Population biology is based on a fundamental law. If deaths exceed births, the population will decline. If the opposite occurs, the population will increase. The difference between births and deaths over time determines the rate of population change.

The birth-death relationship means that waterfowl managers have three options if they want to rebuild our flocks. They can increase births (production management). They can decrease deaths (harvest management). They can do both.

Historically, two organizations have played a dominant role in developing our waterfowl management strategies – Ducks Unlimited and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. DU is viewed by most hunters as the leader in attempting to increase natural production by securing breeding habitat and boosting productivity by manipulating water levels. The USFWS is viewed as the agency responsible for setting hunting regulations to allow for an annual harvest without over-shooting our breeding stocks.

How well the combined efforts of the two organizations have succeeded depends on who you ask. But since the 1945 publication of Kip Farrington’s book, The Ducks Came Back, which celebrated DU’s grassroots movement to restore Canadian breeding grounds after the devastating 1930s prairie drought, the impression left by professional management is that without assisting nature there would be few ducks to hunt.

Is this true?

To determine our answer, we must first look at our efforts to acquire and manipulate breeding habitat. Hunters rarely ask biologists how many ducks are produced on conservation wetlands. When they do, few receive meaningful answers. The reason is that no biologist can answer this question with precision, few will speculate, and some apparently have never thought about it.

Importantly, DU is not alone in securing habitat. The USFWS estimated its wildlife refuges and waterfowl production areas produce on average about two million ducks per year. DU makes no estimate, although its production is considered by many biologists to be less.

An estimated two million additional ducks are produced on CRP lands in the northern prairies of the United States, although this cannot be considered a strict waterfowl conservation program. Another two million are believed “saved” each year from lead poisoning through the mandatory use of nontoxic shot. Therefore, I believe that no more than 10 percent of the fall flight can be attributed to management habitat efforts.

My estimate may be overly generous. Many biologists privately estimate the number to be no more than five percent.

The problem can be seen in 1999 -- the year of the 100 million fall flight. Did our habitat efforts really produce 10 million ducks? If so, where were they produced? I have never heard any biologist hazard a guess.

The requirement for habitat is intuitively obvious, but this analysis tells us there is little likelihood habitat management can significantly increase the fall flight. It puts into perspective Ducks Unlimited’s mantra – “More habitat on the ground means more ducks in the sky.”

The prairie “duck factory” is the continent’s main producer of ducks, and it must continue this role if populations are to be rebuilt. No other landscape comes close to the productivity of the prairies. For this reason it is the only place where intensive management is cost effective. However, securing and managing prairie habitat over the decades has done little to stave off the devastating impact of modern agriculture. This is discouragingly obvious on the Canadian prairies.

Prairie farmers beset with many problems are unlikely to be interested in changing their practices to produce more ducks. Without government land-use policies that specifically address the needs of wildlife, our attempts to secure enough habitat to significantly increase duck production will always fall short.

The continent’s unmanaged wetlands determine the size of the fall flight. Acquiring more habitat will not automatically translate into a bountiful fall flight. It is noteworthy that on parts of the breeding grounds, including the prairies, there are not enough ducks to occupy the currently available habitat.

Is investing more money in intensive management the answer to bolstering natural production? We know, for example, that predation is having a devastating affect on prairie duck production. Predator management has always been an important and potentially effective management tool. However, DU has flatly stated that it is no longer in the business of predator management. It claims the impact of nest predation is greatly reduced when there is plenty of good quality upland habitat. This is true but the problem is that habitat is seriously degraded across much of the prairie breeding grounds.

Delta Waterfowl has stepped into the breach, espousing the benefits of predator control. But to be meaningful, predator management would have to be done on a large scale across the prairies. It would be impractical elsewhere. A prairie-wide predator control program would require a huge financial investment -- money that will have to come from hunters. Predator management can boost production, but it isn’t the panacea that everyone seems to be searching for. It is no more the answer than securing more habitat. It’s simply one tool available to managers.

Even if we take the optimistic view that we currently produce 10 percent of the fall flight, this percentage would have to increase significantly to make an obvious, visible improvement in the fall flight.

Keep in mind that we shoot more ducks each season than we produce on conservation wetlands, dispelling the myth that we put back what we take.

If production management as currently pursued is unlikely to rebuild populations, then we better hope that reducing deaths will achieve our goal. The cornerstone of harvest management -- the ability to regulate bag limits and season lengths -- is based on the assumption that hunters can potentially kill too many ducks. We know this is true. But how many is too many? The answer is that nobody knows.

Some biologists are convinced there is no need to further restrict the harvest. This has created a divisive and often acrimonious debate over how many ducks hunters can safely kill without reducing our breeding stocks. It is obvious that there is a theoretical threshold beyond which killing more ducks matters. This is dependent on what species and population is in question. Many biologists believe that while hunting may not have caused the decline of heavily hunted species like pintails and scaup, hunting during a period of the most liberal regulations in decades may be slowing or preventing their recovery, as has happened with the black duck. Because nobody knows for sure what the threshold is for any species, it follows that utmost caution should determine our hunting regulations to prevent further declines in our breeding populations.

Complicating our ability to restore populations is the fact that a good breeding season is invariably the impetus to liberalize hunting regulations. I recall the preamble to Wisconsin’s hunting regulations the year the most recent prairie drought broke. It was “rewarding” hunters for their “patience” by easing restrictions.

It is important to note the science that underpins waterfowl management is not as precise and comprehensive as some claim. If it were, after seven decades of research and field experience, we could better predict the size of the fall flight, the number of ducks we produce, and the impact of hunting on breeding populations.

The Adaptive Harvest Management (AHM) model that serves today as the basis for setting hunting regulations represents an improvement over past population models, but it has flaws that call for caution. For example, the model uses banding data that works reasonably well for prairie mallards, but has little predictive value for other key species, even other mallard populations.

Its greatest flaw is maximizing the long-term kill of mallards. How can we attempt this on a continental scale with an imprecise model and a paucity of quality data? AHM may be the best system to date, but this does not mean it is good enough to perform all the tasks we ask of it.

While we work toward developing models for other beleaguered species, we should assume that hunting is a factor in slowing their recovery. Management’s failure to take this into account reveals the prevailing attitude among those who set regulations and the formidable bureaucratic resistance to change within the ultraconservative, inflexible U.S. Fish and Wildlife service. Private sector organizations for their part also seem loathe to call for a reduced kill, seemingly convinced that initiatives to augment natural production will eventually work.

Waterfowl management often reassures us that plenty of ducks are out there somewhere. Yet it never cites the precise locations of these concentrations. If hunters cannot find the ducks, and they are looking, it’s a good bet that they do not exist. This concern has spurred many hunters to ask for more harvest restrictions. One is the Minnesota group that calls itself the Concerned Duck Hunters Panel. It consists of older, experienced hunters, many of whom are retired professionals who have been associated with waterfowl management since its early days. They know management’s history and limitations.

The Arkansas Wildlife Federation’s Duck Committee is a voice for conservation from a state synonymous with killing ducks. The committee thinks the unthinkable and speaks the unspeakable in suggesting recent disappointingly poor duck seasons are partly the result of shooting too many ducks. These individuals are not prophets of doom and gloom. Their legitimate concern is borne of experience.

There also are a number of biologists who are concerned that we may be killing too many ducks, but find it difficult to publicly express their belief. Political pressures from outside the system make it difficult to speak out – or to manage solely on the basis of sound biology. Parochial interests that play out through political interference have always compromised biologically based waterfowl management.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service increasingly avoids the problems we face. During its early years, rebuilding our flocks was its primary focus. Today, it expresses much less interest in sustaining an abundance of ducks.

The waterfowl community needs a frank and honest debate between hunters and professionals about duck hunting’s future. Thoughtful, credible hunters are demanding more openness. They do not want to be brushed aside and told what to think.

Our future can be glimpsed in the birth-death equation. If our professional waterfowl management system cannot meaningfully increase births through production initiatives, and it will not reduce deaths through more restrictive hunting regulations, how will it restore populations, especially if (as many hunters believe) mortality today is exceeding recruitment?