Now, along comes a warming trend that has impacted the entire planet. If you are a waterfowl hunter and don’t currently support the efforts of D.U. This helps preserve North America’s waterfowl resource. Through political lobbying and habitat conservation and restoration, these groups have protected the millions of acres of nesting habitat in the Duck Factory. This is why organizations like Ducks Unlimited and Delta Waterfowl work so hard to protect the Duck Factory from human exploitation. In all probability, they won’t nest at all.
It cannot be assumed that a duck driven off a plowed-up pond will merely nest on another one. They will fight off other birds to maintain it. This wasn’t so bad for waterfowl… unless the farmer also drained potholes and tore out the natural cover around them, which they did to some extent.īreeding ducks require a certain amount of space around their nests to provide an adequate food source for their ducklings. As European settlers pushed westward, much of the prairie was ploughed up and turned into agricultural land.
The Duck Factory’s prairies are not only attractive to nesting waterfowl, they are also coveted for farming by humans. The potholes and a suitable margin of cover around them are vital to maintaining strong waterfowl populations. Breeding success in this area determines the abundance of ducks that filter down the flyways each fall and hopefully check out your decoys. This is a land of vast prairies, dotted with innumerable shallow ponds, or potholes. More than 80 percent of the continent’s waterfowl nesting habitat lies within the “Duck Factory”: North Dakota, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. Since we are talking about a North American breeding duck population of some 40 million birds, this requires an awful lot of nesting habitat-both wetlands and prairies. In order to have a lot of ducks, we need places where the birds can nest and raise their broods. In order to have good duck hunting, we need a lot of ducks. This article, is about how a warming planet will affect ducks and duck hunting. Wait, don’t touch that dial! (as they used to say in the early days of radio.) If you are as tired as I am of arguments about climate change, be at ease.
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