By Doug Leier
In the most basic of explanations, the lack of snow this winter and late arrival of spring rain was not as helpful for ducks but better for pheasants. But let’s take a closer look.
The number of rooster’s heard crowing during the North Dakota Game and Fish Department’s 2024 spring pheasant crowing count survey was up 37% statewide from last year.
“This is really good news but expected, considering we had such great production last year and the mild winter we had certainly wasn’t hard on birds,” said RJ Gross, Department upland game management biologist.
The primary regions holding pheasants showed 28.8 crows per stop in the southwest, up from 19.5 in 2023; 21.5 crows per stop in the northwest, up from 16.6; and 16 crows per stop in the southeast, up from 12.8.
Barring untimely heavy rains, cool weather or hail, Gross expects more good news from the the pheasant hatch, the results of which will show up in the late August brood survey.
“The residual cover this year was great … with timely rains, the habitat for nesting looks great,” Gross said. “We should be setting up for a good fall.”
But what was good for the pheasants and most upland game was not as beneficial for ducks.
The spring breeding duck survey conducted in May showed an index of about 2.9 million birds, down from 3.4 million last year.
The 2024 breeding duck index was the 30th highest on record and stands at 17% above the long-term (1948-2023) average, according to Mike Szymanski, Department migratory game bird supervisor.
“By and large, all species were flat to down. Mallards, for instance, were down about 19%, pintails were down about 29% and blue-winged teal down roughly 13%,” he said. “These species being down from last year is one thing, but when you compare it back to what we consider to be one of our best periods for breeding ducks in North Dakota (1994-2016), we’re down a lot more than that. So overall, mallards, pintails, blue-winged teal, gadwall, wigeon and northern shovelers are down anywhere from 24-49% from that 1994 to 2016 time period.”
Szymanski said the decline in breeding duck numbers has a lot to do with the loss of CRP and perennial grasses on the landscape used for nesting cover by ducks.
“While our overall duck population count this year was about 2.9 million birds, that hardly compares to 5.4 million in 2002, our record-high,” he said. “So, we’re down considerably and were getting into this realm of a lower average where we probably won’t be above 3 million breeding ducks very often based on our landscape conditions.”
“Coming out of winter, we were certainly quite dry after having a mostly open winter across the state, but it rained a fair bit in the 30 days leading up to our survey, so that kept it from being really dry,” Szymanski said. “At the time of our survey, wetland conditions were considered ‘fair.’ We had a lot of new water on the landscape during the survey that really wasn’t there when ducks were moving through.”
On the bright side, Szymanski said, rains in late May and into June were a boon for renesting opportunities and nesting probability in general for ducks.
“There should be a pretty good nesting effort by ducks this year in what upland nesting habitat is available,” he said. “Wetlands are in much better shape now and there should be a really good renesting effort for those birds that had nests destroyed by predators.”
Szymanski cautions waterfowl hunters about reading too much into survey numbers just yet. He said that while the mid-continent duck populations aren’t what they once were, we’ll know more once the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service releases their survey results sometime in late August.
“It can be really hard to predict what our fall hunting is going to be like from what we see in the May survey,” he said. “But throughout summer, we’ll have our July duck brood survey, and we’ll have a fall wetland survey in September to kind of give last looks at what production was like in the state, and then also what wetland conditions are like leading into the hunting season. It’s always important to check back and see what our surveys are showing us that we do throughout the year.”
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