Delta Waterfowl tries to spread word

The fledgling group offers pins for kids' first duck

HENRY MILLER
Statesman Journal

November 9, 2005

It's kind of a croix de duck for kids.

Worth Mathewson of Perrydale has come up with a way to get more people interested in Delta Waterfowl and more kids interested in hunting.

He's giving away a free First Duck pin to any youngsters who send in their story about bagging their first duck during the waterfowl season.

"I just want a letter from them about what the circumstances were when they got their first duck, and a photo if they want," Mathewson said. "Because in each magazine we feature a youthful duck hunter and their first duck."

Mathewson is the field editor for Delta's magazine, the Delta Field Report.

Delta is just coming into its own as a national membership organization after decades as primarily a waterfowl academic research support group that got most of its funding through corporate sponsors.

"A lot of people when they hear of Delta think that it has something to do with the Mississippi Delta, that it's strictly an eastern organization," Mathewson said.

It actually originated at Delta Marsh in the Canadian province of Manitoba in the 1930s. The organization still has a research station there, along with its new headquarters in Bismarck, N.D.

"In the past few years there's been a little bit of discussion because of the confusion of delta, whether that's the name to have," he said. "But it's the original name, and we're going to stick with it."

The waterfowl-hunting public's experience with the organization is probably through two successful duck-nesting projects: the Adopt-a-Pothole program that raises money to pay for prairie nesting sites on farmland around pothole ponds.

The other is the raised nest box Hen House Program that keeps nesting mallard hens up off the ground and away from predators.

But in going national, with memberships and fundraising events, it sounds almost like, well, Ducks Unlimited.

And there has been, and still continues to be, some acrimony between the groups, said Mathewson, who belongs to both.

And he said he supports each because their missions are complementary, not conflicting.

"The money that DU raises primarily goes into marshlands, and that benefits an enormous amount of species aside from the ones that are shot," Mathewson said. "So I see every dollar that goes into DU as very beneficial, and I will personally support DU as long as I live.

"But for the pure duck hunter, some of Delta's programs are aimed at producing more ducks."

That's because Ducks Unlimited's vast and expansive marsh projects do little for ground-nesting "puddle ducks" such as mallards, pintail, teal and widgeon.

Delta's projects do, Mathewson said.

And along with paying farmers to leave greenbelts around pothole prairie ponds, and building off-the-ground nest boxes, the biggest difference is that Delta is putting a lot of research and effort into trapping predators that prey on ducks and ducklings.

And that, Mathewson said, is seen by some as a third-rail issue.

But it works.

"We launched into the first of our spring trapping around various potholes," he said. "This was done on the heels of a study by a graduate student at LSU who was assigned two sections of the Cando Marsh in North Dakota, a very, very prime waterfowl area" Mathewson explained. "And at the end of the person's Ph.D. work, it was determined that the nesting success on the two sections was 7 (percent) to 9 percent."

Delta Waterfowl paid for a trapper to put a dent in the skunks, raccoons and foxes, and the first year, the nesting success went up to 42 percent.

Last year, after several years of trapping and measuring the results, the nesting success was up to 82 percent, he said.

In a way, the trapping program mimics what used to go on, Mathewson said.

"There was a time where every farm kid on the prairie ran a little trapline," he said. And that's just not done anymore.

"And so you don't have the trappers out there. You've got a tremendous increase in predators. And you've got a decrease, a vast decrease, in nesting areas. Therefore we have found at Delta that predator control is very, very important in producing more ducks."

Delta's approach to making more ducks and Ducks Unlimited's approach to providing them with staging, raising and wintering areas both are needed, Mathewson said.

"Delta's a small organization," he said. "We still have only about 70,000 members. And DU's got 640,000.

"But as duck hunters find out about Delta's programs, they're really embracing them. They're saying this makes more sense to where my dollars go."