Wherever California waterfowlers gathered during the 2008-09 season, and thereafter at various dinners or on the sporting clay course, one or more hunters generally would make a point of decrying the seven-bird mallard limit as completely out of keeping with the perceived local population. Usually, no one present expressed dissent. Indeed, the terms used to describe the regulatory thinking behind that framework were unflattering in the extreme, condemning both the regulators and the California Waterfowl Association for not advocating a much lower limit and even a shorter season.

For the plain fact is that our local mallard counts are down and have been down for several years, challenging the all-time lows. Worse, some respected biologists believe that we have allowed the population to fall below the safe critical mass of breeders required to sustain a healthy population. We enjoyed a wet spring this year and may have had a decent hatch – but it would take several such years to make up the deficit and get us up to a comfortably sustainable breeding bird count.

In the most recent issue of California Waterfowl, CWA president Bob McLandress wrote that the long seasons and high limits were not responsible for our low mallard population, essentially defending them, laying the groundwork for their continuation. According to McLandress, we are killing roughly the same number of mallards each year and the kill reflects roughly the same percentage of the population.

Wholly apart from legitimate questions concerning the accuracy of the kill numbers – a subject on which I have previously written – the president’s position totally misses the point. How does his argument bear upon the question of protecting and sustaining a critical mass of breeders? And how is it consistent with regulatory practice that routinely reduces season and bag limits on other species when populations fall? Isn’t a low and declining population why the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service closed the season on canvasbacks for 2008-09? Isn’t that why the service has lowered the limit on pintail – from ten a day when I came to California in 1956 to one per day for the last nearly two decades -- and reduced the pintail season length during a few years of that drastic reduction? Isn’t that why the service has reduced limits on scaup and proposed an even further limit last year? Why are our local mallards different? Why does the association and our regulators take the position that the regulatory framework for our local mallards has no bearing on the kill when it applies the exact opposite approach to most other species? And if low population numbers don’t justify a reduced framework, why do we have a limit or a closed season at all?

I have also remarked in this space about the curious position on this issue taken by the waterfowl specialist for the California Department of Fish & Game. If you recall his “logic,” he divided the total mallard kill (based on the highly questionable numbers we have for that) by the number of hunter days (another SWAG¹ of breathtaking proportions) and concluded that the average hunter takes less than one mallard per hunt, leading to the conclusion that reducing the limit from seven to four or three would not have any impact on total kill. This “methodology” ignores the fact that most mallards killed by hunters die over private ground where limits are the norm. Most keepers of those grounds maintain meticulous kill logs that spell out in detail the results of each hunt and prove that the average hunter day on those grounds produces far more than the statewide mean average. Yet our regulators (and apparently the Association as well) steadfastly refuse to go after the data those logs disclose, preferring instead their wildly inaccurate approach, apparently because “that’s the way we’ve always done it.”²

McLandress in his article attributed the persistent low mallard population to “loss of wetlands.” (How that justifies a high limit and long season remains unexplained, but never mind). As he describes it, development consumes thousands of acres of wetlands every year.  Here again we encounter half-truth, inconsistency and outright falsehood. First, although we have indeed consumed vast areas of historic wetland for development, the argument assumes that all wetlands lost would otherwise be good brood habitat. That is simply not the case. Indeed, CWA makes an aggressive attempt to have wetlands managers create brood habitat, consisting of grasslands for nesting associated with permanent ponds. And those efforts have proved to be a hard sell for relevant albeit depressing reasons.

Production ground, i.e., nesting and brood habitat in the spring, does not become good hunting ground in the fall and winter. To manage for production, clubs and landowners sacrifice hunting potential, a sacrifice that many refuse to make. “Why should I spend a lot of management money to give up 80 acres of good hunting habitat to produce ducks that my neighbors will kill – when they produce zilch?”

Second, and an even more telling point: many large landowners in California have gone to great trouble and expense to create brood habitat on their lands, with indifferent success. Despite their efforts, a disappointing number of hens use those grounds most years, many fewer than the land could carry.

Indeed, from the evidence that one would gather by actual trips into the field, as opposed to drawing conclusions from statewide statistics and bell-curve computer models, lack of breeders, not lack of brood habitat constitutes our real problem. Brood habitat without breeders to exploit it will produce no more ducks than your average Walmart parking lot. And when a land manager spends money to create production ground only to see it fail to produce, the word spreads – and the program becomes even harder to sell in the future.

I find an even more troubling philosophical issue at work here, an issue that transcends the dimensions of the local mallard framework and stewardship question. It comes down to this: No matter what the issue, regardless of the facts, the CWA invariably takes a position that advocates for more kill, more liberal limits, longer seasons, season extensions to the eve of nesting, youth days when most pairs are already bonded, etc. Any dissenting voices encounter a torrent of statistics compiled from the most dubious sources³ and so-called science so bogus as to give the term “junk” a bad name. And when those strategies fail to drive dissenters from the field, the killer elements resort to shouts and intimidation, non-specific loud noises, a variation on the lawyers’ mantra that when you have the facts, pound on the facts; when you have the law, pound on the law; and when you have neither, pound on the table.

The bottom line is this: we don’t have enough mallards in our local population to safely sustain it, risking irreparable harm if we had just one more dry spring before the flock has a chance to rebound. High limits and long seasons can only make it harder for populations to rebuild. Why is it OK, as a matter of management and stewardship, to have a 100-plus day season and a seven-bird daily bag on mallards with a population of around 380,000 (if that), when we have a one-bird daily bag on pintail⁴ in a segment of the continental population that winters in our Valley estimated to number roughly one million birds?

If you see the symmetry and logic in that, send me an email with an explanation, expletives deleted – and I thank you.

Elsewhere in America, we are told the Central Flyway snow goose population has exploded, to a degree that threatens devastation of their tundra nesting grounds. In an attempt to control the situation, the service has authorized spring hunts in which the hunters can use electronic calling. This has produced a cottage industry of guiding outfits that set out thousands of decoys and elaborate electronic setups with amplified calls located throughout the set. I am told, by an acquaintance who responded to one of the ads and went on such a hunt, that no human could stand that noise without hearing protection. He also reported that although thousands of snows flew over, few succumbed to the blandishments of the set and the fancy sound system.

I have been hearing similar stories from areas where snows provide a major part of the sport during the regular season. Increased hunting pressure virtually throughout the year has rendered the surviving birds invulnerable except in the wildest of wild weather. They now know too much to be suckered by hunting strategies. In short, we stand bitten by the law of unintended consequences yet again.

The regulators planned to cull the population and provide hunting opportunity at the same time by adding spring shooting to the season. But the spring hunts haven’t significantly reduced the population. They have succeeded, however, in impairing hunter opportunity throughout the year by training the birds in the ways of hunters. That’s what you could fairly call a “twofer” – a strategy that had precisely the opposite effect intended on the two main reasons for adopting it.

Having failed so completely with the snows, we hear that the regulators plan to adopt the same strategy for management of white-fronts, a population that has also expanded significantly, providing great sport for us privileged to hunt in California’s Central Valley. Personally, I figure that after two or three seasons of spring hunts, the white=fronts will also become too wary to provide reasonable hunter opportunity at any time and the population will not be reduced. Rather, it will expand by the number of birds the spring hunts condition to avoid the gun during the regular season that would otherwise become part of the kill.

Recall here a populist and perceptive definition of insanity: Doing the same thing repeatedly while expecting a different result. Worse, we should have learned by now that population control by extra hunts is the bluntest of blunt instruments and comes at a high risk. Anyone who pays attention to such things knows that the greatest criticism hunting in general has had to endure has been triggered by special hunts supposedly to reduce over-population. The one I recall most vividly was the Montana special bison hunt to kill the buffs that wandered out of Yellowstone. Someone quoted on the front page of the New York Times likened that hunt to walking into a shopping center parking lot to shoot a parked Buick. Publicity like that we do not need – even when we deserve it. The best antidote, of course, would be to eschew all conduct likely to elicit such unfortunately fair comment.

White-fronts were close to qualifying for the endangered species list about 20 years ago due to virtually uncontrolled “subsistence” spring hunting and egg-gathering in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. The population exploded when the authorities sharply restricted those practices. Doesn’t that give us a clue as to a more effective population control measure than spring hunts? Why can’t regulators simply undertake a controlled gathering of eggs in a number sufficient number to keep the populations in check, if that is such a big concern? Obviously, a carefully structured and controlled program of this sort would be much more effective than relying on hunter kill in the spring. It would not have the side effect of training the birds to avoid the gun and effectively throw raw meat to the wolves of the anti-hunting movement.

The suggestion is far too obvious ever to be adopted. And it suffers from a worse defect than that: it does not cater to the killer contingent. Indeed, it reduces the “hunter opportunity” that they now consider their birthright. Sadly, we have learned that concessions to that constituency are far easier to grant than withdraw. They will oppose any effort at withdrawal with any argument that falls to hand, regardless of illogic, inconsistency, defective data, and disregard for the ethics of stewardship, sportsmanship and fair chase. As in the case of the California Waterfowl Association’s defense of our local mallard framework.

In short, the hogwash flows with a vigor comparable to that of the growth in goose populations. And we sacrifice our moral responsibilities on the altar of unsustainable limits, season lengths and spring hunts – while proclaiming to the world that we, the hunting fraternity, are the true conservationists.

A very wise person once told me that cynicism and sarcasm are the lowest forms of wit. I didn’t get it then, and I don’t get it now. There’s nothing funny about this. Nothing at all, although it is a joke.

¹ Scientific Wild-Ass Guess.
²The Department states that it has no “access” to that data, while admitting that it has never asked for it. It thus does not know how much of it would be available simply for the asking. I offered in writing to assist in soliciting the clubs and other groundskeepers to provide it, an offer to which I have received no reply from the Department. One more proof that the Department is set in its ways, comfortable in its ignorance and does not wish to be compelled to process new information, regardless of how relevant and probative it might be. Once again, we encounter the Parable of the Cave.
³For example, compiling estimates of kill from the questionnaires we fill out to get our license the following year, band returns, when we have no way of knowing the percentage of the population banded, etc., and exit counts a public shooting venues when a significant percentage of the kill occurs over private grounds.
⁴ Our Association is striving mightily to get that limit lifted to a daily bag of two. I hope they succeed – but only as a package deal that drastically lowers the daily mallard take to no more than two.