Ohio Waterfowl Were Poisoned

Ducks vs. EthanolHow do I put this nicely? Ducks drop dead every day. So do geese, grebes and other waterfowl. Several diseases, such as avian cholera, are capable of sweeping through large flocks, leaving many bodies behind. Most stories about waterfowl deaths end in the cause being something quite natural, if unpleasant for the neighbors.

That’s why this story out of Ohio is odd. About 50 mallards, domestic cross-breeds and Canada geese were poisoned in an urban area. Little blue pellets of poison were found. No suspects yet.

The NBC4i story has more details.
The WCBE story gets right to the point.

Photo: A healthy mallard duck drake, no where near Columbus, Ohio. Photo by Erwin and Peggy Bauer, courtesy USFWS

Ducks Unlimited Likes New Farm Bill

“The 2014 Farm Bill is arguably one of the best agriculture conservation bills for sportsmen and ducks that we’ve seen in a long time,” said Ducks Unlimited (DU) CEO Dale Hall in a press release distributed yesterday.

Ducks Unlimited likes that the bill re-couples conservation compliance to crop insurance and preserves at least part of the important Sodsaver program. Though DU advocated for a national Sodsaver program, the release says, the final bill includes a regional program that will affect the nation’s top duck producing states of Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota.

Read the rest of the DU press release on the 2014 Farm Bill, here.
Read other news about the Farm Bill, here and here.

Ducks and Hunting

Ducks vs. EthanolA new paper in the Wildlife Society Bulletin says because duck stamp revenues pay to conserve duck habitat, that ironically, a reduction in duck hunting threatens duck populations. The study found a correlation between duck stamp sales and duck populations, with a steady decline in both in recent years.

Read the Wildlife Society Bulletin abstract here. (Subscription or fee required for full access.)

The BBC News’ environment correspondent tried to get his mind around the idea that more duck hunting means a more secure duck population. This is something that state wildlife professionals may never ponder, since the fact that hunting license fees and the federal sporting goods tax is often the only funding for wildlife conservation (game or non-game species) that many states receive. It might be interesting to look at the thought process of someone coming to the idea anew.

Read the BBC News article based on the Wildlife Society Bulletin here.

Photo: mallard duck drake, by Erwin and Peggy Bauer, courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service

This Year Is Just Ducky

The north-central United States, south-central and northern Canada, and Alaska are known as America’s duck factory. In the past year, the US Fish and Wildlife Service reports, duck populations in these regions are up, in spite of a decline in breeding habitat conditions.

The USFWS press release announces the availability of the 26-page long 2012 Trends in Duck Breeding Report.

According to the report, the decline in breeding conditions is due primarily to a mild winter (which means less snow, therefore less snowmelt), a dry spring and warmer than typical spring temperatures.

The shocking statistic was a 49 percent decrease in ponds from last year. The report says that the number of ponds this year was similar to the average, so it appears that last year’s wet weather had as much to do with the pond decline as this year’s dry weather.

The least shocking statistic is that mallard numbers are way up.

Read the press release here.
Download the report (a big PDF), here.

Photo: Mallard drake by Erwin and Peggy Bauer, courtesy US Fish and Wildlife Service

March Wildlife Disease Roundup

Things have actually been pretty quiet over the past month when it comes to wildlife diseases. The big news, of course, is white nose syndrome in Alabama, but there have been a few other stories worth noting.

Rabbits can get prion diseases. Once it looked like they were immune to diseases in the family of mad cow and chronic wasting disease, but the latest research shows they can get it. (See the original paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.)

At least one frog species, the Pacific chorus frog, is a carrier of chytrid fungus, a recent study found. Read the LiveScience story via MSNBC. The study was published recently in PLoS ONE, read it here. Or read the San Francisco State University press release, here.

A wolf suffering from parvovirus was discovered in Idaho. Parovirus effects all canids, including domestic dogs. There is a vaccine for the disease available for dogs. Read the Idaho Department of Fish and Game press release here.

Also, there has been an outbreak of canine distemper in gray foxes in Michigan.

For birds:
The red tides on the Gulf coast of Texas have caused the deaths of redhead ducks.
The death of eider ducks on Cape Cod (Massachusetts) has been pinned on a virus, named Wellfleet Bay virus.
Ten wild turkeys were found dead from avian pox, a virus, in southeast Montana.

Finally, back in late February, brucellosis, a cattle disease, was found in elk in Montana.

Photo: A Pacific chorus frog. Credit: Joyce Gross

Ducks vs. Ethanol

The price of corn has hit $6 per bushel, and the rate for the Conservation Reserve Program has not kept up, says an article in the Minneapolis StarTribune. That means more farmers are converting the prairie and pothole acres that had been preserved on the Conservation Reserve Program to corn production.

That’s bad news for ducks. (It’s also bad news for pheasant, but that is more of an economic issue than an ecological one.)

Read all the details in the Minneapolis StarTribune, here.

What this excellent article doesn’t mention is that Congress failed to renew the ethanol tax credit, which expired on the last day of 2011. The New York Times says the expiration of the tax credit won’t impact the price of corn or the demand for ethanol.

Photo: Mallard drake by Erwin and Peggy Bauer, courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service