Sept. 14–Duck hunters will hit their favorite sloughs and fields this fall amid the backdrop of record-high spring continental duck populations, a reality that defies the ongoing loss of grassland and wetland habitat. The reason, wildlife experts say, is simple: It rained — a lot. But there’s a caveat, they say: The trend isn’t sustainable if drier conditions return, given what’s happening on the landscape.
Mark Fisher says he’s never seen as many ducks before breeding season as he did that rainy, early May day this past spring in the Devils Lake Basin.
A biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Devils Lake, Fisher was returning to Devils Lake after completing a waterfowl count.
Driving that rural highway near Lawton, N.D., was like driving through a duck factory, he recalls; the ducks were everywhere.
“It was like there were pheasants running on the road — a paved road,” Fisher said. “It was raining, and I mean there were ducks everywhere. It was unbelievable. They were picking gravel off the road, and off to the side of the road, every little pothole or whatever was full of birds. There’d be a little shallow muddy corner to a field, and it was full of birds.”
Fisher’s encounter was just a snapshot of the big picture for North America’s ducks, which are at record highs going into this year’s waterfowl season. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, this year’s North American waterfowl survey pegged the spring breeding duck population at 49.2 million birds, topping the previous high of 48.6 million in 2012 and up 8 percent from last year’s estimate of 45.6 million.
But ominous signs loom on the horizon.
This year’s record breeding population comes despite the ongoing loss of grassland and wetland habitat throughout the Prairie Pothole Region — widely known as North America’s “duck factory” — as land in the federal Conservation Reserve Program expires and returns to farm production.
At first glance, record duck populations and habitat loss might seem contradictory, but Fisher and other biologists say waterfowl continue to ride the wave of an extended wet cycle and a low abundance of nest-robbing predators, especially red fox, which were decimated by mange in the early ’90s.
All about water
Given what’s happening on the landscape, how long the trend continues depends on how long the wet conditions persist.
“It’s all about the water — water really starts everything,” said Joel Brice, vice president of waterfowl and hunter recruitment programs for Delta Waterfowl in Bismarck. “We’ve had a handful of years here just recently where the entire Prairie Pothole Region is wet, and so what you have is good breeding water conditions for the entire prairies rather than just part of it.
“It’s not only been wet, it’s been really wet, and it’s been wet late in the season, as well. No doubt we’ve lost a lot of habitat, and we’re going to lose a lot. The trend is downward, but it seems contradictory.
“Why are ducks going up? Water masks all the problems; it really does.”
Nowhere, perhaps, is that more apparent than North Dakota, where the state Game and Fish Department this spring tallied a breeding duck index of 4.9 million birds, up 23 percent from last year and 110 percent higher than the long-term average.
Game and Fish has conducted the survey since 1948.
Mike Szymanski, waterfowl biologist for Game and Fish in Bismarck, said the Dakotas and western Minnesota continue to reap the benefit of high duck populations that built up through the heydays of CRP. North Dakota’s CRP acreage peaked at more than 3 million acres in 2006 and now stands at less than 1 million acres. By 2019, Game and Fish projects CRP acreage in North Dakota will hover near 200,000 acres.
“What CRP was to breeding ducks in North Dakota and the U.S. prairies was basically a windfall, and we’re still kind of living that windfall,” Szymanski said. “Obviously, we’re losing a lot of that CRP but we’ve also got record water right now so you’re not seeing the direct effect of what happens with reproduction when you lose all that habitat.”
North Dakota’s top 20 years of duck abundance all have occurred in the past 20 years, Szymanski said, a trend that also coincides with the wet cycle. Someday, though, dry conditions will return — at least if history is any indication.
“You get a year when we have a drought or a series of years with drought or poor wetland conditions, that’s probably when we’ll see the hangover from losing that CRP,” Szymanski said. “It’s hard to say whether we’re going to take a drive down a nice long hill or if we’re going to go on a roller coaster ride where we just about hit the roof of the car on our way down.
“It’s hard to know exactly what the transition will be, but it’s going to be in a state of lower production.”
Broad impact
Fisher said the impact of that lower production will rumble across North America. The Dakotas now produce about 60 percent of the continent’s ducks, Fisher said.
“It’s like the birds are really lumped into the Dakotas, and if we get a drought anywhere in the Dakotas, then populations are certainly going to crash,” he said. “There’s no question that will happen, and it’s going to happen. It’s inevitable. We can’t continue to maintain these wet conditions year after year.”
As ducks get squeezed into fewer habitat blocks, they’ll become even more vulnerable if predator populations increase. Fisher said there already are signs red fox are gaining traction, though numbers remain low.
Red fox are tougher on ducks than other predators because they also kill the hens, where skunks or raccoons just eat the eggs. Before the mange outbreak, duck nesting success in red fox strongholds was at or below 10 percent, Fisher said, far below the 15 percent to 20 percent benchmark required to maintain duck populations.
By comparison, Fisher said, surveys as recently as 2012 found nest success as high as 70 percent in some parts of the Lake Region, a number that would have been incomprehensible not that many years ago.
“If we have high predator populations in that fragmented habitat they’re going to just absolutely wipe out nests, and our nest success is going to drop off,” Fisher said. “I think for us in the Devils Lake area in particular, losing the connectivity of habitat and shrinking the grasslands is a recipe for disaster, and it may not show itself today, but if you get a below-average spring water condition and an increase in predator numbers, we’re going to get wiped out. We’re going to probably be struggling to maintain the waterfowl population that we have now.”
Enjoy for now
Still, waterfowl experts say they don’t want to paint doomsday scenarios because there are so many unknowns.
“We do have serious concerns about when drought returns to the prairies, and it’s going to happen,” Brice of Delta Waterfowl said. “There’s no way to lose the amount of habitat we’ve lost, particularly in the U.S., through CRP. There’s going to come a time that if those acres don’t come back, we’re definitely going to see a decline in duck numbers.”
Brice said he doesn’t dare predict how extensive that decline will be.
“As waterfowl enthusiasts, we’re all at risk of being caught off-guard,” he said. “We’ve enjoyed these great conditions for years and years and years so I think there is a risk of surprise looming.”
In the short term, though, the table appears to be set for waterfowl hunters to have one heck of a fall hunting season.
“Get out and have fun, enjoy it while it lasts because it’s hard to say how long it will last,” Szymanski of the Game and Fish Department said. “We’re kind of living on borrowed time.”
Given current regulations and the number of ducks in the fall flight, hunters don’t have much of an impact on waterfowl populations, Szymanski said. A few species, such as pintails, canvasbacks and scaup, need special regulatory consideration, “but by and large, we don’t harvest enough ducks to have big population effects or effects on their survival.
“Then it just comes down to how they reproduce,” Syzmanski added. “We have enough water to bridge the gap, and the gap keeps getting wider.”
Dokken reports on outdoors. Call him at (701) 780-1148, (800) 477-6572 ext. 1148 or send e-mail to [email protected].