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Plummeting Population 
Biologists shocked by plummeting pintail populations back then were even more surprised when numbers failed to recover after water returned to prairie breeding grounds in the 1990s. Historically, pintail populations had fluctuated in tune with water conditions – an accepted biological fact of life – and they always bounced back when conditions improved.
In the 1970s, more than 60 per cent of the continental breeding population settled in the southern Canadian Prairies, with the remainder in northern Canada, Alaska and northern states in the continental U.S. In the 1980s, the proportion of pintails that settled in southern Canada had dramatically decreased – from a high of more than 4.5 million in 1974 to less than 500,000 in 1988.
Pat Kehoe, DUC’s Edmonton-based manager of Prairie Region conservation programs, notes many factors are likely to blame for the decline of pintail populations. The main ones, he says, are those that have caused reductions in pintail reproductive success on key Canadian breeding grounds.
Pintails commonly nest in crop stubble, putting them directly at risk of farming operations. Increased production costs, lower commodity prices, and increased equipment size have resulted in more intensive agricultural use of Prairie lands. In fact, close to three million acres of land within the pintail’s primary breeding range are being farmed more intensively than they were in the 1970s.
The trend away from the formerly common practice of summerfallowing fields likely heightened the problem. Tilled land under summerfallow remains idle during much of the pintail nesting season. When those lands are continuously cropped, with tilling and seeding occurring during the nesting season, nest destruction can be significant. Compounding the problem, pintails tend to not renest as often as mallards and some other species.
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