Dave Caswell oral history interview

              Interview with Dave Caswell

Of Canadian Wildlife Service

By Dr. Mark Madison April 16, 2004

NCTC, Shepherdstown, WV

MR. CASWELL: I am currently with the Canadian Wildlife Service in the

Prairie/Northern Region. My official title is Chief of Waterfowl Management, for our

Division. The area that we look after is the prairie, northern region which is Manitoba,

Saskatchewan, Alberta, the Northwest Territories so we have a big hunk of property

where the birds breed in and come on down to the States. It’s a good junk of property

and there are a lot of cooperative programs, and a lot of people involved.

From my personal perspective, I grew in place called Delft, Manitoba, which is

well known for research. Al Hokebaum was the Director there. He was a well-known

biologist and waterfowl person. As a young fellow I worked in the field cleaning pens

and cutting grass and doing all of that sort of stuff. At Delta I was exposed to a lot of

graduate students, etc, doing research on waterfowl, etc. I never really thought that that

was going to be my career. I thought I was, or intended to be an oceanographer. So I

went to university and went through Physical Sciences. Then I was going to go on into

Oceanography. I decided that I didn’t really want to be out in the middle of an ocean. A

lot of other things were going on, on the prairies. I went back and picked up all of the

biological sciences courses. I worked in Ontario for a couple of years as an avian

biologist. Then I went to the States, actually, and took a graduate degree. I was then

hired by the Province of Manitoba. At that time I was what they called the Avian

Research Specialist. I worked on waterfowl and upland game birds, etc. This was at

about the time, 1973, that the federal government was doing a lot of expanding. At that

time they hired a bunch of what they called Population Management Biologists. Kent

Brace was in Manitoba. Dan Nighland in Saskatchewan, and Bruce Turner in Alberta.

These guys were the core of the waterfowl management group in the CWS, in the prairies

at that time; in terms of the guys who were actually going out in the field. That was also

the time that the CWS took over the air grounds. It’s been documented that the fellows

would come up on planes from the USFWS and try to find out where in the prairies the

birds were and to try and develop a survey system. They knew at the time that they

needed to correct for what they were doing from the air so they actually developed some

ground surveys which were all transects. They actually picked them in areas… [Phone

rings, tape stops]

…. When the USFWS actually set up [unintelligible] in the 1950s and were applying

surveys across what they called the ‘duck factory’ at that time. I could talk about a lot of

stuff that went on back then, but it was before my time. There was obviously a lot of

Canadians involved in it like Jay Bassar from Manitoba and Kooch from Ottowa working

with the fellows. They realized that they needed some correction factor from what these

fellows were missing from the air, which makes sense. So they started an air/ground

component which was to correct for the visibility rating. They’d have a crew go out on

selected air grounds, count the birds on the ground and do a ratio of what they saw from

ground to the air and extrapolate that across the rest of the surveys. They started this in

prairie Canada in 1961. Staff that ran the air grounds in that period were basically

USFWS staff but they were enforcement people. I don’t know what they didn’t think

they were supposed to be doing during that period of time, but they sent them up to

Canada to work on the air grounds. And actually later, in August, they’d work on

banding too. They send these fellows up to Canada to band. In 1973 said they were

expanding and were hiring waterfowl population people. They took over the air grounds

in 1973. There wasn’t a lot of air grounds. Like I said, there were maybe thirteen per

Province. So we were running about twelve or thirteen air grounds apiece. They were all

off line, so we started doing it in 1973. I wasn’t with the CWS at that time, but I was

dealing with the flyways and using the data, etc. I was hired by CWS from the Province

in 1978. That’s when I went federal. In 1979, there was a study down in the mid 1970s

indicating that these air ground transects that were off line were actually, maybe biasing

the survey in the sense that when the pilots and observers were flying along, they’d come

along and say, “Oh, by the way, we’ve got an air ground over there.” They’d cut off the

transect, cut off and swing around pick up the air ground and come back and do the

survey again. So the statistical point of view this is not the same way they were doing

the transects and it turned out that the air grounds were actually, probably a little biased.

When they were originally picked, they were picked because of good concentrations of

waterfowl. Obviously, a lot of the transects do not have a good concentration of

waterfowl. It’s variable with high and low densities. So you need a sample about the

whole thing. In 1973 we went out. Some of the fellows actually flew the air grounds for

us and marked on where they had rows. You need some type of way to get around them.

We went out of the ground and checked various potential air grounds on the transect lines.

We picked a whole set and put on the lines. We got them on lines in the 1970s.

Back in that time too, we were sort of observing that there was a sort of a

disconnect between what we were seeing in terms of habitat out there and what we were

seeing in ducks. What was happening in the 1970s was the populations were good, but

from 1955 to the 1970’s whenever the ponds went up the ducks went up. When the

ponds went down, the ducks went down too. It was a nice correlation between these two

measures. In the 1970s in prairie Canada we started to see a disconnect. When the ponds

came back up, the ducks came up too, but not to the same level as the ponds. This was

doing on back and forth. We figured that something was going on out there. We started

to get a disconnect between the ponds and the populations. From our point of view,

being out there walking on the ground, etc., we thought that maybe something was

changing in terms of the habitat. Not the water per say, because the water is always

coming and going. At that time we initiated a more intense habitat survey associated with

the air grounds. From the time the air grounds were established in 1961 through the

1970’s time, each crew would go to every basin that had water, etc., and they’d record

what the pond type was, whether it was full or half-full, they’d record cover vegetation

and obviously count and specieate all of the ducks. We developed a habitat-monitoring

program. To go along with it in the 1970s what were looking at was the basin, the

vegetation in the basin, the margin vegetation, which extended ten meters out from the wet

meadow zone. The impactions of these things, whether they were grazed or cultivated or

burnt various things like that. There was also margin width and upland habitat

conditions; whether it was in stubble, or trees and that type of thing.

We worked on that through the 1970s and initiated that program in about 1980.

Basically it’s complementary to what we are doing in the visibility rates, in that while we

are out there counting the ducks and ticking off and recording habitat information as it is

too. This started in the early 1980s. Just prior to that, we have to back up and say that

we put all of those things on line and we added the habitat component to it. We actually

used FWS. They’d come up in their planes, and photograph all of these air grounds for

us. We had photograph of all of the air grounds. We individually marked every pond so

we had a map. This was the way to go. In 1986 when the North American Waterfowl

Management Plan [NAWMP] was signed we started looking at implementing the plan in

prairie Canada in terms of habitat programs, etc., from a Canadian point of view. The

NAWMP was the ability to put a soil and water conservation program on the landscape

out there using cooperative dollars from the United States. The funding arrangement was

something in the neighborhood of 75% US dollars and 25% Canadian dollars. With that,

for the NAWMP we also needed some type of monitoring program to go along with this

to see how we were doing. How are we doing? Are the populations attaining their goals?

So in addition to the landscape monitoring, we also wanted to improve out estimates of

the waterfowl populations. From a study that was done, it was basically said that 71%

of the variability associated with the counts was due to the visibility rates. In 1979 with

NAWMP dollars, we doubled the number of transects we were conducting in prairie

Canada from sixty-five to one hundred and thirty-five. We had a bunch of students and

we were able to double the program. That helped tighten up the [unintelligible] limits of

both counts. We’ve basically running this program since then, since 1979. We’ve got this

enormous big data set which we never seem to have had the where with all to go back and

look at the details we want. But, we’re using all of this information on an annual basis for

generating the numbers that we want. This information under the NAWMP that was

improved is also instrumental in a component of the adaptive harvest management

program. It’s one of the key measurements of meeting the model requirements, etc. The

model predicts it and we go up and check what’s going on up there. So in these aspects,

Canada has been involved on the ground since the 1970’s. They were just taking at the

last meeting about changing the ways that they do some of the air grounds in the States.

They started them in about 1972 in the Dakotas and Montana. They are thinking about

incorporating some of the concepts that we put in. I don’t think it will ever go into the

detail that we have because it’s not the same program per say.

DR. MADISON: What things do you have to reconcile to work across national

boundaries? I know it’s a good, long-lasting partnership and one of our oldest, but are

there any technical things that you need to work out? Does it matter about metric

measurements, or any other things like that, which are difficult to reconcile? You don’t

see a lot of these transnational cooperative agreements. They are very hard to negotiate.

MR. CASWELL: No. There’s a lot of the staff that come up from the US to Canada.

Not so many of the Canadians go down to the US to work. But we’re obviously involved

in the flyway system. All of the Provinces have a member on each of the flyways. The

Canadian Wildlife Service and all of its components are very cooperative across

international boundaries. It’s broader than just the waterfowl side of it too. In a sense,

under the NAWMP we expanded out. This was the general habitat program. However,

you have a couple of other joint programs like the Black Duck venture, which is a species

oriented program. It’s a big cooperative program between Canada and the US. The Artic

Goose joint venture, which is a multi-species program, even though it doesn’t cover all

artic Geese because it doesn’t touch the geese, for example, which are breeding in Alaska

and go directly to the US. They don’t stop in Canada. We are restricted on the

international aspect, to the waterfowl that are actually breeding in Canada and Russia for

example, and then coming down into the US. That’s another big cooperative program in

the sense that when we first started the Artic Goose Joint Venture [AGJV] there were

some Canadian dollars specifically put into it. The US didn’t have that luxury at the

time, so it was difficult to find dollars to put into the venture. But recently there have

actually been AGJV dollars coming from USFWS dollars going into the program. The

AGJV was one of the instrumental ways to finally get some coordinated management

programs right across the Artic. Before that, there was research studies, especially

[Waykeys] and various colonies up there and some intense studies on white fronts or

various other populations that have been very localized. With the advent of the AGJV in

the early 1990s, for the first time we had a coordinated banding program right across the

Arctic from Alaska right through to Bapland Island on small Canada Geese and White

fronts. That changed the whole management of white fronts in the sense that they were

managed as two populations; east and west. But after the banding and collaring program

and observations and harvest, it was found that ‘hey, these are the same birds!’ They go

down here and all of a sudden they move up from Texas to Louisiana or vice versa. It’s

all the same population. That changed that whole practice. Now we’re in a White Goose

Program with the over abundant white goose issue. Again, now mainly USFWS dollars

and CWS and the research of university type people working on the ground up there,

we’ve got a coordinated banding/marking program and a monitoring program across all of

the colonies in the Canadian Arctic. These big cooperative international programs have

allowed us to do a lot more detail on a much broader aspect than we were ever able to do

in the past.

DR. MADISON: I think they are a great success story. You’ve been doing this going on

thirty years. Describe some of the changes that you have seen, changes in data

accumulation, technology to carry it out. You’ve already discussed some of the changes

in strategy and planning how you do it. Birds are one of the few fields where we actually

have people with this depth of knowledge. Often times with other divisions they hop

around a lot more. I am curious what changes you’ve seen since 1975.

MR. CASWELL: The technology of managing and storing data is so much different than

it used to be. When we first went on the air grounds it was basically going out and

writing everything down on a piece of paper and away they go. For us, we started

entering data into computers back in the 1970s. We developed programs so we could

print out the last year’s information on a sheet and we wouldn’t have to write everything

down as far as the habitat. You’d just go in make modifications. Then you go into the

computer program and just change the individual things. It used to be that for all the data

there were cassettes, card files and all this stuff that was sitting there. To be able to use it

to the extent that you probably could, or should, was just a tremendous job. Now, with

the advent of the computers and such, it’s just completely different. The Service have

developed a lot of these programs with a lot of help from Jack Hodges from Alaska, like

on the moving map.

DR. MADISON: Jack has come up in every one of the four oral histories!

MR. CASWELL: This kind of stuff, for us in the Arctic programs that we’re working on

now…GPS units and all of that stuff has really changed the way we can do surveys in the

Arctic. The early guys when they were flying along were trying to look for landscape

features on maps that didn’t exist. “Well, maybe there’s a pond out there. Geez, there’s

ponds all over the place and I’m trying to associate this pond with that one!” It was hard

even if they had a map at the time. Now, we just put in our “lat-longs” [latitude and

longitude] and fly from point A to point B. Now, we can record the information directly

to the computers. There is a time and a lat-long associated with it. We can go up and do

surveys now, like on Baffin Island where I go every year now to develop the surveys and

using the data to generate the information stratified to other features is just so much

simpler.

DR. MADISON: It’s an amazing transformation in a relatively short period. Look at the

first years before the fiftieth anniversary that they are celebrating. What Fred Lincoln

was doing, he basically could have been doing in the 1950s.

MR. CASWELL: Here’s one of the classics that I can remember. We go up Baffin Island

and we fly around and so stuff. Then the USFWS developed what they called

“the fly by” at one time. It was trying to get a quick overview of the Arctic. We had

Canadians like Sam Berry and Gus Gooch and various people who had working in the

Arctic since the 1950s. These guys were getting ready to retire so a fellow by the name

of Ron Reynolds who was with USFWS at the time thought it would be a good idea to

capture some of the information from these guys before they did retire. So under the

AGJV, every spring for a few years, they rented a big, high winged aircraft they could fly

right across the Arctic and they’d take these guys with them. They’d record information,

etc. The feeling of going across the Arctic in a matter of four or five days that early

explorers would have spend their whole life trying to see certain parts of it. Then, over

the winter they could get caught in the ice in their ships and send two of three years up

there to explore one little piece. Here we are, flying across in about three days; pointing

out all of these areas that people were doing. It’s just an amazing concept! Dewey

Soaper, for example, on the Great Plains of the Kujiak where the original Blue Geese were

nesting. Dewey wanted to go up and work on these birds. He was with the Canadian

Wildlife Service. So he went up the fall before, stayed with the locals. The Inuits were

over on the other side. He stayed there over the winter so that he could be there in the

spring because there was no way he could there in spring because of ice, ice flows and

various things. He would have had to come in my boat. He wanted to be there when the

geese migrated up there in the spring. What these guys did in the past is just

unbelievable!

DR. MADISON: That brings up an interesting point, and something you mentioned

earlier. We’ve heard a lot, because we’ve been doing these oral histories here about

American pilots going north. Were there Canadian pilots that regularly flew in the US?

MR. CASWELL: The Canadian Wildlife Service really didn’t have…. It wasn’t even the

CWS. It was the Dominion Wildlife Service at the time. Basically, they didn’t have

planes and the same numbers of people even. But these guys had enough knowledge from

what they had done in the past. They were obviously working with the US people when

they’d come up into Canada to develop surveys and explore and that sort of stuff. I

mentioned fellows like Gus Gooch and Tom Berry who worked in our early programs.

DR. MADISON: Let me ask you one more question about looking at the last thirty

years or so. Have the challenges to the migratory waterfowl numbers changed? In the

US, when we think of the 1970s, we think of the end period for pesticides and DDT

whacking a lot of our birds. What’s driving bird number changes further north?

MR. CASWELL: Climate right now. On populations, there are a couple of things that

have happened. There is the overabundance of goose this year. You think back to a time

when probably these birds were evolving that they prairie landscape was pretty

unforgiving. These birds would winter down in the gulf coast and work their way up in

the spring across this prairie inhabited by buffalo and not much else and go up into the

Artic, breed and come back down again. With the advent of agriculture and various other

things going on up there, you’ve got a whole different landscape between what these birds

are flying from in the winter; working their way up so they can feed on grain and can be in

much better condition on the narrow stems of the new growth coming up. These birds are

in a lot better condition when they get up into the Arctic. Also, when you get up into the

Arctic and these birds are breeding up there; you think about the predator/prey

relationship. What have you got up there? You’ve got foxes and other avian predators

that come up with them. But you never have really large concentrations of predators

because sure, they can take advantage of these birds when they are breeding in the spring,

but what do they do for the rest of the year? So there is this link where the predators can

only get up to a certain number and they can’t overwinter. So the main controlling factor

on these Arctic goose populations is basically weather. Basically it’s a boom or bust

situation. You don’t get a lot of years when you get partial production. You can, on

Baffin Island for example. Sometimes only a certain portion of it will open up so the

birds will come in and nest. But generally, if let’s say it hasn’t opened up yet by mid

June, you’re going to get a complete bust in production. So you get a bust and then you

get a good production. It keeps rocking back and forth. But quite frankly, over the last

decade or so, I don’t think we’ve had a bust. Things are opening up earlier in the Arctic.

They are saying open later. The birds are in much better condition when they get there.

So we are getting more continuous production, year after year, after year. I think that’s

part of it.

DR. MADISON: That’s very interesting because that’s slightly different from some of

the factors that are affecting numbers down here. All right, one last question and it’s real

easy. I get a different response from everybody, so we keep on asking. What is the best

part of your job?

MR. CASWELL: I personally like, obviously with the numbers of years that I’ve put in,

I could theoretically say, how do you phrase it? You’re at the 1/14 phase in your life.

That’s tick me off once and I’ll give you fourteen days notice!

DR. MADISON: We call it “KMA”.

MR. CASWELL: Yeah, right! I enjoy all of the various aspects except on the

administration side. I am getting more and more into that obviously. But the fieldwork

and dealing with the people and the other agencies. And for me, I cover a lot of territory.

I mean, we’re involved in the waterfowl population surveys in prairie Canada, so I’m

there. I’m up in the Arctic involved in the population surveys and banding in the

Canadian Arctic, so I get up into the Arctic. Because of the international ness of it, we

are involved in a lot of programs in the U.S. and in Mexico and South America. I get

down to those areas in the winter too. I love being at the flyway meetings. Somebody’s

got to keep the Americans honest, and it might as well be us!

DR. MADISON: We speak the same language, and you know how bad Americans are

about learning new languages! At least we can understand your criticisms! What are the

flyway meetings like? I’ve never been to one.

MR. CASWELL: These are where all the various biologists from all the various states,

and provinces, etc., get together and look over all of the information that’s been collected

over that particular year and in the past of course. They have two phases. One is the

winter flyway meeting where you are more into providing information on the various

studies, etc., and planning what we are going to do the next year for research

cooperatively. It’s a funding source. The flyways contribute dollars to work on their

populations and their breeding grounds. Summer meetings are more the regulation phase.

How many more ducks are we going to get this year? Let’s argue over that for a while.

Theoretically, the Adaptive Harvest Management Program was supposed to remove all of

that. We agree up front on what the numbers say. And when the numbers say it, we do

it. Well, that hasn’t happened. There’s always a lot of tinkering going on since the

advent of it. But even with that we’ve always been very supportive. We’re not involved

in Harvest Management in the regulations side. We actually set our regulations in June, or

it used to be. We have to set our regulations because of our seasons and translation and

everything has to be bilingual. We’d do it in June so the US could set their regulations in

July. They would have the advantage of production information that was available to

them. Over the time period, we’ve actually progressed more in the regulation phase.

They don’t change the regulations a lot. It’s pretty well stable. But we’ve actually set

up our process now so that in December of the year, we start planning the regulations for

the next year. We have a consultation period with the Provinces. We ask what

regulations they want to change and why. We go through the public consultation period.

Our regulations are basically established in April, before the surveys are even conducted.

That means we do have the option that if something drastic happens we can come back

and make the necessary modifications. But the flyway meetings are busy and depending

on the issues they can get heated. It can get intense. Or, they can just go out and say

“no, we need more work and more information; get out and get it for us!” It’s quite an

interesting concept.

DR. MADISON: Dale, thank you so much. This was an excellent oral history.