The morning dawned warm and still. Only a few clouds hung like tattered gauze curtains in the grey light of the coming day.  My friend, who I will call Gregg for the sake of this piece, had invited me to share a hunt on his large ranch in an area that he had developed as wetland habitat. That was in mid-season, the time when Gregg generally enjoys fine shooting.

In normal years, one would have a hard time matching Gregg’s ranch for mallard productivity. Gregg and his guests usually took limits without a great deal of effort. Having been there many times before, I knew and had enjoyed the bounty of his marsh at first hand, marveling at his skill and dedication in managing it.  (I emphasize first-hand experience because I am continually being told by so-called authorities, who spend most of their time tinkering with computer models rather than in the marsh looking skyward, that my views lack a scientific foundation of credibility. I gain some fleeting solace out of the retort that theirs’ lack an existential foundation of reality).

Something had clearly changed this year. Gregg had warned me with the invitation and I soon observed the phenomenon he had described. I didn’t need the warning as I had observed it on all my previous hunts this season. Although a decent flight showed up with the growing light – birds that had spent the dark hours in the nearby rice fields returning to their resting grounds – mallards were conspicuous by their scarcity among the flocks of pintail, widgeon and spoonbills. And those relatively few mallards were far warier than normal, particularly for birds using a lightly hunted area.

Gregg possesses extraordinary skill with a call, particularly on his home ranch. At other times, I have seen him pull bird after bird, flock after flock into easy shooting range. But not this morning – or any time this season for that matter, according to him. The birds responded to his hail, turned and descended to about one hundred yards in altitude, circled once without lowering and then left. Time after time, while the pintail, widgeon and spoonbills poured in to light on the pond. We ended up with three greenheads total for the morning, all drakes flying alone. Mature birds, all of them. One showed evidence of being actually “old” in waterfowl terms – well over seven years, according to Gregg who is better at determining such things than I am.

One hears the same story from all over our California valley. Fewer mallards, uncommonly wary (with a few exceptions); and those who can tell the difference report that the birds they take are almost all mature with very few juveniles of the 2008 hatch. Nor did those phenomena come as a real shock to anyone who pays attention.

We had some of the worst nesting conditions in history in the spring of 2008, after a bad year in 2007. Our local breeding numbers approached the bottom of the chart, close to the lowest levels since we began keeping track. Drought conditions prevailed throughout the summer, putting pressure on the available brood water. The counts published in late summer confirmed our worst fears, a dangerously low number of local mallards in the fall flight – a number so low that one of the most respected local biologists (who does not work for the state or federal government or our state waterfowl association) surmised that perhaps the number had reached a level below the minimum critical mass needed to sustain the population for the long term. And our local mallards provide somewhere between sixty and seventy-five percent (depending upon who you ask and the perceived agenda of the question) of our California’s annual kill.

The feds looked upon those conditions as part of larger picture and gave us another year of “liberal,” apparently relying primarily on a new and thoroughly untested Pacific Flyway version of the discredited mid-continent adaptive harvest model. Our Fish & Game Commission went along, despite widespread evidence of the marsh reality. The California Waterfowl Association embraced “liberal” as usual, reflecting its “hunter opportunity” agenda and rejection of conservation and “fair chase” principles. Our department staff did not stand up vigorously for protection of the resource. Thus, it came to pass that we have a one hundred day season and a seven bird daily bag limit on mallards in a year where the numbers on canvasbacks, similar to the mallard count in our local flight, prompted the feds to close the season altogether. Not to mention the fact that we have a one pintail limit with a flight of that species on our flyway at least four times larger than mallards.

Regarding all this, a cynic could easily conclude that it has become national and state policy to kill them all, in a last climactic orgy of excess. Only one factor of fortuitous good fortune can redeem such incredible malfeasance – the birds refuse to cooperate, just as they refuse to return the questionnaires that would allow the “regulators” to fashion an even more lethal strategy. They spend their days on sanctuary ground, feed at night and generally reject the blandishments of skilled callers such as my friend Gregg.

Even before our Commission adopted the framework – immediately after the California Waterfowl Association formally recommended that it be adopted (with the trivial exception of limiting the daily take to one hen instead of two) – many hunters expressed the belief that the proposed mallard bag was not just wrong but crazy. One veteran of the marsh, in particular, employed the term “asinine” and thereupon provoked an attempt at defense by our waterfowl specialist at the Department of Fish & Game.

I summarize that defense, as the specialist later explained it to me:  When you divide the number of mallards killed each year by the number of “hunter days,” (using federal numbers, which is another wild guess story in and of itself), you get a number suggesting that the average hunter day (one hunter hunting on one day) results in a bag of roughly one/half a mallard per shoot. Therefore, reducing the daily bag limit from seven to four would have no impact and save no ducks. (I am not making this up). By the same logic, the President-Elect’s proposal to increase income taxes on persons who make more than $250,000 per annum will raise no revenue because the average taxpayer only makes about $75,000. The flaw obviously consists of using a mean average as the method of attempting to understand a situation to which it is utterly unsuited.  The Parable of The Blind Men And The Elephant comes to mind.

The answer does not lie with the mean, but with those whose kill falls at the high end of the scale. If the regulators gave the matter any thought, they would ask: Do some hunters actually shoot the seven mallards per day?  If so, how many hunters and how often?  It may be difficult to get exact numbers – but since when has this field of scientists insisted on anything more than rough estimates? Until we have at least an idea of the answers to those questions, we have no idea whatsoever whether a reduction in mallard limit would significantly reduce the harvest. I am personally astounded by the fact that our regulators have not attempted to gather this data, even more so that they seem to consider it irrelevant.

Specifically, in California (and I understand that the same applies elsewhere), a small percentage of the hunters take the great majority of the ducks, particularly true of mallards. Here, the best mallard hunting takes place on private grounds, duck clubs and ranches with prime wetland habitat, including some that have been recognized as “prime” for generations. Many of the hunters who have access to and control those grounds hunt more than 30 days during the year – quite a few even more than that. Many of them pay big money for the privilege. They take limits at least half the time and have guests with them on many of those hunts that do the same. I have been to many of those places as a guest, have held a shooting membership from time to time in some of the better ones, and know whereof I speak as a matter of first-hand knowledge. I have seen many of the kill logs that most of the good clubs keep and I know that the members rarely if ever fudge on their reporting. Those logs tell a far different story than our regulators believe – or that the California Waterfowl Association apparently wants them to believe.

I can put dozens of hunters into the category of those who shoot more than 30 days per season and take limits regularly, just from situations of which I have personal knowledge. There are probably 1,000 such cases throughout the state. If you assume 15 limit days for each of those hunters (and not counting their guests), you could take 45,000 mallards out of the kill by reducing the limit from 7 to 4, assuming that the hunters observed the game laws.¹   That’s close to fifteen percent of the current kill as the feds estimate it – and it would not come out of the bag of the common man as they – recall -- only get one mallard for every two shoot days.

The regulators scoff at the notion that a significant number of hunters take the full limit often during the season. But when you question them, you find that they have done no fieldwork on the subject such as, for example, reviewing the meticulous and detailed logs that many of the clubs keep. True, the state has no power to compel disclosure of that information – but what difference does that make when they have not even thought to make a request. In short, they have made important management decisions affecting one of our most important species based on assumptions of the kill profile that are simply, demonstrably and grossly false; and that most of the members of the serious hunting fraternity know to be wildly at variance with reality—not to mention inconsistent with other regulatory strategies. 

If reducing the daily bag has no impact, then by parity of reasoning, increasing it wouldn’t either. If each hunter on every hunt is only going to take one-half a mallard, you could raise the limit to 20 or 50 or 100 if what you are really trying to do is stoke up the August crowd to invigorate stamp and equipment sales. No harm to the resource because the limit is meaningless. But if that is so, why have we had a one pintail daily bag for years? No one can claim that that restriction hasn’t reduced the kill, particularly in these times when pintail literally fill our skies. Why have any of the other species limits been cut back supposedly in response to population trends? Think of cans, scaup, black ducks, etc.

I submit that the “regulators” cannot answer these questions rationally or logically. That is bad enough. But the complacent dismissal with which they deflect the arguments – “I rely on science and you’re not a scientist, etc., etc., etc” – is the part that convinces me we are doomed.  That is unless and until we replace the lot, and the models they claim as the fount of their dogma.

Humpty-Dumpty, one of the character’s in Lewis Carroll’s Through The Looking Glass²   had a saying, an authoritative declaration intended to cut off all disagreement and debate:  “When I use a word, it means precisely what I say it means, neither more nor less.” The term “science” as used by our regulators provides a perfect example of a Humpty-Dumptyism. Strip away the soothing preamble to rejection of serious engagement on an issue and you will hear our regulators saying: “I’m a scientist and you are not . . .” as a way of telling you to shut up and accept their wisdom, as from on high.

It is hard to imagine another field of human endeavor where we would apply the term “science” to something as fraught with uncertainty, unknowns and uncontrollable variables as waterfowl biology – speaking of the wild flight as opposed to the barnyard or laboratory version. Just as algebra is not higher mathematics, what we have in our field is not true “science,” if what we mean by that term is a thoughtful, thorough and internally consistent basis for a regime of sustainable management for our birds. We may have the best we can have under the circumstances. The error lies in believing that it is more than it is, i.e., a compendium of unprovable hypotheses based on a foundation of numbers that are no more than very rough estimates. If we recognized the limitations, we might be more careful and more open to considering relevant questions.

Personally, I have come to distrust both the inputs and the conclusions of our system. But what bothers me the most is the fatuous complacency and dismissive condescension of those in charge, an attitude that simply rejects all questions, all references to inconvenient fact as the product of unsophisticated and untrained minds rather then informed observation of field reality. Who are you going to believe, me (the anointed expert) or your lyin’ eyes?

If the seven-bird daily bag and one hundred day season for our mallard flight in the conditions that prevailed this year doesn’t demonstrate the total bankruptcy of our regulatory system (and the association that supports it), then nothing else will. One more dry spring, and Mother Nature may bang down the gavel on that judgment in a way that all of us will heartily regret. Knowing who to blame will provide fleeting comfort to those who really give a damn.

As I write this, another critically dry winter seems to be shaping up. And with spinning- wing decoys legal as of a few days ago, temporarily increasing the depletion of our precious, dwindling breeding stock while adding to that unknown number of hunter days that yield a seven bird limit, who can guess how loud the bang of that gavel might prove to be?

It’s early yet – but as those in charge adopt the hear no evil, see no evil and for goodness sake speak none as well, I say prepare for the worst, folks. Anyone who can see light at the end of this tunnel suffers from some sort of retinal dysfunction.

¹I am pretty confident that most of the hunters in this category are law-abiding, most on principle and others out of fear of embarrassment.

²Carroll also, of course, wrote Alice in Wonderland