Lean Pickings When It Came To Fat Ducks

When hunters got around to preparing their mallards for freezing during the last few weeks of the season, many were surprised that their birds were virtually devoid of fat.

Why, they wondered, weren’t the ducks bagged in the Columbia Basin layered with creamy fat, as they have been at the end of past seasons?

The mallards obviously weren’t malnourished. Their breasts were full and legs round. But they didn’t carry any fat.

The pintails seemed to be even skinnier. A couple of Spokane hunters shot two pintails on their first of three days of hunting during the last week of the season. The birds were so thin they decided not to shoot any more.

Pintails are naturally thinner than mallards, so the hunters may have been a bit too choosy.

I prepared more than a dozen mallards, nearly all of them drakes, for my freezer during the last 10 days of the season. Usually during the latter part of each season, I skin several birds and trim off a lot of fat, so I was surprised when none of the ducks was carrying any fat.

Couldn’t the ducks get enough food in the Columbia Basin? Or were other factors, possibly even disease, responsible?

Wildlife biologists can provide educated guesses. Waterfowl biologist Matt Monda of Ephrata said he believes several factors were responsible for the ducks’ apparent lack of fat.

He said changes in agricultural practices, near record numbers of ducks, changes in flight patterns and unusually mild weather all may have contributed to the failure of the ducks to gorge themselves.

There was no shortage of ducks during the latter part of the season. Monda said that for a time there were more than 500,000 ducks, mostly mallards, north of the Tri-Cities. For many hunters, shooting was exceptional. But the birds moved around a lot, apparently to find food.

Basin farmers aren’t growing as much feed corn as they did a few years ago, Monda said. They’ve been switching over to apples, grapes, asparagus and alfalfa. Some have been growing hybrid poplar trees for wood pulp. All of those crops have been replacing the acreage that once was in feed corn.

A lot of fields are being planted in sweet corn, instead of feed corn. When sweet corn is harvested, nothing is left for the birds. On the other hand, farmers leave a lot of husks in the feed corn fields.

At one time, Monda said, much wheat stubble was left standing in the fields over the winter months. Waterfowl found enough wheat in the harvested fields to fill their bellies. Now much of the wheat stubble is plowed under after harvest time in the fall.

Actually, there was a lot of wheat stubble in the Basin, but much of it was in non-traditional duck feeding areas. As a result, unusually large numbers of ducks were attracted to areas that in the past haven’t drawn hungry birds. For example, the Gloyd Seeps, an area that’s not considered a traditional feeding area, were a magnet for thousands of northern ducks.

Ducks utilized standard reserves at times, particularly soon after they migrated into the Basin. Hunters had some sensational shooting. For example, when there were about 120,000 birds, primarily mallards, on the Potholes Reserve, hunters who hunted near the reserve took limits every day. Then most of the ducks left and the wise hunters followed them.

The unusually mild weather may have been a big factor in the feeding habits of both ducks and geese the last few weeks. When temperatures range from 10 degrees below zero to 15 to 20 above and snowstorms drop a foot or so of snow on the ground, the birds usually feed all day and build up a lot of fat. But temperatures rarely dropped to near zero in December and most of January and only a little snow fell.

As a result, the birds didn’t start flying to wheat and corn stubble until just about the end of shooting times. They apparently didn’t have the urge to put on a lot of fat.

When the birds did fly during shooting hours, some hunters had excellent shooting. They were the hunters who leased private land used by the birds and those who followed the flocks and then got permission to hunt on land where the birds landed.

Maybe the ducks and geese were better weather forecasters than all of those who have the latest radar equipment. They may have sensed that they didn’t need to layer themselves with fat to survive one of the mildest winters in years.

, DataTimes MEMO: You can contact Fenton Roskelley by voice mail at 459-5577, extension 3814.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Fenton Roskelley The Spokesman-Review