Pintails Rivalled Mallards

At one time, pintail numbers rivalled mallards on the Canadian Prairies. Like most ducks, their numbers dropped dramatically during the drought of the ’60s, but rebounded during the better water conditions of the 1970s. Pintail populations slumped again during the drought of the 1980s, but this time their numbers didn’t significantly increase with the improved water conditions during the 1990s. This failure to rebound is in stark contrast to other prairie nesting dabbling ducks, which reached near record levels during the wet ’90s. In 2002, pintail numbers matched an all-time record low of 1.8 million birds. In 2003, pintail numbers increased slightly, but they remain nearly 40 per cent below their long-term average and at levels more than 50 per cent below their North American Waterfowl Management Plan (NAWMP) goal. Something is obviously wrong. Why is this graceful bird of the prairie slowly disappearing before our eyes? Like canaries in a coal mine, pintails are perhaps telling us something about the health of our prairie landscapes. Their declining population trend is possibly a warning sign about the health of the prairie ecosystem, which waterfowl, wildlife and humans rely on for existence.

Recently, Ducks Unlimited Canada (DUC) and Ducks Unlimited Inc. (DUI) took the proactive and unusual step of developing a species-specific program, the Pintail Initiative, to help reverse this decline. As a first step in this initiative, the population trends in the three primary breeding areas (Alaska and northern Canada, Prairie Canada and Prairie U.S.) (Figure 1) were examined to determine where the problem might lie. We can clearly see that the majority of the decline in the pintail population has been in those birds that typically settled in Prairie Canada. So, what has happened, particularly since the 1970s, in Prairie Canada that could be responsible?

DUC research biologist Jim Devries and researchers from Montana State University examined habitat changes collected from 1961 to the mid-1990s on Canada’s Prairies. Using pintail data collected through the annual U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service/Canadian Wildlife Service spring surveys and land use data collected every five years from Statistics Canada's Census of Agriculture, Devries and crew determined that since 1961, fewer pintails were settling to breed in areas of the prairies with increasing cropland. This increase in cropland was not mainly due to loss of native prairie, but rather a shift from summerfallowing, where croplands are rested in alternate years, to an annual cropping regime where more acres are now cropped every year.

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