Keeping the ducks alive at Cottonwood Island Park is a priority for Paul Cailleaux and Brock Bailey, volunteers from Ducks Unlimited Canada, but it takes the community to help provide the means.
There are almost 400 birds who will winter at the park because they didn’t have the time to prepare for their big migratory flight down south.
“I think it’s important for people to understand that we didn’t want to feed the birds this early but because the weather has been so cold we started,” Bailey said. “A lot of these birds are young birds. What happened this year is that because of the Avian flu and the drought a lot of the birds didn’t get an early nesting so they nested later and the later hatch didn’t have the same amount of time to build up their fat reserve and energy to make it through the winter so the young birds really suffer because they just haven’t had the time to grow.”
Cailleaux and Bailey are feeding the birds to just get them through the winter.
“If we don’t feed them," Bailey looked down and shook his head. "I used to work for the wildlife service here – there were so many dead birds – they were starving to death."
That was about seven years ago when ducks were dropping dead mid-flight onto First Avenue.
“So what we’re doing by feeding them now is giving them a really good head start for their spring nesting so they’re going to be in a lot better shape to nest early, which is what they should do.”
The Avian flu kills a lot of birds, he added.
“But it also makes a lot of birds really sick and they don’t nest or breed because of it and that affects the population.”
The drought across North American has affected bird populations everywhere.
“So birds will nest in the north, then stage in places like Manitoba and Saskatchewan and Alberta and part of B.C. and they feed up and that lasts a couple of weeks and then they will move further south and then they’ll stage in Northern Oregon and then they’ll bounce their way down to Mexico,” Bailey explained. “Well this year because there was no water and no food a lot of them have over flown all those staging areas and arrived in Mexico in horrible shape. Just skin and bones and now we’ve got all those birds arriving in Mexico just plopping down on limited areas just trying to feed up. A lot of the wildlife managers I’ve been talking to are quite concerned about the population that will be coming back in the spring time and how they’re going to fare.”
What Cailleaux and Bailey are doing in Cottonwood Island Park will help keep that population of ducks surviving the winter.
“We hear from the people of Prince George that they appreciate what we’re doing,” Bailey said. “They love feeding the birds and we appreciate the donations that help us through the winter.”
Pacific Western Brewery and Spruce Capital Feeds are helping Paul and Brock out as much as they can but they need people in the community to help again this year, he added.
“Pacific Western Brewery and Spruce Capital Feeds are really community minded and really stepped up again this year and we thank them very much."
In the meantime, the two men are currently out of feed at Spruce Capital Feeds, so they pay for it themselves when that happens. They're asking the community who would like to donate to the cause to please pay a visit to Spruce Capital Feeds at 1694 Quinn and make a contribution to help offset the costs of the hundreds of bags of barley used every season.
They are also asking those visiting Cottonwood Island to please keep their dogs from chasing the ducks because the energy they expend trying to stay safe is energy they should be using to survive the winter.
