Duck Population Survey in North Dakota

BISMARCK, ND (trfnews.i234.me) The North Dakota Game and Fish Department releases the results from latest duck survey.
*Video provided by North Dakota Game and Fish Department.
welcome to this week’s edition of outdoors online a weekly webcast produced by the North Dakota Game and Fish Department I’m your host Tom Jensen we’re going to talk waterfowl this week my guest is Mike Szymanski Mike is the head waterfowl biologist here at Game and Fish Mike you and your crews are compiling data that you gathered from your breeding duck monitoring efforts that you do this time of year exactly what are the bleeding duck efforts monitoring it well Tom we do a survey every year in May to figure out how our duck populations and habitat conditions are in the state we run a transect I run north and south they pretty much run from the South Dakota border up to the Canadian border and they’re run by two crew two-man crews on each of the transects and we we tie them a little bit with migration here sometimes they’re a little bit earlier later in the month of May okay what do you do as you drive these transects so as we’re as we’re driving along we we make a lot of stops along the way we’re usually puting along fairly slowly counting all the water classifying the water types and then counting all the ducks and geese on the water and we’re also calling out the social groups like how the how the groups of Ducks are composed whether it’s like three males and one female or a pair and we also do it by species and that gives us an indication of kind of the breeding effort and and what we may or may not be seeing because the pens that are up in the grass nesting I assume that’s why you do it in May right we want to make sure that the birds have kind of settled out and are on breeding territories are a little bit more active a little bit more consistent than what they’re doing as you get later in the year you start a bird that are moving off on the molt migrations or grouping up groups of males that are grouping up as hens or taking broods off for brood rearing so it’s really the best period for consistent counts and you’ve also got a consideration for vegetation growth that you don’t want to be too late in May where you might have a lot of obstruction by cattails and other growing vegetation and what that would hide the Ducks from it this is an effort that’s been going on for a long time right this is our 70th annual May duck survey in North Dakota so it’s quite likely the the longest waterfowl survey possibly even in the world that’s been done to this extent snow secret we’ve had a pretty dry spring how’s the water situation yeah so our survey efforts had a an interesting count where you know we came out of winter with a lot of snow mount we’re expecting our wetland counts to be out the special in our ephemeral wetlands that are temporary and seasonal wetlands we expect those to dry out throughout the summer but we broke winter fairly early and we came out with some pretty hot dry windy conditions and we started losing those wetlands quite early so our survey counted a lot of wetlands or at least a decent number our number was quite a bit higher than last year and we’re pretty close to the long-term average on a wetland count but the condition of those wetlands was not very good as we were counting them they were in the process of drying up some of them look like they were just kind of hanging on you know that’s not the most attractive situation for Ducks to settle and they have a knack for recognizing that because they need to know what their what their home is going to be like for a while so you know we had a decent count during survey but since then we’ve really dried up and I think most of the state recognizes that with drought conditions and a real lack of precipitation in in the last three months you know the northeast and east central part of the states had a little bit more rainfall so they’re probably doing a little bit better but yeah it’s been a little tough lately and and we could use some rain another downside I guess to the duck populations and the monitoring efforts that you’re doing is of course the loss of CRP or grasslands of any kind right those those are perennial grass habitats are really important for ground nesting birds not only not only waterfowl but other other birds that are nesting on as an example but yeah the the waterfowl breeding in the state primarily doc says have definitely been taken a hit on places to successfully raise and asked over the last few years we’ve got less than half as much CRP as we did in 2007 so as we dry up we’ll start seeing the effects of not having CRP anymore where we’ve had a couple years we’ve kind of gotten lucky with abundant water and in Ducks can kind of get lucky and make a few odds and ends meet when they have lots and lots of water but when you don’t have lots and lots of water and you don’t have much CRP it’s going to be very tough well big question what’s the monitoring effort showing while we’re down about 15% again from last year we’ve had a series of years now where we’ve been sort of progressively lower and lower and lower on our population estimates we have an estimate this year of 2.9 five million breeding ducks in the state which is the first time we’ve dropped below three million Birds since 1994 it is still a big number it’s it’s 23 percent above the long-term average going back to 1948 so we still have a lot of ducks but it is a fairly stark number in that it’s the lowest one we’ve had since we’ve gone into this new era of really really good waterfowl conditions in North Dakota it’s not the kind of trend that you want to see right and we’re sort of getting to that point in the trend where we don’t know you know if we’re going to bounce back or if we’re going to break into some of the kind of old time numbers where we start comparing our breeding population estimate the numbers against stuff we saw in the 1670s did you see any surprises it wasn’t too terribly surprising I mean we kind of knew with the snowfall and ensuing dry conditions what things were going to look like but there were some areas that really did not have waterfowl really settling in them that typically one would think you’d see more around and part of that was just it weren’t there weren’t many seasonal basins a lot of the water was large just kind of big consolidated basins and not a lot of grass on the landscape in those places really did not have many ducks can you kind of summarize what this fall might look like for waterfowl hunters boy it’s it’s a wild card right now that’s for sure other than knowing that most of the western part of the state is very dry right now it’s it’s tough to know we probably aren’t going to have very good reproduction in the state this year for ducks our early season hunting could suffer a little bit for that after that you know as we all know it gets into weathered patterns and in production and there is the north of us and it’s just really hard to know how that could work out I mean we’ve had some some pretty tough years for migration with really nice Falls the last couple years it’s hard to know if we’ll get that again the good thing is is that Saskatchewan seems like it’s set up fairly well for production so we’re not we’re not overly concerned about continental dock populations at this point but you know one one piece of the puzzle is lagging behind right now and I do that all right Mike thanks at that time for information on upcoming seasons educational programs conservation and other North Dakota Game and Fish Department activities visit our website at gfd gov org you can follow us on facebook at WWF facebook.com slash ND g and app for mike Szymanski and the rest of the staff here at North Dakota Game and Fish thanks for joining us for outdoors online we’ll see you again next week