The pintail is a duck in crisis. No other species has toppled from such a lofty pinnacle. No other troubled species has been as ignored by waterfowl management, as evidenced by North American breeding-ground surveys which reveal that the crisis has been building for nearly half a century, as you can see in the following graph.

Figure 1. The North American pintail breeding population peaked at 10.4 million in 1956. Less than 1.8 million were counted in 2002, a decline of 83 percent. Source: USFWS.

The 83 percent decline in the pintail breeding population raises several questions. What is the cause of the collapse? Is the loss of breeding-ground habitat to blame? Is mismanagement by those entrusted to maintain and protect our flocks the cause of the decline? More importantly, can the decline be reversed?

We begin on the breeding grounds.

Pintails are among the first ducks to return northward each spring, often arriving on the breeding grounds while ice and snow still hold the prairie pothole country in cold embrace. Only mallards return as early.

In wet years, pintails descend on the prairies in great number. In dry years, many over-fly the prairies to spend the summer on the boreal forest or tundra where many do not breed.

Importantly, pintail hens do not display a strong fidelity to their previous year’s nesting site. They are highly nomadic – an evolutionary strategy designed to enable the species to quickly take advantage of re-charged wetlands, an important factor on the arid western plains. This contrasts sharply with female mallards that exhibit a strong tendency to return to the area where they previously successfully nested.

On the northern prairies pintail hens often build their nests in stubble or fallow fields. This makes the clutches vulnerable to seed drilling and spring plowing. Moreover, because pintails initiate nesting very early, as do mallards, the hens and nests are presumed more vulnerable to predators than later nesting species. Each hen lays an average of seven eggs, compared to nine for the mallards.

Importantly, pintail hens display little desire to re-nest if their first clutch is destroyed, unlike female mallards that often re-nest one, two or even three times.

All of this is key to analyzing and understanding the pintail debate.

We first turn to potholes.

As all of us know, the number of potholes on the northern prairies varies significantly from year to year depending on precipitation. An analysis of the data since 1974, the first year the Dakotas and eastern Montana were included in the pothole counts, discloses that the percentage of North American pintails found on the prairies is declining under all wetland conditions. In high water years from 1974-89, the percentage of North American pintails averaged 81 percent, declining to 67 percent from 1990-2002. In years of average water, the numbers during the same time periods dropped from 66 percent to 59 percent. In low water, the averages were 44 percent and 41 percent, respectively.

In part, these declines are blamed on the reduced acreage of grassland on the western Canadian prairies – land that once raised cattle which has been plowed under in recent decades and is now growing wheat. This suggests that tilled land is less attractive to pintails and is causing them to abandon the prairies.

A secondary result of increased tillage is that pintails are more prone to nest on cultivated fields than any other species. Studies have found that 34 percent to 57 percent of all prairie pintails nest in cropland. Because spring plowing, seed drilling and predation destroy many clutches, nest success is reduced. Studies have found nest success rates on tilled land have ranged from zero to seven percent, compared to 14 percent to 25 percent on grassland pastures.

This low success rate is exacerbated by the pintail’s reluctance to re-nest and overall nest success falls below levels necessary to maintain a stable population.

By comparison, the undisturbed breeding grounds in Alaska, Yukon and western Northwest Territories have maintained stable populations.

Thus, waterfowl-management’s apologists argue that habitat in all its manifestations is to blame for the pintail’s failure to maintain its former abundance. Not only do we have less breeding habitat, the habitat that remains is of poorer quality and reduces the pintail’s chances for reproductive success. This is why the species failed to increase significantly during the high-water years of the 1990s.

This train of thought is accepted by many waterfowlers who for the past three-quarters of a century have been conditioned like Pavlov’s dogs to believe the cause of all waterfowl evil is habitat degradation -- either temporary as with drought or permanent as with changing agricultural practices.

No one disputes the loss of northern-prairie grassland habitat, especially on the Canadian prairies. But to assign blame strictly to habitat changes ignores important other factors that must be taken into account before rendering a final judgment.

The most important of these can be seen in the population trends. All other prairie-nesting duck species increased to record and near-record levels during the wet years of the 1990s. Only the pintail failed to respond as it had in previous wet cycles and posted only a modest 30 percent increase. Is this due to habitat loss?

Two recent studies have concluded there are too few pintails today to occupy what’s left of the Canadian prairies. Bethke and Nudds (1995) examined the historical relationship between the pintail breeding population and wetland conditions for the years 1955-74. They compared the data to the year 1989 and estimated a breeding population “deficit” of 1.6 million pintails on the Canadian prairies. A follow-up study of both Canada and the United States suggested that during the wet 1990s there were still too few pintails to occupy all available habitat.

A striking example can be seen by comparing two recent years. The number of potholes jumped from 4.6 million in 1998 to 6.7 million in 1992, an increase of 2.1 million. But only 214,000 additional pintail hens in 1999 were counted on the prairies – an average of 10 new potholes for each additional hen. No one suggests 90 percent of the new potholes were unsuitable for pintail habitation.

Then we encounter the Dakotas and eastern Montana. In 1979 biologists counted 1.5 million potholes in the region and 516,000 pintail hens – an average of one hen per three potholes.

In 1999, after the Conservation Reserve Program caused the conversion of 4.7 million acres of cropland to lush nesting grassland across the region, biologists found 1.5 million potholes but only 365,000 hen pintails – a 29 percent breeding population decline on the most attractive nesting grounds on the North American continent. This works out to one pintail hen per eight potholes (and one pintail hen per 13 acres of CRP grassland).

Thus, we find that potholes outnumber pintails across the prairies and there are too few pintails to occupy all existing habitat.

Some attribute this sad state of affairs to declining juvenile production, as evidenced by the studies cited earlier that suggest decreasing nest success has reduced juvenile production below the level necessary to maintain a stable population. This conclusion becomes muddied when we compare hen age-ratios, a key indicator of reproductive success. We compare the number of juveniles per adult in hunters’ bags for the years 1974-2001 for pintails and mallards, both early nesting prairies species.

Figure 2. Long-term pintail data shows that during the past quarter- century the number of juveniles per adult has steadily increased, as indicated by the ascending trendline. Source: USFWS.

Figure 3. Long-term mallard age-ratio data suggests mallard nest success is slowly decreasing, as indicated by the downward slope of the (solid) trendline. Source: USFWS.

These graphs pose a key question: If pintail juvenile production rates are increasing, why is its population steadily declining? Additionally, why are mallard production rates

decreasing, but its population remaining stable or increasing?

This contradiction suggests something other than habitat is playing a significant role in determining the fate of our beleaguered sprig.

Thus, the data tells us the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and flyway councils are less-than-honest when their spokesmen attempt to blame ”habitat” for waterfowl management’s failure to halt the perilous decline of our pintail flocks.

We can further conclude that if waterfowl management is to truly “manage” waterfowl in any meaningful sense of the word, it must fill the great expanse of unoccupied nesting habitat with breeding hens to increase the productive efficiency of the so-called “duck factory.” The historical record reveals it not only has failed to achieve this, it has not entertained the idea. It is managerially bankrupt.

Next: Part III. The role of hunting.