Food Resources for Wintering and Spring Staging American Black Ducks

Habitat restoration and enhancement objectives for wintering waterfowl are typically derived by a bioenergetics modeling approach. This approach has been developed as a planning tool to identify the amount of foraging habitat required to meet North American Waterfowl Management Plan population objectives. Our objective was to provide the energetic supply component of the bioenergetics model at an important wintering area for American black ducks Anas rubripes in the Atlantic Flyway, the Eastern Shore of Virginia. We estimated food availability among four main wetland cover types used by overwintering American black ducks: brackish water, freshwater, mudflat, and salt marsh. Mudflat (221 ± 50 kg/ha) and salt marsh (728 ± 175 kg/ha) had the highest amounts of available invertebrate food density, and freshwater (42 ± 9 kg/ha) had the highest amounts of available seed biomass. Our results suggest that seed density found in freshwater wetlands on the Eastern Shore of Virginia is considerably lower than densities found in inland freshwater cover types used by dabbling ducks. We also found that levels of invertebrate density found in Virginia mudflat and salt marsh are considerably lower than levels on Long Island, New York, and in southern New Jersey. Lower levels of food density compared with both more inland and northern wintering areas suggest that American black ducks wintering in Virginia are more likely to be limited by forage availability than American black ducks and other dabbling ducks wintering both inland and in the northern portion of the wintering range.