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Pintail Heaven 
On the 55,680-acre McIntyre Ranch, the snow is melting fast in the warm south wind, but patches of white still dot the grassy hills along with scattered herds of mule deer and beef cattle. Run-off flows freely down hillsides and coulees, splitting off to form shallow pools or continuing in muddy torrents to empty in a willow-lined creek on the valley bottom. Water rushes through steel culverts under dirt roads, and in many places, backs up and overflows the frozen ground. A lone porcupine waddles to drier ground on a hilltop.
In a four-wheel-drive truck patrolling the northern edge of the historic McIntyre Ranch, ranch general manager Ralph Thrall III and Don Watson, of Ducks Unlimited Canada (DUC) in Lethbridge, can’t stop smiling. Thrall, whose grandfather bought the ranch from W.H. (Billy) McIntyre’s estate in 1948, knows the meltwater will help rejuvenate the land, creating stock-watering ponds and injecting moisture to the grassland that supports his Red Angus-Hereford cattle year-round.
As for Watson, head of conservation programs for the Alberta Prairie field office, he’s enthused because the water will provide a natural welcome mat for ducks – particularly northern pintails – that will begin returning in the next week or so.
He knows the presence of shallow wetlands in vast expanses of grassland will entice many pintails to stop and nest rather than continue their migration further north.
“Pardon me if I can’t hide my excitement,” Watson says, his face beaming at the sight of the run-off. “ I think we’re really going to raise some ducks this year.”
“ It’s a little piece of pintail heaven,” Don Watson notes.
As such, the Milk River Ridge is an important linchpin in DUC’s integrated plan to rejuvenate and restore pintail populations hit hard by prairie drought and agricultural changes in the 1980s.
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Page 3: Plummeting Population >>
