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Restoring the Tradition
In 1998, 60 years after its foundation, DUC established a new conservation vision for the Prairie Region, and developed conservation strategies to achieve this vision over the next 20 years. The vision, simply stated, is: A mosaic of natural restored and managed landscapes capable of perpetually sustaining populations of waterfowl and other wildlife.
From that vision came a plan called Restoring the Tradition, aimed at using the vision’s principles to help re-establish productive landscapes for the northern pintail – a species DUC has identified as being of special concern. DUC’s innovative pintail restoration program is based on years of solid science conducted by DUC’s Institute for Wetland and Waterfowl Research (IWWR). In Saskatchewan, two years of research established that converting cropland to other agricultural uses could alleviate the dangers to pintails associated with spring-seeded croplands. Pasture and hay lands harvested in late season are not as prone to potentially catastrophic disturbance during nesting. Studies showed pintails, on average, hatched one nest for every 142 acres of hay land, almost 10 times more than was observed in spring-seeded cropland.
In 1998, IWWR used information from the agriculture census, historical weather data and waterfowl and pond surveys to conduct a Prairie-wide analysis of pintail response to changing agricultural practices and environment between 1961 and 1996. The analysis highlighted regions where pintail declines have been correlated with changes in cropping practices. In conjunction with earlier analyses, the study supported the hypothesis that pintail breeding potential was being compromised by recent changes in cropping practices.
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