COLUMN ONE : Nose-Dive in Ducks Stirs Flap : Ducks Unlimited is known for protecting waterfowl habitat. But a declining duck population has critics blaming its members--people who like to shoot ducks.

For more than half a century, Ducks Unlimited, North America’s largest and best-established wetlands-preservation group, has worked to save marshes from the farmer’s plow and the developer’s bulldozer.

But today, Ducks Unlimited appears to be flying in formation with some of its opponents: It is putting up a $9.5-million corporate headquarters and visitors center, complete with parking lots, admission fees, a gift shop and sewage-treatment lagoons, right at the shore of a marsh that the United Nations has singled out as a “wetland of international importance.”

A development in prime marshland? Not surprisingly, the project has ruffled the feathers of more than a few bird lovers and environmentalists in Canada.

“It’s heartbreaking to think of the wet meadow, with the frogs and the birds, being replaced by concrete and asphalt,” says Margaret Kapinga, a former tour guide at the site, the Oak Hammock Marsh, about 25 miles north of Winnipeg.

But Ducks Unlimited, a nonprofit group made up largely of conservation-minded hunters, says that in the long run, the center--occupying nine of 4,800 acres of marshland--will make the world a better place for waterfowl. “This is the most environmentally friendly building you’ll ever see,” says Bob Kindrachuk, Ducks Unlimited’s Canada spokesman.

The opinions on the building now going up at Oak Hammock Marsh reflect two widely divergent approaches to waterfowl management--a surprisingly contentious subject these days. Beneath the claims flying back and forth at the construction site lies a bedrock question: Can an environmental group, whose membership is largely motivated by the pleasures of the hunt, really know and do what is best for ducks?

It’s far from an idle question. Ducks are in a state of crisis in North America. While the figures vary from species to species, the total duck population of the continent is at its lowest level in recorded history.

At the turn of the century, an estimated 200 million ducks filled the flyways each year during spring and fall migrations. But last year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimated there were fewer than 30 million ducks flying from Mexico and the southern United States to Canada. And figures this year look even worse.

Biologists fear that ducks have become the latter-day canaries in the coal mine--that their demise is a warning that something is dangerously out of whack in the continental ecosystem.

Duck populations haven’t taken this steep a nose-dive since the 1930s, a time of drought, over-hunting and harmful farming practices. Back then, the U.S. government fought to save waterfowl by buying up farmland on the cheap and setting in place what is now known as the National Wildlife Refuge system. The government also outlawed the baiting of birds, imposed tough bag limits and shortened the hunting season for most ducks.

Before long, duck populations rebounded. But, alas for the waterfowl policy-makers of today, no one took a hard, careful look at just what it was that triggered the recovery. It might have been the government’s wetland reclamations; it might have been the tighter hunting regulations, or it might simply have been that many North American duck hunters had traded in their shotguns for M1s in the 1940s and gone off to Europe and the Pacific to fight the Axis Powers. It may have been a combination of all three.

Since no one can say with certainty what helped the ducks of half a century ago, no one knows exactly what to do today, now that duck populations are again imperiled. And the lack of an unassailable prescription has left an opening for controversy.

The mainstream view is that the best way to help ducks is to preserve habitat--an expensive proposition, since saving wetlands often means buying or leasing them from owners, then damming and diking them and managing the water levels year in and year out.

Few people care enough about lowly swamps to cough up that kind of money. Few, that is, except for hunters, who have a vested interest in the ducks that inhabit wetlands. And, indeed, wildlife biologists in both the United States and Canada can point to wetland after wetland that wouldn’t be in business today if it weren’t for the money and ministrations of people who like to shoot ducks.

But an increasingly vociferous counter-argument has it that while saving waterfowl habitat is important, it is only part of the picture. The hunter is among the duck’s worst enemies, this argument holds, and to help ducks re-establish themselves, the annual fall “harvest” must be curtailed.

“It’s a classic Catch-22,” says Norman Seymour, a Canadian wildlife biologist, hunter and author of a forthcoming book on waterfowl management. “I think we should stop the harvest of pintails, what with the numbers dropping off as precipitously as they are. But if you close the harvest, you run the risk of people no longer having the vested interest in the ducks, and not preserving the habitat for them.”

At the center of the debate is Ducks Unlimited.

The group traces its origins to the Great Depression, when Joseph Knapp, a New York publishing magnate and avid hunter, began to worry about the fall-off of ducks on his favorite North Carolina hunting grounds.

Knapp reasoned that since ducks fly to Canada every spring to lay eggs, the best way to replenish them would be to salvage the wetlands of Canada. Provide ample water north of the 49th Parallel, he figured, and ducks would flock to it and breed.

He founded the More Game Birds in America Foundation, which evolved into Ducks Unlimited. True to his vision, the group’s huge membership--510,000 in the United States today and 140,000 in Canada--has spent five decades raising hundreds of millions of dollars, identifying endangered wetlands in Canada and turning them back into soggy havens for ducks. About 17.3 million acres in Canada have already been restored and preserved; new projects are under way in places such as Mexico, Australia and New Zealand.

To many, Ducks Unlimited epitomizes the spirit of volunteerism that President Bush has celebrated in his “thousand points of light” speech. But critics say that in this case, those thousand points of light have become the lethal muzzle flashes of a million shotguns.

“If you want more ducks, you’d better have ducks to start with,” warns Harold Syrett, 71, a farmer who lives about five miles from Oak Hammock Marsh. “You’d better stop shooting them, until the population readjusts itself.”

He and others point to the progress that could be made if hunters--many of them Americans--would not kill 6 million or so ducks annually, as they do. Syrett, for one, has given up hunting.

He says he used to know when the spring migrations had begun because he could hear the racket of thousands of pairs of wings churning the air above his farmhouse. But no more.

“Now we have water, but no ducks,” he says. “We have foxes, coyotes and magpies. The geese are fine. But the total ecosystem is made up of many things, and now there are too many missing parts.”

Syrett wishes Ducks Unlimited would urge its members to give the ducks a rest, but he says, “If they advocated a moratorium on hunting, they’d just die in the United States.”

George Reiger, a gadfly columnist at Field & Stream magazine, cites a number of occasions in recent years when Ducks Unlimited, together with such pro-hunting societies as the National Rifle Assn., has fought proposed hunting curtailments as “unnecessary and potentially harmful to waterfowl conservation.”

“Ducks Unlimited has increasingly ducked its responsibility because it’s primarily devoted to raising funds, and people don’t like to give money when they’re being lectured,” Reiger asserts.

At Ducks Unlimited’s Winnipeg office, staff biologist Terry Neraasen looks weary when presented with that argument. “If you stopped hunting altogether, duck populations would still decline,” he says. “Because the problems facing them depend on the quality and quantity of habitat.”

Neraasen cites the findings of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which took an exhaustive look at waterfowl depletion in the mid-1980s and found no clear-cut relationship between hunting and declining population levels. “They really didn’t get a solid answer,” he concedes. But, he says, “hunting was not a primary factor in waterfowl declines.”

The research continues. Meantime, Ducks Unlimited, Fish and Wildlife, and other blue-chip nature groups are homing in on what they consider to be the obvious duck-killer: a drought, already entering its second decade, on the Canadian prairies.

As the prairie lowlands have dried out, Canadian farmers--spurred by government incentives--have plowed right up to ponds and sloughs on their land. That has destroyed much of the ground cover that ducks need to protect their nests from predators. (About 75% of all ducks on the continent are hatched in Canada and the northern United States.)

Oak Hammock Marsh itself is an example of the means Ducks Unlimited has chosen to save nesting grounds. A quarter-century ago, the marsh was marginal farmland, pocked with old bomb craters; the Canadian armed forces, considering it useless terrain, had dropped half a million bombs on it for target practice during World War II.

In the late 1960s, the provincial government of Manitoba, increasingly aware of the wetlands importance, set about buying back the farmland. Ducks Unlimited helped by pumping more than $1 million into miles of dikes, trails, ponds and channels to control water levels. It built dozens of islands to give ducks a safe place to nest.

The result: Today, the once-unproductive farmland is back in primordial form, teeming with 260 types of birds. About 75,000 people--many of them local school children--visit it each year, to watch everything from pelicans to peregrine falcons.

It’s a story that Ducks Unlimited is justifiably proud of--and which the organization wishes more people could hear. Winnipeg is not exactly on the international tourist circuit; even when people visit here from afar, they don’t often bother driving 25 miles north of town to contemplate a stand of cattails.

Nor do many visit Ducks Unlimited at its modest offices in an industrial park off a divided highway on the south side of Winnipeg.

And so it was that, when the province started thinking about a bigger role for Oak Hammock Marsh, Ducks Unlimited seized the chance to build an office and visitors’ complex there.

The building won’t be done until October. But already its dramatic, curving walls of pale, golden stone rise from the earth. The roofs are to be low and planted with native prairie grasses, Kindrachuk says, in hopes that birds will nest right atop the building.

The windows themselves are to be deeply recessed, to keep down the number of bird strikes. Anything that might impede a bird’s flight--guy wires, chimneys, utility poles, exhaust vents--has been excluded. There will even be a ban on fried foods in the cafeteria for fear that flying grease particles might offend waterfowl.

Plans call for some exterior walls to rise right out of the marsh waters so ducks, geese and swans can paddle by at close range, edifying visitors. And if no birds float by on a given day, no problem. The building will be chockablock with teach-and-touch computers, so visitors can call up bird images, along with all manner of ornithological information. Television cameras also are to be placed unobtrusively above nests in the swamp, so tourists can watch birds without disturbing them.

The center, which Ducks Unlimited hopes will attract more than 200,000 people a year, also will offer the disabled unprecedented access to nature, giving them marsh views that “a person in a wheelchair could never see,” says Kindrachuk. He says the increased public awareness of wetlands will more than offset the temporary presence of bulldozers, the introduction of 120 Ducks Unlimited office workers and the sacrifice of nine acres of marsh.

Opponents aren’t buying this. “The marsh is its own educational theater,” Syrett says. “What you need is not a building to stand in, to play the sounds of the marsh. You don’t need dioramas. You don’t need high-tech. You don’t need TV cameras inside the marsh so that you can stand inside the building and press buttons to see what’s going on out there. What you need is the marsh to stand in, with someone to explain it to you.”

Kapinga, the former tour guide, adds, “You can’t teach conservation with poor conservation practices, and this is obviously a poor conservation practice.”

Kapinga stands atop a low observation knoll in the marsh, watching men in hard hats work on the building. The ground is scarred by bulldozers but alive still with birds and small mammals. Grebes paddle in the shallows; frogs croak in the willow groves; ground squirrels stand defiantly atop their burrows; brilliant-hued yellow-headed blackbirds sail by.

To Kapinga, the building is a manifestation of the sort of keep-busy, bigger-is-better, pro-development attitude that Ducks Unlimited ought to fight.

“This is not the way things should be done,” she says. “If you have an existing habitat that’s successful . . . you don’t just take it away, put in an office building, then try to restore the habitat. Ducks Unlimited could have built their office building somewhere else.”

She and others think Ducks Unlimited has refused to do so because the building is part of its strategy as an outfit that solicits funds from hunters. Who would write a check for an organization that had no bang to show for its buck?

“Ducks Unlimited only saved the big marsh because in the big marsh, people could see what they were doing,” Syrett asserts. “The majority of ducks are hatched in small potholes or the grasslands around them. But Ducks Unlimited has never dealt with the small pothole. They go for the mega-project, then say, ‘Hey! Look what a great job we’re doing!’ ”

Noting the dearth of ducks on his land of late, he adds, “Ducks Unlimited has solved the problem of raising money, but it hasn’t solved the problem of raising ducks.”

Back at his Winnipeg office, Kindrachuk shakes his head. “This has been a very quiet company that has been inching along and doing its job, following every regulation necessary to make this project happen,” he says.

He says the group is diversifying away from the big, managed marshes it engineered in the past; it is trying to find ways to preserve the humble pothole. He suspects some building foes are not so much pro-duck as anti-hunter, automatically opposed to anything a group like Ducks Unlimited might do.

“Someday, there will be a marvelous story to be told about this building, and all the hoops that this company had to jump through to build it,” he says.

But retorts Kapinga: “Talk with any urban planner. They’ll tell you offices belong in urban centers.”

Rising Out of the Marsh

Ducks Unlimited is putting up this $9.5-million headquarters and visitors center on the shore of Oak Hammock Marsh, singled out as a “wetland of international importance.” A spokesman says the center will be “the most environmentally friendly building you’ll ever see.” Ducks in Decline: % of change in N. American pop. between the 1955-’89 average and 1990 Mallard: -27 Gadwall: +16 American wigeon: -15 Green-winged teal: +38 Blue-winged teal: -41 Northern shoveler: -4 Northern pintail: -52 Redhead: -16 Canvasback: +7 Scaup: -23 Total duck population: -22 Source: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service