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North Dakota’s 58th annual duck brood survey produced a combined bag of outcomes headlined by a 79 % leap in brood numbers over 2021 and an 88 % leap over the long-term common. However, like with most waterfowl survey outcomes, there’s extra occurring than meets the attention, North Dakota Sport and Fish migratory recreation chicken administration supervisor Mike Szymanski tells Outside Life.
The rise in brood numbers follows up drearier outcomes from the 76th annual breeding survey in Might, which confirmed only a 1.5 % improve within the total duck index from 2022. That also accounts for a 39 % improve within the duck index over the long-term common. Szymanski bolstered that some celebration is actually so as.
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“The ten,000-foot view could be that we had a mixture of good inhabitants within the spring going into the breeding season, and fairly good situations. It labored out fairly nicely regardless of our challenges with declining nesting habitat on the panorama,” Szymanski says. “So it was a type of Goldilocks years. It was a powerful yr for manufacturing.
“However,” he continues, “if we had the grass that we had 10 years in the past, it might need been an absolute blockbuster of a yr.”
By that, Szymanski means the outcomes would have been lightyears higher if habitat availability had been what it was a decade or two in the past. The state has misplaced greater than two thirds of its CRP acreage within the final 15 years, down from 3.4 million acres in 2008 to roughly 1 million acres this yr. Because of this, dabbling duck numbers are manner down and diving duck numbers comprise a lot of the lauded 80-percent improve, although a lot of northern North Dakota is in extreme or reasonable drought.
“If you put it in context, it begins to not look fairly pretty much as good,” he says, noting that the composition of the brood index speaks volumes about what’s actually occurring. “We’ve file brood numbers this yr for diving geese. However they nest over water, so that they’re not affected by the lack of CRP. They’re extra impacted by the nice wetland situations we had, which began final yr and carried over into this yr. So these diving geese made a a lot greater contribution to the duck brood index than they usually do, about thrice greater than regular. However then while you have a look at our dabbling duck numbers in comparison with once we had much more CRP, say 1994 to 2000, and just about all of our dabbling geese are under that common. The one species that was actually above that index had been gadwall.”
He pointed at mallards as a selected instance of the dabbling duck fall-off. From 1994 to 2020, the common duck brood index for mallards was 130 broods. This yr, NDGF counted 104.
“It’s an excellent quantity, it’s higher than the long-term common, but it surely’s nonetheless a good bit under what we had been seeing once we had plenty of CRP,” Szymanski says. “That’s the distinction between good and nice.”
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On the finish of the day, Szymanski says he’s making an attempt to be a realist reasonably than a pessimist in regards to the state of affairs as a complete. And when he appears to be like on the numbers from a nationwide perspective—a few of which had been simply launched within the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s annual waterfowl survey outcomes—he says North Dakota shall be a vivid spot for duck hunters this fall.
“Folks get the incorrect impression generally after they see the duck brood numbers are up 80 %. Properly, it’s simply higher than what it was final yr. However nonetheless, it provides a shining level for duck manufacturing,” he says. “Simply trying on the breeding inhabitants numbers from Might throughout the continent, it appears to be like like North Dakota was the stronghold for the place plenty of geese settled. We had fairly good wetland situations, so we’re kind of a [standout] in a bigger continental inhabitants that didn’t accomplish that nicely.”
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