Insights: Rescue the Duck Factory
By Don Young, Executive Vice President
As the days grow shorter and summer stubbornly surrenders to fall, ducks are staging on North America’s prairies. Impressive concentrations of birds gather in the largest potholes, flying out to feed at first light, building energy reserves for their southbound journey. Mallards will be among the last to leave the prairie, hanging on until the staging areas ice over. From our duck blinds this fall, we’ll watch with equal measures of awe and anticipation as north winds and sharp fronts push the big flocks down the flyways. And we’ll treasure these birds’ time with us, savoring each decoying bird, each shot, each retrieve as if it were the rarest and most valuable of gifts. In a few months, the season will end far too soon for most of us, and the birds will move north again. Many of them will make their way back to the prairie pothole country.
But when the ducks return next spring, America’s prairie landscape will be changed. In the U.S. portion of the Prairie Pothole Region, many native prairie nesting grounds that have produced ducks for thousands of years will be plowed under, the grassland irretrievably lost. Fields once covered in lush nesting cover as a result of the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) will be growing crops instead of ducks. A perfect storm is sweeping across the prairies as I write this, a hurricane of change, and the future of America’s prairie-nesting ducks is blowing on the wind.
Because of global food demands, federal mandates for ethanol production, and weakened conservation provisions in the new Farm Bill, America’s farmers are putting many more thousands of acres into cultivation. In 2007 alone, more than 850,000 acres of CRP land were tilled and returned to cropland. In total, more than 4.3 million acres of CRP lands will expire on the prairies by 2012.
Native prairie is America’s most productive duck nesting habitat, but only 22 million acres remain today. Over the last six years, the Dakotas and Montana have lost a half million acres of native prairie—tilled under, gone forever. If current loss trends continue, another 3.3 million acres of native prairie could be lost within five short years. And because of the perfect storm raging across the prairies today, that rate of loss could even accelerate.
With so many forces working against the conservation of vital nesting habitat, this is a crucial period for waterfowl and for the future of waterfowl hunting. And Ducks Unlimited needs your help more than ever before. Right now, plows are turning the nesting grounds into croplands, so we must band together as duck hunters to save as much prairie habitat as we can as quickly as we can.
Many farmers and ranchers in the Dakotas would like to help Ducks Unlimited conserve important nesting habitat by selling grassland easements on their lands. But landowner interest in conservation easements exceeds our ability to meet the funding required to address those opportunities. This backlog of grassland easements amounts to 300,000 acres of prime native prairie nesting habitat. And with your help, we can save it.
Right now, go to www.ducks.org/helptoday, and give as much as you can to help us permanently protect these 300,000 acres of native prairie. Over the years, we have asked DU members to support the ducks in so many ways, and you have risen to every challenge. So, with the fall migration and the celebration of another hunting season just weeks away, we’re asking you to take a moment and help the ducks once again. The window of opportunity to save these acres from the plow is narrow and closing fast, so it is important that ducks hunters act now. Once an acre of native prairie is plowed under, it is gone forever, as are the generations of ducks that it would have produced—and the duck hunting opportunities we’ve always cherished. Act now and make a difference. You can help ensure our skies are filled with waterfowl today, tomorrow, and forever.