conservationists, this could be the most important lesson of our lifetimes.

on duck populations, success rests on the scale of program delivery. Further, it is widely held that our best chance to achieve a large enough scale of delivery rides with the federal governments of the US and Canada. If we want to have fall flights at the levels of the 1990s again, we must maintain CRP in the US and develop and deliver a similar program in Canada.

Focus and Diversify

One of the most influential pieces of information for duck hunters in the last twenty years was the work by Steven Hoekman that dramatically illustrated the bottleneck for duck populations exists on the breeding grounds.

As investors and architects of duck conservation, this must drive our focus to the pothole region, and arguably, the portion of the PPR most in need of repair is in Canada.  If we want more ducks, we must focus on and solve the problems in Canada.  It’s that simple.

Delta believes waterfowl conservation has been too reliant on direct, permanent habitat securement to influence waterfowl production. We believe this is problematic because the hundreds of millions of dollars that are invested each year on behalf of duck production are not adequately diversified in a way that best insulates our waterfowl populations from risk.

Risk is inherent in all endeavors conducted on behalf of ducks. For example, as fantastic a program as CRP has been for ducks and hunters, it is now potentially at risk due to large budget deficits in the US.  As great as the federal duck stamp program has been, permanent habitat securement is also risky because at some point local landowners begin to resist it.  Farmers in Saskatchewan are currently fighting for a moratorium on land purchase by conservation groups, and there are county “caps” on wetland easements in North Dakota. Predator management is subject to attack by animal right’s groups.

The reality is that all conservation efforts on behalf of waterfowl are subject to risk, and that’s why Delta believes we need to diversify our management efforts.  We strongly believe there must be increased investment in two areas that show the greatest promise for a duck population impact and have been relatively under-capitalized to date in Canada: agricultural policy (CRP-type programs) and intensive management (predator management, Hen Houses).

Leverage: A duck hunter’s best friend

If you’re like me, one of the first lessons you learned in the schoolyard was that if you’re wrestling with a much larger, stronger opponent you must use leverage if you hope to win. As hunters we are taking on gargantuan foes including world grain prices, crop subsidies and large-scale ecosystem change. The truth is that we are very small players in a much bigger game.

As duck hunters we comprise less than 1 percent of the continental population. We have relatively few dollars.  Our only hope to influence the landscape so as to have a definable, significantly positive influence on duck populations is to look for opportunities to leverage our limited resources. From any perspective, we cannot consider 330,000 acres of permanent protection and minimal annual impact on duck production as leveraging hunters’ resources in Canada.

If we’ve learned anything from the Canadian NAWMP experience, it’s that  hunters could never hold enough fundraising events, sell enough memberships or gather enough donations to establish the habitat necessary to secure the duck populations. Our pockets aren’t deep enough to pay for the millions of acres of habitat necessary to achieve the impact of a program like the CRP in the U.S.

Clearly, we must look to developing a program in Canada similar to the CRP in the U.S. Consider for example, the Alternative Land Use Services (ALUS) program that we’ve been advancing in partnership with farm groups in Canada (see article on page  ).

ALUS is our best chance to generate enough habitat on the ground to make a real difference for ducks because it isn’t just duck hunters paying the tab, it’s the Canadian government and society as a whole. And governments need to safeguard the environment because society demands the healthy landscape ALUS would provide.

Delta Waterfowl’s total annual cost to promote and advance ALUS has been approximately $300,000 per year (Cdn) for the past several years. As a duck hunter, imagine being able to spend such a tiny amount of money to achieve a landscape-level set-aside program like ALUS.   That’s leverage—applying a small amount of money from hunters with the potential of hitting the ball out of the park.

As hunters we need to look for more of these types of opportunities if we are going to fix the Canadian prairie.

The Duck Hunter as an Investor

Given the collective experiences of the past 65 years, and considering the need for diversification, innovation and leveraging, Delta’s staff is currently working on a detailed blueprint for Canada. Change is needed and change is coming, but it will be difficult.

As detailed in John Devney’s Perspectives column in this issue, much of the work will be up to you.  It will no longer be enough for hunters to simply be members of organizations or raise money for conservation. Hunters are going to have to ask more questions about how their dollars are being spent.  Because of the inertia of the entire system, change will only come if you involve yourself in the process. Because you pay the bills, the system will respond to you.

In coming issues of the Waterfowl Report, look for more information on our campaign to tackle Canada’s challenges on behalf of this continent’s duck hunters. And be prepared to get more involved in the process. We are counting on your help.