The Goal is Achievable

Sustaining prairie waterfowl habitat is critical to the future of Waterfowl hunting in North America

As this latest issue of Ducks Unlimited magazine begins arriving in DU members’ mailboxes across the nation, another type of distribution is occurring on North America’s waterfowl breeding grounds. The spring migration, for most duck species, is now wrapping up, and the breeding season is in full swing. The birds are once again busy spreading out, seeking nest sites, maintaining or forming pair bonds, mating, defending territories, laying eggs, and trying to survive another breeding season. All of these activities are part of the ducks’ natural annual cycle and a race against time to perpetuate their respective species prior to the onset of another winter. It also sets the stage for what we hunters can expect come autumn.

There is another race against time, however, an ominous one that the ducks aren’t conscious of but which acutely concerns those of us who love waterfowl: the continuing high rate of loss of waterfowl breeding habitat in the heart of the continent’s “duck factory,” the Prairie Pothole Region.
This issue of the magazine contains the concluding article in our four-part series “Prairies Under Siege.” In the last four issues, we have attempted to inform readers of the ominous, ongoing threats to waterfowl breeding habitat on the prairies of the United States and Canada and how Ducks Unlimited is responding, where and when it can, to address those pressures on that precious, disappearing resource. Every year, the United States alone loses more than 100,000 acres of wetlands, and many more acres of valuable grasslands important to upland-nesting waterfowl are converted for agriculture or other uses and are permanent losses to the ducks’ breeding habitat base across the prairies of North America.

The overlying theme through all four parts of the series has been that Ducks Unlimited’s continued focus is the long-term conservation of waterfowl breeding habitat on the prairies. Conserving wetlands and nesting grasslands is where we will continue to focus our efforts. As we explained in Part I of the series (“Ducks, Habitat Conservation, and Predator”s; Nov/Dec 2003), Ducks Unlimited believes that the best use of limited financial resources for waterfowl and wetland conservation is on habitat conservation. In the face of significant land-use pressures, we need to remain focused on habitat conservation to provide the foundation for long-term viability of waterfowl populations and waterfowl hunting.

In Part II of the series (“New Threats to Ducks and Waterfowling”; Jan/Feb 2004), we outlined how susceptible waterfowl habitat on the prairies has become to potential destruction as the result of federal policy changes, including increased crop subsidies in the prairies, the diversion of CRP away from the prairies, and a sobering U.S. Supreme Court decision that literally stripped most prairie potholes of conservation protections previously provided under the Clean Water Act.

How we spend our conservation budget was spelled out in “Science and Conservation,” Part III of the series (Mar/Apr 2004). In that article, DU explained how it utilizes its science-based decision-making process to determine how to invest precious habitat dollars most effectively to benefit waterfowl, and to evaluate our conservation efforts to modify and refine our efforts for optimal results.

Finally, in this issue’s concluding article, we look to the future of the prairies, which, in essence, will also foretell the future status of waterfowl populations and affect the future of waterfowl hunting on this continent. The challenges, you will see, are enormous and potentially alarming, but for more than six decades Ducks Unlimited members have converted challenges into opportunities. The prairies are where we will need to make our stand in order to be true to our organization’s original singleness of purpose: to conserve habitat for the benefit of North America’s waterfowl. More precisely, when it comes to the prairies, to quote DU’s Dr. Jim Ringelman, author of the concluding article in our series, “We are reaching for nothing less than securing for all time the waterfowl production capacity of the Prairie Pothole Region. The challenges are daunting, but the goal is achievable.”

Let’s get to work!