| From 1918, when the Migratory Bird Treaty Act was signed, to 1946 the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the Canadian Wildlife Service biologists struggled to find accurate ways to estimate North America’s breeding population of waterfowl so they could set hunting seasons and bag limits. In 1946, Art Hawkins began working at the Delta Waterfowl and Wetlands Station on the Delta Marsh to find a better way to count ducks. Over an eight year period Art and his team developed the aerial survey protocol and routes still used today. The routes only actually cover about 1% of the breeding grounds, but by estimating how many wetlands are in a square mile, and how many ducks there are on each type of wetland, statisticians create an estimate of the waterfowl population for all of the breeding grounds.
Read the full text transcript of the Early History of the Breeding Grounds Survey.
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