A good friend farms rice in the Sacramento Valley, in the heart of one of California’s most storied hunting areas. A forty-acre field, roughly square, lies between his house and the county road that bears his name. The county named the road after his grandfather. The fourth generation, in the person of the second son, resides in the first house up the road to the north. Rice fields awaiting the disk and landplane lie in every direction. The starkly beautiful outline of the Sutter Buttes graces the western horizon.

When I visited my friend during the first week of April, he took me onto the front porch and clapped his hands loudly. Several hen mallards rose from the grasses of the forty-acre field, sounding the alarm call. He stepped a few feet into the field and clapped again. More hens leapt into the air. He turned and smiled. “Never seen anything quite like this, Howard. Gotta be thirty nests out there. My wife tells me I can’t touch that field until the ducklings have hatched. Probably have to do what she says, if I want to enjoy a comfortable life.”

It has been one of those rare years here – plenty of rain with warm weather to generate an explosion of grasses, but none of those fierce pulses of floodwater that scour away the nesting cover. We could enjoy a great production year. Unfortunately, habitat without birds to breed in it is as useless as ducks without habitat. We need both. Clearly, my friend has both in his front field. We have both on the little ranch where I hunt, as my turkey hunting forays have made clear. The gobblers elude me as usual, while mallard pairs pass overhead continually, in good numbers, rising from all the drains, hens spinning off to land in the thick grasses.

One could easily get giddy at the prospects – if one took that little patch of ground as a Valley-wide barometer. But that would be a mistake as the same condition does not obtain elsewhere. Indeed, one can travel through large portions of our Valley and see almost no birds at all, despite proliferation of the same rich grasslands.

The year 1999 provides the frame of reference for me. That year, if you saw a bird in the sky from March through June, it was a mallard, likely as not. Every puddle held a pair or two; every vernal pool held several pairs. It didn’t seem to matter where you were. Driving the country roads in rice country, paired mallards crossed in front of you every minute or so, threesomes gyrated through the sky as the drake in waiting jockeyed for position. Every water hole on every golf course seemed to hold its little flock of wild mallards.

Not this year. For every area that holds a concentration of ducks, one can easily find one or more areas equally promising with no birds at all. Of course, our 1999 breeding pair count was double what it was last spring, even though the feds and state “guardians of the resource” continue to allow us long seasons and high daily bag limits despite such sharp declines in population.

But there’s a potential positive here – at least an opportunity for one. The current conditions should provide a critical test for the scientists’ pet theories. With breeding hen numbers down and nesting cover the best in years, “density dependence” issues should not limit production. The birds have substantial room to spread out. The lush cover and mild temperatures should lead to high levels of nest success and robust recruitment. And these prime conditions challenge the compensatory kill hypothesis; for if that hypothesis holds any validity, then the favorable environment should produce enough birds to reverse the recent sharp decline in population, to demonstrate that hunter kill did not matter.

If that does not occur, if we do not get extraordinary recruitment this year, then we will have been handed one more reason to doubt the teaching of our “experts.” If it does not occur, we in California will have squandered the production opportunity of this bountiful spring by depleting our brood stock to satisfy a bad case of short-term trigger itch. It probably felt good for some at the time, although the laments on the internet suggest that only a few found last season a satisfying one.1

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The feds have now released the winter counts. The numbers for our wintering ground rose sharply – and the drumbeat for a liberal framework has already begun. Strange how perceptions adjust to fit current reality.. When the winter counts are down, the experts tell us that those are the least reliable of the numbers, the most variable based on weather, the most questionable in terms of accuracy. But when those counts climb, it is amazing how they acquire authenticity.

No mention of the fact that early storms in the Valley that created attractive wetlands, and early hard freezes to the north to push the birds down, might have had an influence. Some of the men who compile those counts know for a fact that weather played a large role – but they don’t get paid (or think they get paid) to take positions that might disappoint the masses, even if those positions find their basis in hard reality while the masses clutch at false hope.

Exact science this is not. But for the sake of consistency – even the appearance of consistency – the champagne bottles should remain corked and on ice until we have the spring counts plus a chance to assess this year’s production. Personally, I expect our mallard counts to be down from last year, the lowest year in the last ten. But I must confess that some of what I am seeing in a few places like my rice farmer friend’s front field has me hoping that I may prove wrong.

* * * * *

The pintail plot thickens. We will hear this year from experts who claim that we seriously undercount that population. We will hear that the Alaska population (which provides most of the birds we see in our Central Valley) remains stable and has not increased in response to reduced season length and bag limits. Indeed, it appears that the Alaska population ebbs and flows within a relatively narrow band, in inverse proportion to the ebb and flow of the fox populations in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, periodically decimated by rabies or other scourges. The experts will tell us that pintail survival rates are far higher than previously thought, a conclusion hard to reconcile with stable populations and the notion that ducks cannot be “stockpiled.”

Intriguing stuff, internally contradictory, something for everyone. Wherever the truth may lie, all these ideas carry an implicit admission that we don’t know what we are doing when it comes to pintail management. We can’t count them accurately, we don’t have a clear picture of where they nest these days, and we have no idea how to increase their numbers – or if indeed an increase is even possible. But there’s a purpose behind all this admission and revelation – a strong and growing push to liberalize the pintail regulations for the coming year, based in large part on surmise and admitted ignorance – as in “we don’t know enough to justify holding the harvest down.”

I happen to have more than a little personal background in this vortex of confusion. Beginning in the fall of 1972, I visited the Alaska Peninsula for a week or ten days for eighteen straight years, usually the first or second week of September.2 These were trout fishing and backpacking expeditions, although I shot a few duck and ptarmigan for dinner every now and then. Over the years, I became familiar with the country from the Lake Clark Pass down to Becheroff Lake, a vast wilderness that includes what is now Lake Clark and Katmai National Parks. On several of those trips, I encountered large flocks of pintail, hanging out in the river bends, the estuaries and the beaver ponds. One backpack trip in particular, a forty-mile walk from the source to the mouth of Copper River where it empties into Lake Iliamna, I had swarms of pintail around me for an entire week.

Commenting on that phenomenon at a waterfowl gathering after I returned home, I was told, in authoritative and sonorous tones, by a certain prestigious waterfowl biologist, that I must have been mistaken. No pintail on the peninsula, he said. The habitat is all wrong for them. Too mountainous. Too many predators. No food, etc., etc.

I shot three or four of those ducks to eat and held them in my hands while preparing them for the cooking fire. After hunting pintail in California for more than twenty years, I had a pretty good frame of reference for identifying them. And those Alaska birds were the most amazing imitation faux pintail that anyone could possibly imagine. Obviously not the real thing, of course, because the great biologist had so declared.3 Some unknown species that looks just like pintail – but not pintail. There can be no more telling symptom of trouble than when a leading authority denies the existence of an obvious, notorious and inarguable phenomenon.

Then there’s the venerable “overflight” theory, dusted off for another run: Finding no suitable nesting ground on the prairies, the birds allegedly fly over their traditional nesting area and continue on to the boreal forest region. Here again, I have some personal experience, although not nearly so much as with the Alaska Peninsula. In four trips to the boreal forest region of northwestern Alberta and the Northwest Territories west of Great Slave Lake, in the late summer prior to migration, I have seen nary a pintail. Lots of geese and mallards, but no sprig.

Proving exactly nothing, I suppose. Those Alaska Peninsula birds I encountered might have been migrants in transit from the Yukon-Kuskokwim – although current “scientific” wisdom would have us believe that the birds migrate along a much more southerly vector than that. And the boreal forest region is so unimaginably vast that you could probably hide two or so million pintail in it and never be the wiser, unless someone happened to stumble onto them by accident and reported the encounter.4

Whatever the truth of the matter, the hopes and anxieties of a new springtime provide the cauldron in which creative ideas seethe – innovative approaches to justify a variation on “liberal” regulation to bring the hunters out next fall. Having pretty much exhausted the mallard-centric thinking we turn to the pintail and support a fervent argument for a longer season and higher daily bag for that species on a platform of admitted ignorance. At this point, I am resigned to the fact that the pitch will be made and will likely succeed. But I challenge those who make it to accept and promote the following four points as part of the package:

First, admit that we are relaxing the regulations not on the basis of science but in its acknowledged absence, extrapolating from anecdotal evidence and deductions based on common sense. If that works for going more liberal, i.e., allowing more take than science justifies, then it should work the other way as well under appropriate circumstances and to deal with kill-enhancing technological innovations such as spinning-wing decoys.

Second, make it absolutely clear to the hunting public that the change is strictly experimental, and should not be relied upon as a template for the future. We must avoid the sense of vested entitlement that each relaxation of the regulations seems to engender. Hunters must understand that a decline in spring counts will bring about an immediate return to the more restrictive rules.

Third, the daily bag should be restricted to drakes only after November 10. Once the birds achieve winter plumage, pintails do not present a gender identification problem, even in fog or low light conditions.5

Fourth, any increase in permitted pintail take should be countered by a commensurate reduction in the mallard limit. We must reduce the pressure on that species if we are to harbor hope for its future and a return to the plentiful times of the late ‘90s.

As dubious as I am at the prospect of any relaxation of restrictions in the current climate of population declines, I find satisfaction in the drift of the pintail arguments. An admission that science cannot provide us with clear answers is long overdue.

And in the meantime, while I fret over what might happen this coming fall, I can take solace from the mallard hens going about their business in my rice farmer friend’s front field. May they be fruitful and multiply.

1 The suspicion persists that those who claim to have had good hunting were guilty of taking an extra pintail or two, for those birds seemed remarkably plentiful in relative terms, considering the published population numbers.

2 The waterfowl hunting season opened on September 1 in those years.

3 Nothing so quickly dissipates respect for a supposed man of learning as authoritative (and condescending) statements that conflict with your own universe of observed reality. My wariness of waterfowl biologists probably began with that incident.

4 Given its wooded nature and dense wetland vegetation, I doubt that accurate aerial counts are possible in that country, even if one knows where to look. It would be tantamount to the difficulties of making accurate wood duck counts. Ducks hanging out in a black spruce bog remain virtually invisible until they flush.

5 We hear that one hen should be allowed as a “mistake” duck. If we don’t build that into the regs, hens shot by accident will be left in the marsh. The problem, of course, is that with one hen allowed, hunters shoot that hen as part of their limit. The second hen becomes the “mistake” duck and is left in the marsh. But in any case, the regs are for the hunter who wants to abide by the law – because enforcement is virtually non-existent on private hunting grounds these days. Protecting hens tells those hunters (hopefully the majority) to be more careful.