I begin this analysis by making four assumptions:

1) Canada must continue to be an important source of duck production for the North American continent’s fall flight.

2) Intensive management will not significantly augment natural production.

3) Canada needs an influential hunting community if traditional North American duck hunting is to continue.

4) The Canadian waterfowling community needs a proactive, influential advocate(s).

These factors will play a pivotal role in determining the future of American duck hunting.

Historically, Canada has produced most of the ducks that constituted the fall fight. However, extensive breeding habitat degradation and outright loss, particularly on its part of the prairie “duck factory,” has diminished the potential of ducks to sustain large, species-diverse fall flights. The Conservation Reserve Program in the United States gave duck managers and hunters a reprieve, but it couldn’t compensate for the loss of productivity on the Canadian prairie. Furthermore, CRP is an agricultural program – not a wildlife conservation initiative. It is vulnerable to termination, with dire consequences for duck production. The Canadian prairie will never meaningfully recover its potential to produce ducks. This is true even with a government-based land- use policy that includes sustaining harvestable levels of ducks. But such a policy would help. What Canada needs is a program like CRP.

From the beginning, management to augment natural production has been part of the objectives of professional managers. Government agencies like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and non-governmental organizations like Ducks Unlimited traditionally have been committed to this concept. More recently, however, the service has been getting out of intensive management of ducks in favor of more broadly based landscape management. Even though DU is still in the business of intensive management, it is becoming overwhelmed by the enormity of the task. In reality management’s initiatives cannot produce meaningful numbers of ducks. Indeed, even on the prairie where intensive management has been most effective, it’s unlikely that it ever has augmented production by more than five percent of the fall flight, hardly something noticeable to hunters. It will be the vast, unmanaged and unmanageable hinterlands of the northern breeding grounds that produce the ducks that hunters of the future will see over their decoys.

Traditionally, Canadians were hunters and the public was supportive of this important part of our outdoor heritage. Furthermore, sportsmen’s groups and outdoor writers kept hunting issues before the public. Ducks Unlimited Canada (DUC) was a nationally influential organization that proactively advocated for hunter’s interests and rights. All of this has changed dramatically in that last two decades. The waterfowling community is declining dramatically, there is little recruitment of young hunters, the public is less supportive, and there are few in the media who are able to provide hunting with a positive profile. DUC, as distinct from DU in the States, still ostensibly supports hunting as a part of Canada’s outdoor heritage but will grudgingly say so only if asked. It will not advocate for hunters, much less promote hunting. In fact, it has significantly distanced itself from hunting, its history and its roots. DUC is going the way of DU in Australia, where this organization has changed its name to reflect its reality and perhaps distance itself from its past. Like Australia, Canada is becoming increasingly an urbanized country, a very different place than the historical perception many people still have of it. Canada’s stringent gun ownership restrictions attest to the country’s profound change in attitude toward hunting.

What then can hunters do to protect their interests? It is highly unlikely that managers will ever produce more than one in 20 of the ducks that fly across the decoys of American hunters. If so, perhaps the best thing we can do is shoot fewer ducks and thereby send more back to the breeding grounds. Across much of the breeding grounds, there is more habitat than ducks to occupy it. It is a myth that more habitats alone will produce more ducks. This is not to say that continuing to acquire habitat is not worthwhile. It is, but we have to keep all of this in perspective. Scarce resources are sometimes better spent in other ways, such as dealing with the social/political threats to the future of hunting. Who, for example, will advocate for hunters in Canada? Who does the Canadian hunter turn to for support?

The Delta Waterfowl Foundation’s mission statement identifies itself as an unequivocal advocate, and its policies and initiatives are true to this objective. In general, it puts its money where its mouth is in a country where few are willing to commit or even acknowledge support for hunting. The question is, can Delta get the job done? Delta has a long enough track record for hunters to judge it. As a research facility, Delta has been around since the 1940s, but it has been aggressively promoting itself as the hunter’s advocate for less than a decade.

On the issue of augmenting natural production, Delta is committed to predator management, and it has shown experimentally that it can be effective. But, since governments won’t invest in predator management, hunters will have to bank roll it. If hunters embrace this concept, then they will at some point expect to see results. It would cost an enormous amount to implement predator management on a scale that would show obvious results. It is at best a high risk management tool that has only ever had modest success, even when the USFWS and other professional management agencies and organizations like DU were committed to it, which is no longer the case. Delta would be doing this largely on their own and one has to ask if money and other resources would be better invested in other initiatives.

Delta also seems prepared to support doubtful concepts on the basis of providing hunter opportunity. The assumption is that hunters will be satisfied only if they have enough ducks to kill. The concern of course is with further declines in the hunting community. Delta supports personal restraint but downplays hunting as a significant factor in the decline of species like scaup and pintails. It supports the concept that low numbers are the result of poor production not so much hunting mortality. In fact, low numbers, especially of key species preferred by hunters, are the result of both. The only thing that we have any meaningful control over is hunting mortality.

Despite this criticism, it’s easy to find reasons to support Delta, starting with the fact that it’s the only national voice for duck hunting in Canada. It lobbies the federal and provincial governments and it provides at least some profile for hunting with the public. Delta is spearheading initiatives like a CPR-like program in Canada, acting on the belief that only hunters will promote initiatives that may sustain harvestable levels of ducks. This is a more productive way to increase duck production. As far as most Canadians are concerned, there are plenty of ducks. Without a strong vocal Canadian hunting community issues important to hunters will remain very low priorities with the public and, consequently, governments.

Delta has just produced a document that should earn it a vote of confidence among hunters. A Report on the Development of a Waterfowl Hunting Advocacy and Waterfowler Recruitment Program for North America, is a case of doing what it says it will. This is something the waterfowling community should have had for decades, and it should have been part of the 1980s North American Waterfowl Management Plan (NAWMP).

If there is any hope of reversing the decline in Canadian duck hunters, it will be through initiatives like this. Delta has shown leadership with its youth hunter program and other aspects of hunter education. And there just may be a ray of hope in selling hunting to the increasingly urbanized public as a socially responsible activity. Social workers are recognizing that risk-taking is an important part of a young male’s development and hunting provides many opportunities for boys and young men to pursue safe, socially acceptable activities. Delta is on the right track with its education initiative.

Delta’s Adopt-A-Pothole initiative is a more cost-effective way of helping nature produce ducks. Unlike predator management, which involves significantly reducing predator populations, it is a concept that can be sold to non-hunters and hunters alike. This program is based on research originally conducted by Delta that shows how small, widely dispersed potholes are critical to duck production on the prairies. Protecting this habitat is essential for sustaining populations of species important to hunters. This initiative is a worthwhile investment for Delta and for hunters who want to do something positive for the future of their sport.

The North American duck hunting community was greatly diminished when it lost the services of Ducks Unlimited Canada. DU had the profile, the infra-structure, the influence with governments, and many other elements important to safeguarding duck hunting in Canada. It may have been a good, perhaps essential corporate shift in philosophy, but it left duck hunters in limbo. Delta is trying to pick up the slack by building a public profile that clearly advocates for hunters. Supporting it is a good way a duck hunter can invest in his future.

This is not to say that Delta should be beyond criticism. Recently, it withdrew from the NAWMP’s Prairie Joint Venture. Apparently it could no longer support professional management’s initiatives to produce more ducks on the prairie. Rightfully so, Delta claimed it hadn’t produced enough ducks to make the expenditure worthwhile. But this move is questionable because it removes Delta as a key player in a network of government agencies and private sector organizations that is critical to the future of North American duck hunting. Hunters have lost DU Canada as an effective part of the network and now Delta’s influence is gone, too.

Delta has been around since the 1940s but its recent rise as the duck hunter’s advocate has been encouraging, if not without some growing pains. It’s on the right track and deserves the hunter’s support, but this support cannot be uncritical. It’s the only organization in Canada that will proactively represent waterfowl hunters. It’s not too strong a statement to say that the future of duck hunting in Canada is tied to Delta’s success. That alone would be worthy of support.

In the final analysis, American hunters not only need Canada, but they need the support of both hunting and non-hunting Canadians, too.