I get invited to an old duck-hunting club from time to time. The club was founded in the 1920s. It is located in the Butte Sink, a world-renowned waterfowling area in the Sacramento Valley. As its name implies, the Sink is a natural depression that lies immediately to the west of a small mountain range known as the Sutter Buttes. The Buttes feature prominently in many of the more famous and widely distributed waterfowl prints, those of Harry Adamson and others. The Sink probably had its genesis when volcanic activity created the Buttes millions of years ago. At times of high water caused by the storms of fall and winter, Butte Creek and the Sacramento River overflow into the Sink creating a natural marshland of tule thickets and riparian vegetation that historically encompassed nearly one hundred square miles.

Before the state and local districts built extensive flood control works beginning in the late 19^th Century, the Sink filled naturally, on an annual basis except in those rare years of extreme drought. Even today, high water events hit the Sink most years. Waterfowl have used the area as prime wintering ground presumably for millennia. It remains one of the best hunting and waterfowl use areas on the Pacific Flyway, if not in the entire country. Agreements that implement the North American Migratory Bird Treaty specifically identify the Sink as an area of great value. Waterfowl populations in the Sink provide a reliable barometer of the wintering flight both as to number and species composition.

The club to which I am invited for a hunt or two each season maintains meticulous kill records that date back to its inception. Consulting those logs, you can learn the number, species and gender of every bird taken. You can also find the number of hunters – a number from which you can determine the average success rate. It would be no great trick, particularly in the computer age, to plot this information on a graph that would show the ebb and flow of the flight during the fall and winter months over a span of several decades.

Many of the other clubs in the Sink keep similar records, as do clubs in other parts of the state. This phenomenon is not limited to California, nor is it limited to private duck clubs. Many guides and commercial hunting operations keep similar records.

Federal and state regulators use none of this information to assist them in their work, even for the limited purpose of verifying their conclusions. They would prefer to estimate kill by hunter surveys or extrapolating from the checkout counts at public hunting grounds, a process perhaps one notch above the proverbial SWAG, i.e., scientific wild-ass guess. Instead of using kill trend lines derived from available records of real ducks on the same property, year after year, as an aid to estimate population and “harvest” (trend lines based on a hard count of dead birds in hand), they rely on “counts” made from low-flying planes, a process with a statistical error factor of twenty percent that they admit to.

Think about that for a moment. We will determine our bird population by counting those we see as we fly over them at one hundred or so feet at one hundred forty miles per hour! The most important count, done in the spring, looks for nesting birds, when the hen, at least, is trying hard to stay hidden. The fliers sometimes use photographs to aid in the counts – but they have no way of knowing whether the birds they are counting today were counted in a different transect the day before and simply moved overnight. Indeed, until the day when the birds reliably and truthfully return the census questionnaires, the process will always be imperfect, an estimate, an educated guess.

But that’s the “scientific method,” folks. Using the hard data that’s there for the asking to corroborate or challenge the data is too speculative. Suggest it and you will hear the accursed “A” word used. Anecdotal evidence. “Anecdotal” meaning not reliable, not scientific, offered by people who don’t get it – or perhaps more to the point, something you collected and I didn’t. The official minds are absolutely closed to this material.

With our leaders turning up their noses at information of such high evidentiary quality, it would be astonishing if they took the trouble to interview the locals who pick and clean ducks commercially for hunters, even though those folks have a treasure trove of useful information. Of course, they don’t interview such people.

Commercial pickers throw out piles of wings that would give a good notion of the adult to juvenile ratio in the “harvested” segment of the population. They could tell the regulators if they were finding an egg in some of the hens killed during the extension or the late youth shoot weekend. (That was a pretty common find out here, by the way – which ought to condemn both the extension and a late youth shoot even if nothing else will). Instead of going to a reliable, steady source of high volume, the authorities rely on wing counts derived from the random hunters who volunteer to turn them in, with no effort made to see if the volunteers were conscientious, selective in the process or represented a decent cross-section of the hunting population. And commercial pickers have a pretty good idea whether the kill is up, down, the same, etc., as well as the species and gender of the birds in the bag.

This stuff is also anecdotal and therefore not worth the trouble. If you ask, you will also be told that “we don’t have the person power and it’s too expensive to collect such information, etc.” The possibility of having a graduate student attempt such a study has never been explored in this state, to my knowledge. Maybe the world is different elsewhere.

And then there are the wetlands managers, the men who have worked the same property for a couple of decades and know its moods as well as they know their own, perhaps better in some cases. They know when the populations are rising or falling. In my view, they have a better sense of what’s happening than any office bound bureaucrat or even the scientists who rely on statistics gathered by others or on the basis of a short term field observation.

Some of the best hunting clubs in the Butte Sink adjoin a federal refuge known as the Bean Field. The Bean Field is probably the low point of the Sink, the spot that flooded first and drained last under natural conditions, before construction of all the flood control, irrigation and other works altered the original landscape forever. Whether it is the historic low point or not, the birds treat it as a true ground zero, a place they will go when they are nowhere else, a geographic homing instinct hard-wired into their genetic migration urge.

A longtime manager of one of those adjoining clubs observed that the population of wintering birds in the Bean Field was way down this last season (2002-03). Twenty percent of normal, he estimated -- a number that corresponded exactly with the observations of a federal biologist at Klamath NWR at the start of the season. The manager’s evidence and his observations are worthless, of course. Anecdotal. Non-scientific. Perhaps I am prejudiced but I believe that the manager’s estimate, derived from daily observation over the course of the entire wintering season and not just the hunting period, is as reliable as that of the federal biologist. If nothing else, it is corroborative. His observations tend to show that the Klamath number was a true picture, not an aberration. Doesn’t that have value when we so urgently need solid data?

A well known sportswriter and avid waterfowler once observed that the feds and state regulators could save a lot of money by extrapolating their counts from the field estimates of veteran wetlands managers instead of spending hours flying around in small planes trying to make a reliable tally. Correct or not, the regulators’ refusal to test their numbers against the field observations of skilled and experienced managers cannot be justified, particularly at a time of crisis when we desperately need to know as much as we can possibly know about field conditions. The idea that it would cost too much or take too long or that we don’t have the personnel to do it would be easier to believe if the information gathering project had ever been defined, the cost estimated and the required funds unsuccessfully solicited from private or non-profit funding sources. To my knowledge (and I have asked the question), none of those things have ever occurred..

I got fired up on this subject in the early ‘80s. In March of 1978, I was crazy enough to buy a small rice farm in the Sacramento Valley that looked like it had some potential as both an investment and a hunting property. I took a helluva risk, borrowing much more than I should have. To save money, I managed the property myself, developing certain marginal portions of it strictly for habitat and hunting while trying to improve the rest for income production. It was a struggle to hold on to the place during the lean years – but I grew to love it dearly, even when I was digging drainage ditches with a shovel in triple digit heat because I didn’t want to spend the money to rent a backhoe. I kept telling my wife that as expensive as the place was, it was cheaper than a course of psychiatric treatment. The fact that I had bought the place, she would say, proved how dearly I needed that treatment.

After a few years of hands-on stewardship (and I do mean hands-on), I could tell how the hunting would be in the fall by what I was seeing on my property and in the vicinity during the preceding spring, checked against what I heard from the land managers and farmers in my area. It didn’t seem to matter what the experts said or the official counts were. If I saw a lot of mallards in March, April and May when I drove the farm roads (the dirt and gravel tracks that don’t show up on any triple A map), if I had several nests in the grasslands above the tailwater areas in my rice fields, I would see a good flight in the fall. And if not, not. As I became more involved in the farming and water issues of the area, the scope of my annual amateur canvass and seat-of-the-pants survey came to encompass 20,000 acres, all word of mouth and field observation checked against memory, a form of verbal tradition. With each passing year, with each new property from which I derived information from the people who worked the land, my sense of the situation became more sure.

The Sacramento Valley may be a unique laboratory for these sorts of observations because we raise most of our mallards locally. A few pintail and teal nest here, but most of our flight consists of local mallards plus migrant pintail, widgeon, teal, gadwall and spoonbills. My ground level spring pulse taking, of course, told me nothing about the migrant flight we could expect, even when it was dead bang on with respect to mallards. (That’s what mattered to me anyway, as I have been a “greenheads” guy for many years, at least until that part of the year when the fully-fledged bull sprig show up).

But the point is this: The official counts and projections that differed from field observation soon had no credibility with me or anyone I knew who worked in the field to the extent that those counts and projections differed from our observations. Which is not to say that our observations were right and the official stuff wrong on the grand, Valley wide scale – but it is to suggest two things. First, the grand scale may have little bearing on what will be seen where you hunt; and second, that loss of credibility, unfortunate in and of itself, is probably avoidable. And the process of avoiding it would add to the body of knowledge we need if we are to manage our birds with intelligent sensitivity. The data is out there and would not require much effort to gather. Credibility is important. Regulations that lack a foundation of consensus are often treated with disrespect. The steel shot rules come to mind, for example.

But let’s free this notion from a California context. Suppose, for example, the feds, the state waterfowl regulators and/or state waterfowl associations made a concerted effort to collect wings from commercial pickers and processors in Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana. Add to the list clubs and hunting operations that clean their birds for their patrons Shouldn’t that be a virtual treasure trove of information on the composition and age ratio of the kill? Is that information being collected now on any organized basis? I don’t think so. And what about the kill records maintained on most shooting grounds? Surely, this information would add greatly to our body of relevant knowledge after a few years elapsed to establish a data base. Indeed, I suggest that the same holds true for each and every state that has a significant place in the production and hunting of waterfowl.

As a first step, one of our universities that has an active waterfowl biology department should put together a study plan identifying: (1) the type of information that could be obtained, 2) how it could be used, and (3) the cost of collecting and organizing it in useful form. Until that is done, I for one will continue to believe that we pursue enlightenment by resolutely overlooking some of our most accurate information, preferring estimates to hard evidence because “members of the fraternity” prepare the estimates while uneducated rednecks collect the real stuff.

One of the more influential waterfowl biologists, now retired after thirty years of teaching, signs off his e-mails with a motto that goes something like this: “Those who know need not be told. Those who don’t can’t be instructed.” The guy must consider that couplet profound or he would not use it as the capper on all his communications. Think about that for a moment. Is it possible to envision a more telling profession of a totally closed mind than that fatuous little mantra? No fundamentalist imam, secure in the notion that all human knowledge ceased when the Prophet ascended to Paradise in the seventh century, could have said it better. Unfortunately, that seems to be the mentality that we confront – those of us who have the temerity, the arrogance, the impertinence, to raise a few pointed questions. The usual answer adds up to: “I’m a scientist and you’re not,” delivered with a smug smile or a hint of irritation, depending upon the mood of his highness at the time.

Well, call me arrogant, impertinent, whatever you like. I believe that it’s long past time to demand that our science open its mind and its eyes to the evidence that lies virtually at its feet and to challenge settled notions – the way scientists in almost every other field do as a matter of routine. Tagging that material with the label “anecdotal evidence” is not an answer. Epithets are not argument.

One last note: I don’t know what conditions are like where you are but out here, we are being told that our winter mallard counts are up 20%. My forays into the field tell me that those are paper ducks, none of the feathered variety being in evidence where they ought to be at this time of year. Personally, I’m getting mentally and emotionally prepared for another slim season – and I fear that those who take heart from those “counts” are in for disappointment. .

Time will tell.