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Our waterfowl banding crew, Byron Mitchell, Christine Fallon, and Brad Rabalais, and I arrived in southern Manitoba on the evening August 1st in an area on the fringe on the Prairie Pothole Region and the Parklands- a waterfowlers paradise. I look forward to this month every year starting on the day we leave for home from the year before.
This was the first time to Canada for two of the crew members, so we spent the first full day driving around the area familiarizing everyone with the landscape and surrounding communities. We launched the airboat the next day and began the search for ducks.
This marsh has always been full of ducks in the past, so I was surprised when after 30 minutes of boating that it was eerily quiet. No ducks in the air and none on the water. It was discouraging, but I had an idea that they may be back in the cattails still molting their wing feathers. The water was a bit higher than last year, so we started exploring the backwaters of the marsh in the thick cattails. We were in luck; the ducks were here!
We found large groups of molting wigeon, gadwall, and our target species-mallards. This isn’t totally out of the ordinary, but there are typically some larger groups of flighted (post-molt) mallards present in addition to the molting flocks. This year, they were all still molting. I estimate the peak of wing molt was about two weeks later than normal. After the excitement of finding the ducks, we decided on a few locations to start baiting and hopefully set some swim-in traps. The rest is history. Sites baited, traps set, ducks caught, rinse and repeat for the next 20 days. We finished the month banding a little over 3,000 ducks and 2,500 of those were mallards.
I can’t stress enough how important the data from this effort is to managing waterfowl populations across the county. But there is another reason it is so important to me. The act of being in the marsh or on the prairie and out from behind the computer, is essential to maintaining a connection with the very resource I work so hard to protect. With the dependence on technology, one doesn’t have leave the office for much. This is an annual opportunity to reinvigorate the passion for waterfowl and other migratory birds that we all had at the beginning of our careers. Hands on with the creatures. Learning their habits and predicting their next move. Witnessing the early stages of the fall migration of shorebirds, sandhill cranes, warblers, and other migratory birds. I’ve only seen 2 wild whooping cranes in my life – both were while banding ducks in Canada. All of this together is what keeps me going and motivated in my career: the sights and sounds of the marsh, and the fact that we are capturing great data for the benefit of waterfowl management.
