While it’s somewhat early to become euphoric, duck hunters and birders alike can anticipate the first really good news in years.
Abundant rains and snows from last summer through this spring have left critical breeding areas of the northern United States and southern Canada awash with wildlife-perhaps the best in memory.
“We’re looking at broods and production that may be the best in our lifetimes,” said Ron Reynolds, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service expert.
From his office in Bismarck, N.D., Reynolds is mapping the effects of the federal Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) on duck production-especially now that there is abundant water-but he also has seen immensely positive spinoffs on songbirds and other creatures.
“We’ve never observed this type of production-ever,” Reynolds gushed.
He said long-dwindling populations of songbirds like lark buntings, meadowlarks, grassland sparrows, bobolinks and other species have been turned around by the 12 million acres of upland cover in the prairie pothole region of the Dakotas, eastern Montana, northwest Iowa and parts of Minnesota established by CRP.
“People just did not realize how important to all phases of wildlife the CRP would become,” Reynolds said. “It wasn’t conceived as a wildlife program. It was designed to help marginal farmers stay in business and to promote better soil conservation. But what it’s done is give us the key to solving-not all, but part of-our migratory wildlife concerns.”
A record 92 inches of snow covered North Dakota last winter, and the runoff filled secondary wetlands, recharged aquifers and generally reversed some alarming wildlife trends. The hard-hit duck population, cut by 50 percent since 10 years of Canadian droughts enabled farmers to drain and plow marginal wetlands-changing the landscape and driving hordes of nesting ducks into the mouths of predators-for the first time is seeing a ray of hope.
Although the federal Fall Flight Forecast won’t be available until later this month, the Tribune has obtained unpublished federal May Breeding Grounds Survey figures that show mallards at 6.9 million, up a resounding 22 percent. Pintail breeders were listed at 3 million, up 45 percent, the same percentage enjoyed by 4.6 million bluewing teal. Gadwalls were listed at 2.3 million, up 32 percent.
In addition, Reynolds said he wouldn’t be surprised if 8-10 million new ducks were fledged from the pothole region, with maybe 60-70 percent duckling survival. Most ducks, of course, are produced in still-arid Canada.
The key has been the magic combination of adequate water and cover on U.S. lands in CRP, which biologists say has changed the prairie landscape more than any other conservation effort. Until now, ducks were forced to nest in the tallest grasses available near water, which too often meant ditches, fencelines and other narrow bands of habitat near cropland that also happened to be full of toothy predators like fox, skunk, mink, raccoon and coyote. Now that ducks can spread through large areas of adequate cover, Reynolds said they are harder to find.
But Charlie Potter of the watchdog Delta Waterfowl Foundation disputed that assumption, saying predators remain the chief concern of nesting ducks. “While it’s true that parts of the western prairies like western North Dakota, eastern Montana and Alberta might have a nesting success rate of 30-50 percent because there are fewer predators in the area, the real duck factory of Manitoba-Saskatchewan has a terrible rate, more like 6-10 percent, because it is full of predators,” he said. “Many of those ducks have been sucked by the water into a predator trap.”
Potter cautioned against a movement to liberalize this fall’s hunting regulations, saying the fall flight should bring an abundance of extremely vulnerable juvenile ducks. “If we liberalize regulations to kill many of those ducks, we will reduce our ability to build the flock,” he said. “We need to give those first-year ducks a chance to reproduce.”
Lloyd Jones, a former North Dakota conservation chief who now is a Delta field executive, cautiously pointed out that the region’s 12 million acres of CRP could disappear if the new Farm Bill does not renew the program.
Just how important is CRP to wildlife? “You’ve got to stop and think that those 12 million acres represent four times the amount of land, both public and private, that man has been able to put into waterfowl management over the 60 years or so that we’ve been trying to help the ducks,” Jones said. “With 3.3 million acres of CRP, North Dakota has the highest mallard pair counts that have been documented since 1943. This is more than we’ve ever had in history.”
Reynolds said he counted 150 duck nests in a single 80-acre CRP field near Bismarck. “That’s over two nests per acre, which is almost unheard of,” he said. “We marked them with willow poles, and it looks like we planted a field of trees out there. We figure 1,000 baby ducks will come from that single field.”
If the predators don’t get them. Potter said his organization is watching two 16-square-mile parcels in a high predator area of Manitoba that showed the stunning difference predators can make. “In one parcel where we’re actively trying to control the predators, the duck success rate is over 50 percent,” he said. “In the other, where there are no controls, the rate is a paltry 6 percent, which isn’t high enough to sustain the duck population.”
Potter cautioned waterfowlers to be aware that FWS duck figures are projected indexes that show trends rather than hard counts. For example, the Fish and Wildlife Service claims the mallard population now averages 1 percent higher than the long-term average between 1955 and 1993. Gadwalls would be 80 percent higher, bluewings 14 percent higher and pintails 31 percent lower.
“You can’t tell me that there’s any way on earth that we can have 80 percent more gadwalls today than we had a year ago,” Potter said. “That simply is not possible. We really should take a hard look at the way these numbers are produced.”
