The regulators have completed their counts, consulted their matrices, the staffs and associations have made their recommendations fully cloaked in the verbal patina of “science,” and we now have our dates and bag limits for the coming waterfowl hunting season. Let’s step back from all that static – the catalogs promoting equipment and the rising fever of anticipation – long enough to take note of a few facts.

Most hunters agree that we had a poor season last year. Reports from states on the southern end of the Mississippi Flyway seemed to compete in an effort to hit the lowest note on the Richter Scale of disappointment and despair I recall in particular a lament from Tennessee disclaiming interest in a discussion of mallards “’cuz we don’t see any of them ‘round these parts any more.”

The Pacific Flyway experience was not much better – dismal throughout the season at Klamath, generally poor elsewhere with a few localized exceptions. Like the year before, it was a season most notable for empty skies, even in storms, even on those days when we came in with some birds – most notable for its poor quality when compared to the situation a mere five years ago. So we start from that base, a base that includes the information that last year’s ballyhooed increase in pintail was probably wrong, a counting error, a statistical aberration, but not a true indicator of resurgence in that beleaguered species.

The federal spring breeding counts show that seven of the ten species counted declined from last year, Gadwall, canvasback and scaup constituting the exceptions. Populations of scaup stand near its all-time low, despite this year’s increase – so the uptick hardly qualifies as a gloriously positive sign. On balance, this year’s numbers speak of further, significant decline.

Mid-continent mallards are down seven percent. Potholes are significantly less numerous. The California mallard spring counts declined roughly 21 percent (after a 100 day, seven-bird daily bag limit in the 2003 season when we killed 12 percent more mallards than the year before, starting from a relatively low base). From a local perspective, however, the most striking element of these numbers is where they stand in absolute terms – well below long-term averages in all parts of the state, the lowest mallard count since the counts began. If you are one of the shrinking minority who still believe the federal numbers, the mid-continent situation is not as bleak as ours, although it is certainly bad enough.

Put the numbers together with the empty-sky experience of the last few seasons and something truly grim emerges. If the sights and sounds of a winter marsh full of waterfowl enter into this equation – if those sensory experiences have intrinsic worth that transcends a kill count, then we have truly passed into a new era, a qualitative change for the worse in the waterfowling experience. Official counts shed light on that story, but they do not define it nor do it justice. Indeed, they mislead by suggesting a picture not nearly as depressing as the marsh experience of those who can dredge up recall of seasons only five or six years in the past.

So what have our regulators decided to allow, scientifically determined on the basis of those numbers – supported by extensive bio-babble and fatuous sermons concerning the importance of “hunter opportunity” (as if hunter opportunity were an abstract concept unrelated to actual birds in a real world sky over a marsh that exists in our lives today and is not the idealized remnant of long dead memory)? A “liberal” framework again, as though we were stuck in a time warp of the late ‘90s. In California, we have settled on a 93-day season (60 days for pintail) with a seven bird daily bag (5 mallards but only one hen, 1 pintail), a framework reminiscent of the days when we actually had a lot of ducks. (The feds would have given us two weeks more – so the self-congratulating local leaders of our sport proclaim the foregoing as an illustration of their responsibility, their restraint, their stewardship virtue).

And unlike the middle to late ‘90s when we actually had a lot of ducks, we shoot this year until the end of January with youth days in early February. In the middle to late ‘90s when we actually had real birds in a real world sky over our marshes, we had the good sense to end the season earlier, to give the survivors a chance to rest, regroup and fatten up before the rigors of the spring migration and nesting effort begin.1

Not now. “Enhancing hunter opportunity” now demands that we hammer away deep into the pair bonding period. After all, we have to offer satisfaction to those poor hunters who somehow cannot find the time to get out until the very living end of January. Don’t they have rights? Don’t they deserve the “opportunity”? Why, after all, should anyone have to accommodate himself and sacrifice his “opportunity” to a larger social good, such as, to pick an increasingly irrelevant example, the long-term well being of our waterfowl?

On that theory, why have a closed season at all? Wouldn’t the “no closed season/no limit” framework provide opportunity most consistent with the full exercise of personal freedom and civil liberty? That way, the truly opportunity-impaired hunter could shoot the birds right off the nest – which, indeed, is not too far from where we are today.

The concept of shooting to the end of January to enhance “hunter opportunity” would at least claim the virtue of logic if those who promoted it would agree to close the general season on January 15 (to pick a more reasonable date) and restrict the later shoot to those who first filed a sworn affidavit with the enforcers that they had found it impossible to get out earlier in the season – with a significant penalty for falsehood. If “opportunity” for the opportunity-impaired is our object, why not solve the problem in that direct fashion and lighten up on the birds?

Perish the thought. What we have here is just another bogus argument offered as a fig leaf for the guys who want to kill ducks and don’t give a damn about their long-term well being, or any notion of stewardship obligations. Shoot ‘em today. Let tomorrow take care of itself. After all, we’ll have that great picture of me and Larry standing there festooned with our limits; and next year when we have even fewer birds, we can go to Canada, or Mexico, or Argentina. (Sort of reminds me of when the guys promoting spinning wing decoys used to argue that SWDs allowed the youth hunters and the elderly to kill ducks. When someone suggested that use of SWDs should then be limited to the young and the old, they lost interest in that argument).

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The California Fish & Game Commission occasionally conducts its meetings under a sign proclaiming that protection and long-term enhancement of wildlife resources constitutes its primary goal, a goal that enhances hunting and fishing interests in the long-term, but only as a secondary effect, a byproduct of wildlife preservation. The message of that sign properly reflects the commission’s statutory charter and the mission statement on its website.

I attended a commission meeting a few years back and, while waiting for the agenda item in which I was interested, sat through an acrimonious debate dealing with a proposed commercial fishing regulation, a debate in which the chair of the commission repeatedly and aggressively reminded the audience that the commission’s role was protection of the fishery, not assuring the economic or psychological well-being (read fishing opportunity here) of that particular segment of the fishing public. The commissioner in question is the very one who now most actively pushes the envelope on waterfowl seasons and most energetically defends the use of spinning wing decoys.

If preservation, protection and enhancement of wildlife resources represent its paramount mission, then with respect to waterfowl, our commission has compiled a four-year record of near perfect failure and is plainly striving for a fifth. A social philosopher of some renown once observed that humans can achieve immortality through spectacular error. One could easily gain the idea that immortality of that nature is being sought here. Money managers with similar records would have been fired long since – if not investigated for something worse than incompetence.

Bluntly stated, the experience of the last four years teaches us that the package recently adopted will likely result in a further reduction in our California mallard breeding pair counts in the spring of 2005. Those counts for the spring of 2004 already stood at an all-time low. The numbers, and their portents, are not matters of deep mystery. All you have to do is plot the population trend line on a graph. The line drops with the passage of time, showing a clear correlation between “liberal framework” and a decline in breeding pair counts the following spring.

Maybe something else is causing that decline, that correlation. Maybe there’s a force other than hunting pressure at work here. After all, if you hit yourself on the head with a hammer every night before you go to bed and wake up every morning with a headache, it’s always possible that you got the headache from grinding your teeth or from a bad pillow. But not likely, certainly not the first choice of culprit. Most reasonable folks would attack that particular problem by throwing the hammer away. Just as most folks who gave a damn about the birds (and saw their preservation and enhancement as the only true and certain way to create hunter opportunity) would drastically cut back on hunting pressure until the populations returned to healthy levels. Perish the thought.

So we dive into an abyss of predictable darkness. An optimist might say that we are conducting an experiment, a test of nature’s resilience. Any such conclusion attributes far more rationality to the process than it deserves. And those who consider nature’s resilience limitless should ponder the fate of the Passenger Pigeon – or, for that matter, the poor old pintail.

The most depressing, albeit predictable, aspect of this debacle is the position of the California Waterfowl Association. The commission’s decision rejected a slightly different DFG Staff proposal and adopted CWA recommendations, in large part driven by Luddite thinking -- the urge to kill more ducks now and let the future be damned – with motivations cloaked in the bogus mantle of “hunter opportunity.” As proof that some of the more highly placed members will employ any argument to justify a “kill now and let the future hang” position, one vocal member of the regulations committee forcefully urged CWA to abandon its long-held (and well documented) position that our mallard population is separate from the mid-continent population.

Why would he take such an insupportable stance, contrary to established CWA policy? Simple. Just look at the numbers. Mid-continent mallards are down this year – but not as dramatically as our birds. The argument – weak as it is – was offered to justify more and later killing, based on that fact. If mid-continent mallards migrated here for the winter, he would have had a point. They don’t, he doesn’t and apparently neither fact matters.

I would not ordinarily tar the entire leadership of CWA with a brush wielded by one member possessed of a loud voice and a suspect agenda. But where were the leaders to overrule him, to come up with a recommendation commensurate with the numbers and the clear trend that we have seen over the last four years? Indeed, where was there even so much as a minority report? Truly, there are no designated drivers in a house of the blind. And if that observation seems cold, so be it.

Nothing can be done to prevent the damage that the newly enacted regulatory package will create. That ship has sailed. But I challenge all those who have had a hand in it – each and every one of them – to take responsibility for what they have wrought. When the spring counts next year proclaim that we have hit a new low once again, I challenge them either to recant or resign, to make way for those with the courage to deal with cold reality and start the long and painful process of leading the waterfowling community out of this morass, through a policy of sharp restraint until our birds truly recover to a sustainable high level of population – if they ever do.

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Historical note: Archaeologists digging in the high plateau of eastern Ethiopia have recently found the preserved artifacts of a small tribe that lived roughly 4,000 years ago. They lasted for about two hundred years before disappearing suddenly, in a manner similar to that of the Mayan civilization of the Yucatan.

According to their script, only recently deciphered after long and laborious effort, they referred to themselves as the Flat Earth People, worshipped gods and practiced a creed based upon a concept that actions have no consequences – murder without grieving, remorse, funerals or the need to dispose of leaky corpses; rampant fornication without unwanted off-spring, disease or emotional trauma; endless indulgence without hangover or weight gain and exaltation of sloth and debauchery over restraint and strenuous endeavor. They came to a tragic end when – according to skeletal evidence preserved by the dry desert air -- the whole kit and caboodle apparently jumped off a cliff in the communal belief that they could fly, a belief induced by over-indulgence in a rye-based psychedelic substance celebrated in some of their petroglyphs.

Notwithstanding their apparent extinction, their creed occasionally reemerges, a pernicious ghoul from the crypt of history to bemuse the gullible and sow the seeds of disaster.

With that regulatory package in place, we have just such an example of foul wind from the crypt – and I am confident that we will splatter on the rocks next spring, believers and dissidents together – because the birds, in the end, belong to all of us and are bound up with all of us, just as we all have a vested interest in their survival. And although our little self-inflicted disaster won’t be a major event in human history, it will be a fitting tribute to the Flat Earth creed, emerged from the crypt yet again; and, of course, to those who espouse that creed, promote it and impose it on the rest of us.

Let’s be sure to remember exactly who they are.

1 California establishes regulations for 5 zones. The foregoing summary applies to the so-called “balance of state” zone that comprises the great bulk of the hunting area where most of the hunting takes place. Three of the other four zones adopt the 93-day, seven bird, five mallard (1 hen) formula, with varying start times based on the unique conditions in that particular zone. The Colorado River zone is required by law to conform to Arizona regulations and has a slightly different framework – 101 days, also extending to January 30.