The rest of the nation often enjoys observing that California is unique in many ways, a concept not always intended in a charitable sense. The derogatory edge does not generally apply to our duck hunting where we possess special attributes. In matters of waterfowl, California alone both breeds and winters roughly half of the ducks local hunters see in the flight, perhaps 90 percent of the mallards and virtually all of the woodies we take during the course of the season.

You can call these birds “migratory” if you wish – which is how the feds classify them. But they deserve that appellation in the same sense that it applies to hyperactive Uncle Harry who can’t sit still but never leaves town. Our mallards breed where they winter – and fly to Oregon in late summer to molt. Or almost to Oregon. Most of them stop a few yards short of the border in the Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge, returning south when their flight pinions grow back in.

Somewhere along the evolutionary line, they gave up migration – in the normally understood sense of the word – as an elegant anachronism, the risks of the journey hugely outweighing any perceived benefits. After a couple of glasses of wine, I can imagine the mallards laughing amongst themselves at the pintails’ insistence on flying thousands of miles over turbulent oceans or mountain ranges to reach destinations of poorer grass and feed than they could have enjoyed by just staying put.

No other state shares a pattern similar to ours.¹ Although the Dakotas breed many of the birds killed there, few if any stay for the winter. Thus, the gunning and other conditions on the southern ends of those flyways the Dakotas feed powerfully affect the spring returns. In contrast, we have the unique ability to help or hurt ourselves by our own behavior. Or to put the matter more coarsely, we have the unique ability to screw ourselves up by ill-timed profligacy, a strong and recurring tendency. Consistent with the nature of modern humankind, we have a hard time blaming that guy in the mirror when it happens.

Equally important, we have a unique ability to see the direct cause and effect relationship that exists between certain conditions and our waterfowl populations. In a way, our state is a laboratory where more of the variables can be measured, if not exactly controlled. For that reason, perhaps we have something to teach others – while we try to get a few basics into our own skulls.

Case in point: our spring 2005 mallard breeding pair counts hit the lowest number ever experienced since the regulators started keeping those statistics. That boded ill for the 2005-06 season, wholly apart from the “liberal” matrix thrown up by the keepers of the Adaptive Harvest Management black box. Then the weather gods delivered absolutely prime nesting conditions, wet and warm storms into May generating lush grasslands with numerous seasonal ponds. The birds we had – few as they were – responded with vigor, creating robust, albeit spotty production, presumably starting the process of restoring age ratio balances to healthy levels.

Then, at the height of the winter migration between Christmas of 2005 and the New Year, ferocious storms hit us with sustained and torrential rains, bringing rivers to flood stage and filling the valleys with standing water. Freshly flooded ground laden with waste grain, crustaceans and other feed gave the birds bountiful sanctuary at what otherwise would have been the height of the hunting season, the time of maximum gunning pressure. While many hunters complained loudly about empty skies over their blinds, huge concentrations of ducks could be seen rafted up in the floodways, feasting on the windrows of seed carried on the surface of the moving water, like trout sucking nymphs at the height of a caddis emergence.

It is impossible to say for sure, but those conditions favored a high survival rate. Not only did all that water provide bountiful feed and refuge from the heavily gunned areas, it flushed out pollutants and created conditions uncongenial to disease development. Waterfowl cholera doesn’t get much of a foothold when two or three feet of fresh new water surges through a potentially infected pond every few days. The same flows reverse selenium buildup, seawater intrusion and other deleterious conditions. Rainwater may carry acids in other parts of the country – but our rainwater comes in off the Pacific from the tropics and the Gulf of Alaska, over six thousand miles of open ocean where the storm clouds form in pristine air and sluice us with water in uncomplicated form.

So we had a better carryover of potential nesters than we deserved or had any right to expect – and the weather gods then gave us twenty-seven days of rain in March, 2006, with some of the most explosive grass growth and ponding that most land managers can remember. Again, the birds have responded to a degree that seasoned land managers declare to be unprecedented.² As this is written at the end of May, broods and breeders are everywhere in evidence, even in areas that normally don’t see ducks – including the volunteer grass between the vine rows in the vineyards of the Napa Valley, for example.

In short, barring some sort of calamity, the California season shapes up as likely to be one of the best in living memory, to the extent that we rely on our local birds. It particularly bodes well for those of us more interested in the sense of a full sky than of a heavy strap. We have every reason to expect that scene this fall and winter, perhaps more bountiful than we have witnessed in decades.

What lesson, if any, do we take from this? Let’s start with the basics: The biologists tell us that a prolific nesting season depends upon three conditions. First, a healthy stock of breeding birds, including a substantial component of the “super hens.” Second, good breeding habitat that for most species means dense and rich grasslands with water nearby where the hens can take their broods after the hatch, with the type of fringe vegetation that provides adequate cover and feed. Third, the birds must make a strong nesting effort. And herein lies a mystery. For in some years, the birds simply don’t try very hard. As they stubbornly refuse to return the questionnaires, we are left with nothing but guesses as to why and no way to test any hypothesis.

Of those three key elements, we have a degree of control over the first. When populations are below our target norm, we should kill fewer in the fall to have more in the spring – which creates a chance to have more in the ensuing fall. Simple enough; no higher math required.

We have a lesser degree of control over the second component as it is largely weather dependent. Certainly we can create areas conducive to productive grasslands and we might even be able to irrigate some acreage – but the explosive waist high dense grasses that cover tens of thousands of acres this spring are a response to a uniquely wet spring weather pattern. We can create the conditions that will provide maximum response to the water – but we can’t make the skies deliver it in the quantity and with the wide distribution to duplicate what happened this March.

Our current conditions also cast doubt on the uniform validity of the curiously named “density dependence” theory – the notion that each nesting hen will insist upon distance from her neighbors, regardless of conditions. This territorial tendency supposedly imposes a finite limit on the number of viable nest sites per acre of habitat, regardless of habitat value. The hens this year apparently neglected to read the learned treatises compiled to chronicle their behavior, with nest densities much higher than normally observed. A mild cynic could reach the conclusion from these conditions that habitat quality trumps “density dependence,” rendering it an uncertain theory distorted by seasonal variables. A serious cynic could conclude that “density dependence” is just another bogus codpiece for low production caused by an insufficient breeding pair population due to over gunning among other causes.

Finally, we have no control at all over the third element, the tendency of the hens in certain years to blow off the notion of nesting as a lot of work with much hazard and little gain. The birds will do what they will do.

So how should all this inform our approach to management? Think of the definition of the word luck: It is the product of preparation and opportunity. Preparation in this context means: Make sure that we have enough breeders to deliver for us when conditions cooperate. Make sure that we have as much ground as possible ready and amenable to prime breeding conditions when the rains come.

No one quarrels much with the habitat part. The more the better. We run into resistance with the notion that management should target a sustainable level of breeders – even though that is the part of the equation over which we can exert the most control simply by exercising restraint. Why don’t we do it? Apart from the usual difficulty of selling the concept of restraint to the majority who find the notion burdensome (just like the process of losing those extra pounds that most of us should shed), we have the compensatory kill theorists declaring that “you can’t bank the birds. You might as well shoot ‘em because you’re going to lose them anyway.”

If that were true as a general rule, we would not be having the bonanza currently in progress in California during the spring of 2006, a direct byproduct of the inadvertent and unintended “banking” facilitated by last winter’s flooding. The notion that we can have strong production without strong breeding pair populations smacks of metaphysics – the kind of thinking that caused many people in the late ‘90s to believe that the stock of companies with a vague idea, no profits and a business plan that ended with going public must be worth a lot of money. Investments in those companies suffered a metaphysical transformation of their own in due course – as in “poof, gone.” Smoke and mirrors are no more productive of truth in one context than another.

The “Cowboy’s Guide To Life” declares that: “Timing has a lot to do with the outcome of a rain dance.” Timing in this case refers to blind luck – wasted in most cases without preparation. Preparation means breeding pair habitat and birds to use it. Some years, no doubt, the rain dance will fail, wasting the preparation. Preparation at least provides the chance to benefit from that periodic dose of blind luck.

Above all, we should acknowledge that the bonanza we seem destined to experience this fall does not flow from any sort of wisdom on our part. Enjoyment will be appropriate. Ceremonies of self-congratulation will not be. Two near-perfect breeding springs, sandwiching a flood created sanctuary winter, have combined with a strong production urge to create our brilliant prospects. We had little or nothing to do with any aspect of that. If our managers claim any degree of credit for the bounty – as they most surely will – we should know what to say to them. (If you get credit for the rain, Buster, take the blame for the drought. Among other things).

I write this roughly sixty days before the regulatory framework for the upcoming season begins to take shape, with guardedly optimistic reports from the Prairies as a complement to our own conditions. One can only hope that the regulators do not get bullied into planning for a kill-fest when we should be thinking about the spring of 2007. As we work on our production habitat programs locally³, I would like to see adoption of a target breeding pair population as our management goal, a number of birds that can take full advantage of the ground, if we get decent spring rains. Managing for that sort of target will give us the best chance of good seasons over the long run. And when someone tells you that it can’t be done – too many variables, too dependent on blind luck – ask him if it has ever been tried. Ask him why it has more variables than compensatory kill dogma, or the other failed strategies of the last decade.

In the meantime, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to practice that rain dance. Seems to have been hellaciously successful out here recently. I wish I could remember all of the moves.

¹ I refer here to wild birds and not to those states that rely increasingly on pen-raised, released mallards for their sport.

² Aside from personal observation, my sources are men who manage private wetlands scattered throughout the Sacramento Valley and have been working the same ground or area for more than a decade – in some cases, several decades. Over the years, I have found their sense of the health of our flights to be more accurate than those of the regulators and other supposed experts who spend most of their time working from aircraft or offices.

³ CWA’s Mallard Legacy program that is creating production ground to take advantage of the rains when we get them.