Since its inception 20 years ago, key partners in the North American Waterfowl Management Plan consistently have claimed the giant public/private effort to secure the future of ducks and duck hunting by protecting habitat was racking up stunning numbers. This year the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said the partners had helped "protect, restore and/or enhance" more than 15.77 million acres.

But a closer look at the nature of those protections reveals some troubling fine print to the impressive numbers: No one is certain just how long most of those acres will remain protected, nor could they claim duck production had increased because of the work – which was the point of the plan.

Twenty years after the plan debuted as a 15-year, $1.5 billion effort, administrators admit it has fallen short of its habitat goals, even after exceeding its original budget by five years and $4 billion.

Interviews with federal managers in the United States and Canada as well as non-governmental organizations involved in the plan also reveal:

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Administrators cannot say how many acres have received permanent protection as opposed to temporary relief, nor can they quantify what impact the money and acres have had on ducks.

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There is no central mapping program that shows which acres have been permanently protected and which are under temporary management. Many acres claimed as "conserved" or "secured" were part of time-limited contracts.

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The total acres of wetlands and grasslands considered critical to the survival of waterfowl and duck hunting are fewer today than in 1989, even after thousands of projects funded by joint public/private partnerships. Although significant progress has been made in some areas, the plan has fallen 50 percent short of goals in the key breeding areas of prairie Canada, even as wetlands loss continues.

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Agencies involved do not always conduct follow-up investigations to confirm land owners are complying with the terms of conservation contracts, instead often leaving that job to private partners even when public money is involved.

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Figures published on acres conserved frequently are inflated because all members of a partnership often take individual credit for the same acres.

Seth Mott, the Fish and Wildlife Service official in charge of the plan, said the problems are endemic to the partnership model that has been the engine powering the plan.

"Since 1987, I've tried on at least three occasions to put some type of accounting system in place to track what is actually getting done, and it's always come crashing down," Mott said. "The model we used to get this thing started -- using many partners to raise funding for each project – has been the central weakness that makes tracking a huge challenge. We just don't know the answers to some important questions."

Those realizations prompted the Fish and Wildlife Service to request an analysis of the program by a committee of outside experts, the draft of which is due June 18.

Waterfowl managers agree that the plan has been an unqualified success on several levels, including the unprecedented number of private-public partnerships that greatly have raised awareness of wetlands issues. They also agree losses of wetland and upland habitat for waterfowl and other wildlife would have been more severe without the waterfowl management plan. Further, populations of some waterfowl species have occasionally exceeded the goals set for them in 1986, although others have not responded at all.

But a growing number of critics question whether the plan is returning the valueper-dollar hunters have been led to believe. They claim the plan was sold as a limited-time project to secure the future by permanently protecting the required habitat, but instead has turned into a permanent project that will rely on unending financial support to renew temporary agreements. Because such agreements depend on the cooperation of governments and private landowners, they say, the future will always be in doubt.

"I think we have a lot of sincere people out there working hard and spending a lot of effort and money trying to do good for ducks, but the system we're using has become almost more important than the results," said Rob Olson, president of Delta Waterfowl Foundation, until recently a major partner in the plan. "We're telling hunters that we're 'securing' the future of duck hunting, when we're really only renting it for a limited number of years.

"Frankly, every time you try to measure success, you end up with empty numbers and angry people. This is not what the plan was supposed to do, or be."

The North American Waterfowl Management Plan was conceived in the mid1980s as a response to threats a record drought posed to ducks and duck hunting. The small "pothole" wetlands on the northern prairies -- the most critical duck-breeding habitat in North America -- were drying up so fast waterfowl populations tumbled to record lows. Hunters were leaving the sport by the tens of thousands, taking with them the license fees and tax dollars that supported the entire waterfowl conservation effort.

Dry cycles were nothing new to duck country, but this time millions of acres were being permanently converted to agriculture and other uses. Waterfowl managers realized duck hunting was headed for the history books unless they found a way to keep the impact from being permanent. Protecting wetlands would also benefit a long list of other wildlife.

The waterfowl management plan provided the answer with a truly epic vision: It would rebuild the fall flight of ducks to 100 million birds in 15 years by restoring and protecting roughly six million acres of habitat at a cost of about $1.5 billion. The Fish and Wildlife Service has since stopped using a total fall flight estimate, preferring instead to measure the breeding population of specific species. Original partners Canada and the United States were later joined by Mexico. In a 1998 update, the habitat goal was increased to 27.4 million acres.

A key selling point of the plan in Washington was its reliance on volunteerism and private-federal partnerships. While administered by the Fish and Wildlife Service, the plan would be implemented through "joint-ventures" involving private conservation groups, state and federal agencies and business concerns. Seed money would be provided by Congress through the North American Wetlands Conservation Act (NAWCA), to be matched on a dollar-for-dollar basis by the non-federal partners in each project.

Perhaps the most important part of the plan was providing a vehicle for conservation work on the vast breeding grounds in prairie Canada, considered the heart of the continent's "duck factories." While U.S. agencies are prevented by law from spending money in foreign countries, funding would be supplied to Canadian joint venture programs through the U.S. conservation act grants, most of which would be administered by the Canadian Wildlife Service and Ducks Unlimited, Canada.

The goal Canada's Prairie Habitat Joint Venture established reflected its overall importance: 9.8 million acres were to be "secured."

As the years rolled by, the waterfowl management plan claimed impressive results and, indeed, duck numbers were bouncing back. The end of the drought brought water back to the prairies, and in 1999 the Fish and Wildlife Service estimated the fall flight at 105 million, considered an all-time record. However in succeeding years those numbers began to slip, and skeptics began surfacing.

All sides agree the effort has been unable to keep pace with the loss of critical habitat. In some areas, Mott said, habitat losses have reversed gains made by the plan.

"There's no question we're losing habitat at a more rapid rate than we're gaining it throughout the pothole region," said Rex Johnson, a Fish and Wildlife Service habitat specialist based in Minnesota. "That doesn't mean we can't meet our goals (of waterfowl production). We have in certain areas. But it certainly makes it more challenging."

More attention was focused on the important prairie habitat program in Canada, which had fallen 50 percent behind schedule. Canadian progress was expected to be slower because the acreage needed was larger and government spending would be smaller. Further, there has long been opposition in Canada's farming country to taking land out of production for ducks, most of which would be killed by American hunters.

But critics said problems with the Canadian program -- from strategy to monitoring -- revealed the plan's inability to provide a proper return on investment.

Through 2005, according to Canadian officials, U.S. interests had contributed $418 million (Canadian) of the $641 million spent in the prairie habitat program, including $198.7 million from Washington, $37.4 million more from individual states, and about $180 million from DU and other private partners. Yet the project reported 3.6 million acres had been "secured," about five million short of its goal.

Disappointment turned into controversy when the report revealed about 331,000 of the 3.6 million acres had been permanently secured by purchase or conservation easement contracts. Most of the acres had only temporary protections of no more than 15 years. Further, many acres claimed "secured" were only under volunteer agreements that had never been checked for compliance. For example, 808,808 acres are in "stewardship programs," a term that describes mostly efforts to convince landowners to use wildlife-friendly farming methods. Yet there has been no follow-up to see how much impact those efforts actually had.

"We don't chart those acres because we have no contracts with the landowners," said Deanna Dixon, PHJV manager for the Canadian Wildlife Service.

Canadian officials said their goal always was to permanently protect no more than 330,000 acres of critical habitat, which it would use as a base surrounded by acres in voluntary programs such as government subsidies for wildlife-friendly farming and ranching techniques. That combination, they said, would ensure a steady, permanent rise in waterfowl production.

"There is a different set of values here when it comes to land use," said Brett Calverley, of DU-Canada. "There simply isn't the societal support to take that much land out of production. We realized that early on (in the waterfowl management plan).

"So our goals shifted to protect enough of the prime habitat to provide the basis for production, then hopefully influence government policy so we can support those prime areas."

While most waterfowl managers agree affecting such landscape changes help waterfowl production, they also said that without signed contracts and rigorous on-theground checks to ensure compliance, there is no definitive way to measure success.

"In this business, if you don't have a signed contract, and you don't have a map of its location, you don't do at least annual follow-up inspections, you don't really have it," said Ron Reynolds, a waterfowl habitat specialist with the Fish and Wildlife Service based in North Dakota. "You can't base progress on good intentions."

But the auditing regime for Canadian projects is a mixed bag, participants admitted. Calverley said DU has a regular inspection program for all of its projects, but the intensity of those inspections depends on the size of the investment. "We try to go back every year or so, and usually at least once every three years," he said. "The bigger the investment, the more likely it will be annual. But most of these we hope to check at least once in three years."

However, compliance checks for some important segments of the programs are even less frequent. For example, measuring the impact of the program's effort to subsidize wildlife-friendly winter wheat plantings relies on a federal government census that is conducted once every five years.

Even if compliance is high, Canadian administrators admit the fact that most acres are not permanently protected means the ultimate success of their efforts will depend on factors largely out of their hands.

"We know that depends a lot on market forces out of our control, as well as the moods of governments and society," Calverley said. "But that's the model we have to use."

Ducks Unlimited also argues that permanent protections have always been only one of the tools for waterfowl conservation, regardless of the location, because there will never be funding to purchase enough land.

"If you're going to base duck production based on permanent fee-purchase protection, we would be in serious trouble because we don't have the money to accomplish that," said Gregg Patterson, DU director of communications. "Successful conservation for waterfowl has always been a combination of permanent protection and smaller parcels protected over limited amounts of time. That's been the model that has worked everywhere."

Other partners, such as Delta Waterfowl, say the prairie habitat program's claim that even 3.5 million acres have been "secured" is a "gross misrepresentation" since most supporters of the plan, especially hunters, had been told "habitat is forever."

"How can you secure the future of duck hunting if you're not sure how many acres of critical habitat you're going to have five years from now?" Olson said recently. "I think everyone is pretty certain of what the word 'secured' means to the average duck hunter out there.

"Our issue is, because we're still losing habitat every year, our time is limited to have an impact on the ducks. For the dollars we've spent in Canada can anyone tell us what the impact has been, or will be 10 years from now?"

There is only slightly less confusion on the U.S. side of the border, where the federal government has contributed approximately $254 million in conservation act grants to the plan, a figure that grew to more than $1 billion with matching funds from partners.

Mott said all U.S. grant recipients are legally required to submit financial statements accounting for their expenditures, and are responsible for auditing the compliance of land-use contracts paid for with the funds. The Fish and Wildlife Service has the right to conduct its own compliance checks, Mott said, but was not sure how often that had been done. He added his agency had confidence the rules were being followed.

The bigger problem has been determining just how many of the dollars spent have gone to create that permanent legacy of waterfowl habitat the nation expects, critics said.

"Double, triple and even quadruple claims are put in for the same project, because each of the partners will claim it has been responsible for the whole thing," Mott said. "So, if we have a 1,000-acre project, and all six partners claim it, the total can be published as 4,000 acres instead of 1,000."

Waterfowl managers agree the accounting issues make assessing the actual impact of the program on ducks almost impossible.

"It's been the major stumbling block to a precise and accurate tracking of the plan's accomplishments," Mott said. "I don't mean this as an excuse, but every time we've tried to implement a new system (of accounting), the partners simply haven't followed it.

"So, no, I can't accurately or with any confidence tell the duck hunter or taxpayer how much they've gotten for their buck -- how successful this program actually has been."

Copyright 2006 by The New Orleans Time-Picayune. Reprinted by permission.