In one important way, Northern Pintails are exceptional. Over the past several decades, most other species of dabbling ducks have been increasing in number. But the number of Northern Pintails has declined.

Nancy Hughes, a wildlife technician with Environment Canada, has spent the last few summers banding Northern Pintails on Old Crow Flats in the hope of finding where the birds spend the rest of their year. Learning more about their migration patterns might help explain why their numbers are dropping.

"They are perhaps more particular than other ducks about their breeding habitat," she says. "There's a concern that if they are forced out of their breeding habitat on the prairies by drought, they head north to moult and feed but not to breed."

An average of thirty thousand Northern Pintails use Old Crow Flats every year, many of them for nesting. Some years the numbers are much higher. The years of high usage tend to be linked with drought years on the prairies, Hughes says.

Northern Pintails aren't the only ducks using Old Crow Flats. As many as half a million birds visit the Flats each year.

"The density of birds using that whole wetlands area is quite high," Hughes says. "It's quite a productive system."

The Northern Pintail banding program was part of a broader three-year banding program and study, completed in 1996, to gather information to help develop a management plan for the Old Crow Flats Special Management Area, created by the Vuntut Gwitchin land claims settlement.

The researchers' goal was to trap and band 400 Northern Pintails a year, says Hughes, although they didn't always achieve it.

"Even with the high density of birds nesting, they're still wary," Hughes says. "It's not like you're tripping over hens and young."

The banding traps are large pens that are easy to enter but harder to leave. They are baited with barley, which seems to be a favourite with ducks. In fact, some keep coming back for more, Hughes says.

"Some of them are incredibly trap-happy. One was there every day for two weeks."

Usually the bands are returned by hunters who shoot the ducks long after they have left the Flats, but the occasional trap-happy bird provides more immediate information. One duck with a taste for barley turned up a few weeks after his Old Crow Flats banding in a bander's trap near Norman Wells in the Northwest Territories.

He was probably stopping at Norman Wells on his way to the Central Flyway, one of the continent's major migration routes, Hughes says. Pintail bands have been returned from points all along the Central Flyway, as far south as the Gulf of Mexico. They've also been returned from the Pacific coast, Mexico, and the mouth of the Mississippi. Almost a third of the continental population of Northern Pintails winters in California.

Hughes speculates that most of the Old Crow Flats birds fly south along the Mackenzie and Athabasca valleys and across the prairies to the central United States where they meet Northern Pintails from other breeding grounds.

"There seems to be a mixing in the Salt Lake area of Utah. Then some head toward California and some toward Louisiana and Texas."

They winter in coastal marshes or in grain and rice fields near the coast. In spring they head north again. Some Northern Pintails fly almost the whole length of North America between their winter and summer habitats. The trip leaves them with limited time and energy for breeding. If drought forces them out of their more southerly breeding grounds, they might not have time enough to raise a brood of chicks in the north.

Hughes says that observing Northern Pintails on Old Crow Flats has shown her how vulnerable they are to weather. Even the rich habitat of the Flats isn't enough to compensate for a bad season.

"Last year we had a late spring, so the hens nested late. Then we had an early fall and the chicks weren't really ready to go," she says. "When things go well, it's a good bet to fly north. But, because of the short season, if things go wrong, they don't have the option of a second nest in the north."

For more information about Northern Pintails and other migratory birds, contact the Canadian Wildlife Service, Environment Canada, Whitehorse.