Wild Fowling

By Chris Dorsey
Imagine sitting in a duck blind a thousand miles from the nearest waterfowler and a century away from the industrial age. That's what you'll find in Canada's Northwest Territories.

Titus Allooloo killed his first caribou with a .22 rifle when he was seven years old. Since that time he's faced down polar bears, harpooned narwhal whales from a sea kayak the size of a pirogue, and lived off all that the land provides. When sharing a duck blind with the fortyish Inuit guide it becomes clear that adventure is a matter of perspective.

As we delve deeper into his hunter-gatherer roots, it's also apparent that sport hunting is a term of luxury mostly reserved for those who have traded their natural instincts for the opiate of a steady paycheck. Like so many highly successful industrialists, however, the Inuit have managed to remove the middlemen.

When your grocery store is the tundra and the bounty that it offers, there is no need for the marketer, processor, or salesman. As hard as I try to imagine myself in his world, I cannot fully comprehend such an existence, for I fear my domestication is too complete. We are both hunters of one sort or another, however, and that is enough for our paths to have crossed.

We're sitting in a blind on a rocky point that knifes into the north arm of Great Slave Lake, a freshwater sea that spans 17,825 square miles and is 2,000 feet deep at its maximum depth. It is the fifth largest lake in North America and is among the great fisheries of the world.

The north arm of the lake is comprised of numerous shallow bays and inlets that are to northern pike what the prairie potholes are to ducks. The same area also is an attractive labyrinth of land and water that many species of ducks use to stage before freeze-up pushes them south. Chief among those birds are the greater and lesser scaup.

As the bluebill flies, our blind sits only a few miles from some of the best scaup breeding grounds in the world. Bluebills are an enigma, for during the last decade-a time when so many other duck populations have soared-scaup have suffered a precipitous decrease.

While last year's count revealed a slight improvement, scientists are still concerned over this long-term decline. It staggers the imagination to think that a duck that breeds and nests in the most remote wilderness of North America could be suffering at the hand of man.

Pesticide residue such as that from DDT, the toxin linked to the devastation of so many birds in the 1950s and '60s-especially eagles, falcons, and hawks-is now found on both polar caps. Other pollutants as well have permeated the most pristine ecosystems on our continent.

Could we have fouled our own nest so completely that no species is immune from our presence? As sobering as such a prospect might be, scientists will nevertheless be looking to confirm or reject the notion.

Whatever the cause, Ducks Unlimited research is aimed to reveal the root of the problem, for there are many possible culprits in this mystery. One of the most intriguing possibilities is the proliferation of zebra mussels throughout the Great Lakes. This exotic species made its way to the lakes via ships traveling the St. Lawrence Seaway and has now become a major food source for scaup.

Zebra mussels concentrate toxins in their bodies-ten times more so than indigenous mussels-so biologists speculate that the invading mollusks might be at least partially to blame.