Texas Wildlife (October 2010)
By
Henry Chappell
My friend Kevin called on a Friday morning and said, “We’re all over the geese. Pack your stuff and get out here.”
An hour later, I pulled out of my driveway and headed northwest for the High Plains.
Snow began to fall in Childress. By Estelline, I could barely see the road.
I checked into a motel in Canyon just after dark. Snow blown under the door to my room had piled into a two-inch drift on the carpet. I turned the heater on high and called Kevin. He and his friend Bob were painting decoys
He said, “We’ll pick you up at 3:30 in the morning.”
They arrived at 3:15. It was nine degrees. The snow drift had grown half an inch overnight. As I got into Bob’s pickup, I noticed what looked like a thousand decoys in the bed. We headed north.
A couple hundred decoys, actually. We unloaded them an hour later in a frozen milo field while Kevin’s Lab, Lori, and Bob’s dogs, a young Lab-Chesapeake mix, and General, an elderly Lab, snorted about in the dark.
Our “confidence decoys,” sandhill crane silhouettes mounted on spikes, proved troublesome. We couldn’t stab the frozen ground deep enough to keep them upright.
We set out the decoys as best we could, chiseled our shallow “pits” and lay down to die of hypothermia.
The dogs plopped down amid the decoys. I think old General went to sleep.
We pulled down our camo masks and watched the sky over a roost playa a mile away.
I was a quail hunter who occasionally hunted waterfowl – mostly jump-shooting mallards off stock tanks or occasionally surprising a wood duck in the bend of a creek.
Despite all that Kevin had told me about High Plains goose hunting, I simply wasn’t prepared for the sight and sound of what must have been thousands of geese lifting off a roost playa at sunrise.
“Cloud” of geese seems cliché but “swarm” or “flock” doesn’t come close.
There was no need for calling. The geese were heading our way. Kevin and Bob had them patterned. The din grew. For several seconds they sounded like they were on top of us, but lying back in the blind, I couldn’t see them. Then they were there, a hundred times more snow geese than I’d ever seen.
I fired. Nothing fell. The honking began to fade.
We sat up. Kevin and Bob sent dogs after a pair of snow geese. I hadn’t heard them shoot.
In less than five minutes, my perception of Texas waterfowl hunting changed forever, as did my definition of “maniac.”
Most of the waterfowl that migrate along the central flyway winter in Texas. In any given year, depending on the vagaries of weather, California, Louisiana, or Texas, could lead the nation’s waterfowl harvest.
We’ve all read the pioneer and market hunter accounts of hundreds of ducks shot in a single day. Surely, nineteenth century waterfowl numbers were beyond anything we can imagine. Even biologists can only guess.
Yet we’re presently enjoying – or enjoying again – a golden era of waterfowl hunting, though conditions are much changed from the old days – a fact that says much about the adaptability of most species of waterfowl.
“People tend to have short memories and pine for the good old days,” said Kevin Kraai, Texas Parks & Wildlife Department’s assistant waterfowl program leader. “Actually things are as good as they’ve been in a very long time.”
This past spring, record rainfall in northern plains states, where many dabbling ducks nest, kept tractors out of the fields during most of the planting season. As much as three quarters of the cropland in North and South Dakota remained fallow – a tough break for farmers, Fat City for pintails and mallards.
Although overall numbers were down in last year’s counts, Kraai expects increased recruitment (reproduction) numbers to more than make up for the slight drop in the adult bird population.
Likewise, goose prospects look much improved over last year, when a late thaw on arctic nesting grounds ruined the hatch. This year, news from the Great White North indicates an excellent hatch of snow geese, Canada geese, and white-fronted geese.
“This year, we might actually have a few geese that will drop into decoys instead of old, educated birds that have been up and down the fly way a few times,” Kraai said.
Looking back beyond the 1950s, when careful waterfowl surveying began, we have to rely mostly on historical descriptions of waterfowl numbers. In the modern era, the 1970s serve as the gold standard against which biologists measure progress and decline.
“No question that the seventies are the kind of era we shoot for,” Kraai said. “Conditions and populations were excellent across the board. The goals associated with the North American Waterfowl Management Plan were established with that decade in mind.”
The 1980s brought extended drought to the U.S. and Canadian prairie. Nesting success plummeted. TPW responded with shortened seasons – as little as 39 days - and much-reduced bag limits.
At the same time, habitat destruction became a primary concern as records indicated that some 53 percent of the original 221 million acres of wetlands in the United States had been destroyed by agriculture and development. Losses were nearly as drastic in Canada.
In response, the U.S. and Canadian governments reached a formal agreement in 1986 known as the North American Waterfowl Management Plan. Mexico became a signatory in 1994. The plan addresses local and regional wetland habitat concerns through partnerships or “joint ventures” between the federal, state, provincial, and tribal governments, conservation organizations, individuals, and business.
At the same time, organizations such as Ducks Unlimited gained momentum as hunters began to realize the link between loss of breeding habitat and overall duck numbers.
Under the North American Waterfowl Management Plan, joint ventures have invested $4.5 billion to protect and restore nearly 16 million acres of waterfowl habitat.
At the same time, 98 cents of every dollar raised through the purchase of federal ducks stamps went (and goes) to habitat conservation and restoration.
With the Farm Bill of 1985 came the Conservation Reserve Program, a U.S. Department of Agriculture cost-share initiative that encouraged farmers to convert highly-erodible cropland to native or domestic cover. In other words, the federal government paid farmers to take land out of production and plant erosion-staunching vegetation
The Farm Bill of 1990 broadened the program to include pasture converted to wetland or otherwise set aside as wildlife habitat. Almost overnight, millions of acres of marginal cropland were converted to grassland and wetland.
“For the first time, we really had a true landscape-level change,” Kraai said. “Literally billions of dollars were available for grassland programs.”
Then the long drought broke. Record rains fell on key northern plains states in 1995, and again in 1998. Everything came together.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service surveys showed overall duck numbers bottoming out at around 25 million in 1990. By the late 1990s, the North American duck population had rebounded to nearly 45 million, a population not seen since the late 1950s. Except for the pintail, lesser scaup, and black duck, all of the popular game species increased or held their own.
As it goes on the northern plains, so goes Texas. Mid-winter surveys show duck numbers trending upward from 1997, with peaks of around 4.5 million in 1999, and over 5 million in 2009. Again, 2010 numbers were down slightly, at just under 4 million, but excellent breeding ground conditions should produce a rise in 2011.
Although, excellent waterfowl hunting can be found in all ten Texas ecological regions, three are especially important in terms of wintering populations: the High Plains, Rolling Plains, Pineywoods, and Coastal Prairies and Marshes.
From the beginning, the North American Waterfowl Management Plan identified the Playa Lakes region of the High Plains as a high priority. Long famous for its goose hunting, the region is an important migration route for nearly all waterfowl – particularly waterfowl heading north. Surveys show peak numbers from early to mid-spring.
Siltation from agricultural runoff poses the largest threat to the playa lakes, especially in the cotton-growing areas in southern Panhandle. Simply put, soil in cotton fields is highly exposed much of the year. Heavy rain washes it into playas. Over time, playas fill in and no longer serve as wetlands.
Runoff can be reduced by buffer areas of grass and other native vegetation. Landowners can receive technical guidance from Texas Parks & Wildlife Department, the Natural Resources Conservation Service and other agencies.
Kraai calls Texas’s 24 million-acre Rolling Plains region “the country’s biggest wildlife refuge.”
“The Rolling Plains region is doing better than it has any time in history,” he said. “The primary habitat is thousands of manmade stock ponds, and they’re becoming more abundant by the day. You never see huge concentrations of ducks, but five or ten here and there add up quick.”
Furthermore, Rolling Plains hunters concentrate on deer and quail. Wintering waterfowl remain relatively unmolested, and small concentrations aren’t conducive to the spread of disease.
Water level in these small tanks varies wildly with rainfall. During summer, they may go completely dry, which encourages the growth of soil plants such as millet and smartweed, two important duck foods.
Kraai said, “A duck can just come down to the Rolling Plains, get fat, find a girlfriend, and arrive back at the breeding grounds in perfect condition.”
Things look far less promising in the East Texas Pineywoods, where rich hardwood bottomland once provided some of the world’s best waterfowl habitat.
Problem is, most of the bottomland – 70 percent or more – has been lost to agriculture and reservoir construction.
While naturally-flooding creeks and rivers enrich the bottomlands and stimulate mast production, new reservoirs see a nutrient spike and associated increase in waterfowl populations followed by a rapid decline in fertility. Over the years, rafts of dabbling ducks give way to coots.
“We’re losing ducks in the Pineywoods at an alarming rate because they’re losing their food base,” Kraai said.
In Texas, over 99 percent of the original 6.5 million acres of coastal prairie have been lost to agriculture and sprawl.
No big deal, you say. Coastal rice farming, with its increase in surface water and food draws waterfowl in numbers unimaginable even by old-timers.
That’s correct, up to a point.
“During the heyday of rice, you probably had more food on the landscape to attract more ducks,” Kraai said. But Mother Nature does things for a reason. What’s supposed to be there is this beautiful prairie with potholes and swales, and it was heavily used by dabbling ducks and probably snow geese.”
Yet even as rice farming declines, largely due to issues of water rights and availability, more efficient harvest methods are leaving less waste rice for waterfowl. Surveys show that a dramatic decrease in wintering snow geese tightly tracks a concomitant decrease in coastal rice farming. Concurrent booms in rice farming in Arkansas and Louisiana are drawing away even more geese.
Midwinter surveys in Texas show snow geese declining from a high of about 1.2 million in 1978 to less than half a million in 2010. The decline has been especially precipitous since the late nineties.
Meanwhile, in mid-prairie states, snow geese constitute a nuisance, and their excessive numbers continue to threaten arctic nesting grounds.
Along with loss of prairie habitat, coastal marshes have suffered from an infusion of saltwater as canals have been cut through marshland for oil and gas exploration.
Dabbling ducks are especially sensitive to the increase in salinity. Our indigenous mottled duck, a coastal prairie native, has been especially hard hit.
The good news is that hundreds of thousands of acres of erstwhile prairie remain, much of it formerly under cultivation for rice, waiting to be restored.
The Texas Prairie Wetland Project, a partnership of Ducks Unlimited, Texas Parks & Wildlife, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, and Natural Resources Conservation Service provides cost-share assistance to landowners for levee construction and other water control projects, and technical guidance at no charge.
Since its inception in 1991, TPWP has helped to fund restoration of 43,000 acres of shallow, seasonal wetlands in the 28-county coastal region. Under 10 to 15-year agreements with TPWP and DU, coastal landowners have completed some 450 projects involving 750 individual wetlands.
One of those, the 32,000 acre Pierce Ranch, near Wharton, partnered with TPWP to laser-level 450 acres prior to levy construction.
“Every year we flood different areas of the ranch for ducks and geese,” said ranch director Laurence Armour. “And we maintain a series of resting ponds, which we also use for organic rice production.”
Texas has long been one of the country’s premier waterfowl states. Despite serious challenges, the progress of the last three decades reminds us of how far we’ve come – and how far we might go.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
North American Waterfowl Management Plan – www.fws.gov/birdhabitat/nawmp/index.shtm
Gulf Coast Joint Venture - www.gcjv.org/index.php
Texas Prairie Wetlands Project - www.ducks.org/Texas/TexasConservation/1536/TexasPrairieWetlandsProject.html
