In certain parts of North America, the climate allows waterfowl to remain in the same region for their entire annual cycle. For example, residential wood ducks and hooded mergansers can stick around all year in the southeast. However, the same species are typically migratory in the northeast where resources are seasonally limited by temperature. Most North American ducks employ this migratory strategy, sometimes traveling thousands of miles to winter as far south as Mexico and South America, and breed as far north as Canada. When managing for ducks, these lengthy seasonal migrations must be accounted for. A duck’s ecology (its interactions with other critters and the various features of its habitat) during the portion of the year that it is on your and your neighbor’s properties can have consequences for the duck throughout the remainder of the year. Thus, landowner cooperation at multiple spatial and temporal scales is necessary to maintain quality waterfowl habitat across the annual cycle.

​

NATIONAL MANAGEMENT 

Why should managers in North Dakota care how ducks are managed in Louisiana or Mississippi and visa versa? Cross-seasonal effects, which are particularly important to the annual ecology of female ducks. The resources available to ducks on their wintering grounds directly influence their body condition and the energy stores they are able to gather, which can directly affect the timing of spring migration. Some females that are resource-limited on the wintering grounds may combat poor energy stores by spending additional time foraging upon arrival to the breeding grounds, rather than promptly searching for and initiating nests. Other females may take more and longer pitstops to forage and “recharge” during spring migration, ultimately delaying arrival to the breeding grounds. Late arrivals have a more limited choice of nest sites than the females arriving before them, reducing the probability that their nest(s) will hatch successfully. Ducklings that do hatch from nests that are initiated late are more resource-limited than earlier hatches, resulting in lower brood survival and a smaller fall population sizes. In a similar manner, the condition of ducks during the hunting season is limited by the resources available on the breeding grounds and at stopover sites during fall migration.

​

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and state agencies work in partnership to maintain a network of national wildlife refuges and waterfowl management and production areas to provide duck habitat during whichever portion of the year ducks are present in the area, exemplifying cooperative duck management on a national level. Public lands managed cooperatively by federal and state agencies provide opportunity for hunters using the properties. But, particularly early in the fall when migration is just getting underway, public lands managers are also putting work into transient birds that need sufficient resources to complete migrations that will terminate during hunting seasons in other parts of the country. In these cases, managers may not directly see the rewards of their efforts but recognize the importance of maintaining a network of duck habitat at a national scale to benefit both duck populations and duck hunters.