Waterfowl Communities in the Northern Plains

Ruddy Duck

Ruddy Duck. -- Ruddy ducks have a distribution concentrated in the southern Prairie Provinces and the Dakotas. Although the numbers of ruddy ducks continent-wide showed a significant upward trend during the study period, this result appears to be due to particularly high counts in a few years of the early 1980s (Fig. 14). Numbers at Woodworth also tended to increase and, in fact, mirrored the continental population (r = 0.63).

Ruddy ducks were fairly strongly related to wetland counts at Woodworth [r = 0.35; Johnson and Grier (1988) did not include this species in their study]. No weather variable appeared to influence numbers of ruddy duck on the study area.

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