The Duck Factory

A visit to the potholes and prairies of Canada is almost a pilgrimage for any worshipper of wildfowl, and, this summer, Alan Jarrett got the chance to explore this geese-filled heaven!

- Alan Jarrett

For a British wildfowler, tales of how they do things in North America are legion. Huge flocks of wildfowl almost darkening the skies, leaping off the page to inflame the imagination.

It’s not all roses, of course, for stringent bag limits are the other side of that coin. Certainly in my early wildfowling days in the ‘70s and ‘80s, there seemed to be a complex points system in place with an understandable emphasis on protecting the breeding females.

I remember reading that mallard males outnumbered females by 8:1 – hence the preponderance of ‘greenheads’ in the bags.

Yes, there are millions of ducks and geese, but there are huge numbers of wildfowlers in pursuit of them. In less enlightened times, no control on shooting led to the extinction of the seemingly limitless passenger pigeon, with bison so close to going the same way.

Hence bag limits and duck stamps – both federal and state duck stamps – designed to put money back into conserving the birds, and in particular their precious habitats. Who better or more motivated to conserve them than the hunters themselves?

The birth of Ducks Unlimited (DU) in 1937 has ensured that hunters’ money is ploughed back into conservation, with over 700,000 members raising millions of dollars on an annual basis. Those years ago, we all heard about the need to protect the prairie pothole country, for this is the ‘duck factory’ breeding grounds from whence so many quarry species come.