The lesser scaup is a common bird of the boreal forest. But it’s not as numerous as it once was. The scaup is in some kind of trouble.
“The lesser scaup has dropped 50 to 60 per cent since the 1970s,” Ducks Unlimited (DU) biologist Eric Butterworth told the Lesser Slave Forest Public Advisory Committee at its regular meeting Mar. 16.
“Why?” someone asked.
“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Butterworth said.
The boreal forest is home to 12 – 14 million breeding ducks annually. It has a huge wetland component, but not a great deal is known about how it works and what influence continued development might have. Or might already have had. Finding the answers to those and other questions is the focus of a growing portfolio of projects across the northwestern part of western Canada.
To that end, DU is involved in a multi-year study of wetland dynamics, among other things, north of Utikuma Lake. The project looks at the effect of roads on wetlands, how waterfowl respond to disturbance, what influences wetland productivity and so on. Similar studies are going on in other prairie provinces and in the Northwest Territories.
Butterworth said that sustainability is the goal of his organization – meaning a situation in which waterfowl populations can remain stable in spite of development. In the NWT, the conservation organization is paying particular attention to projects, “aimed at establishing protected areas.”
Butterworth said Alaska has much more in the way of protected area than the NWT does. Interestingly, the scaup population seems to be doing better in Alaska than it does in the NWT and the southern boreal area, including northern Alberta.
Ducks Unlimited is only one player in the Utikuma projects. The University of Alberta is involved up to the tops of their hip waders and apparently like what they’re finding. Butterworth says the U of A’s Dr. Kevin DeVito plans on making it his life’s work.
DeVito and nine other professors have so far overseen the work of 29 graduate students in the four years the hydrology project has been operating.
Another DU project is with Al-Pac in the pulp giant’s northeastern Alberta domain. Butterworth said he hopes the project will result in a set of ‘best practices’ with regard to water management. Also, “we’re hoping to create maps of the landscape showing the hydrological risk.”
One thing that’s happening on the landscape, Butterworth said, is that roads sometimes act as dams, cutting off or reducing the water supply to large wetland areas.
Lastly, Butterworth mentioned the Boreal Forest Initiative (BFI). It’s a proposal by DU, along with many other players, to protect 50 per cent of the total boreal forest area from development.
“It’s controversial,” he says.
The BFI controversy is internal as well as external. Butterworth said the BFI leadership council – which includes conservation organizations, industry, First Nations and others, “is not a comfortable relationship.
“There are a lot of issues,” he said. “But at least they’re talking.”
Butterworth told the advisory group that tours of the Utikuma project are possible.
For more information on the Slave Lake Forest Public Advisory Group, contact Amy Wotton at 849-7000, e-mail moderator@slfpac.ca, or visit the website at slfpac.ca.

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