My weekend newspaper contains a number of interesting duck-blind ads for the upcoming season, rental opportunities in areas that can be good in years when we have birds. Cabela’s shooting supply catalogue arrived in the recent mail, another harbinger of the coming fall. In a few weeks, we will start fretting about the likely waterfowl season and daily bag framework in a crescendo of prediction. In my home state, the regulatory committee of the California Waterfowl Association will get ready for its meetings to formulate a recommendation for the state Fish & Game Commission. The biologists will finalize their reports – and the beast of anticipation will stir from its annual slumber.  This happens every year, the season when hope triumphs over experience, hallucinogenic expectations deflect all uncongenial facts, and a state of euphoria nurtured by those who profit from it infects our little community in a mind altering fog of addled expectation.

As in the case of leadership, bad news and unpleasant reality provide the true test of character. Anyone can be a hero when prospects shine with glowing portent.  It takes quite a bit more backbone to face unpleasant reality and deal with it, just as it takes real leadership to get the troops to accept bad news. We face that test this year in California and the rest of the nation as well.

Our state winter counts earlier this year were off from the previous year by a wide margin, reflecting a significant decline. Our local mallard breeding counts in the spring hit a number close to the lowest on record. We also had the driest spring since officials began keeping track of such things – and field reports tell of the dismal brood counts that one would expect with too few breeders trying to produce in horrible nesting conditions.  One bright spot could have been the wheat fields. Our mallards usually nest in large numbers in wheat – and the high world price brought thousands of additional acreage into that crop. But the dry spring forced the farmers to irrigate to bring their crops to maturity, drowning out many of the early nests – and then to harvest early, disrupting the birds that had tried again. This has caused responsible and qualified biologists who study our local populations to fear that the combination of adverse circumstances may have driven the mallard population below the minimum level required for recovery, when and if conditions improve. In short, we have experts telling us that we have crossed a critical divide, a tipping point, and are now in deep, deep trouble.

One can take the position that those experts are indulging in excessive pessimism.  Mallards have demonstrated remarkable resilience over the years. But it is far too late and beyond our control to facilitate or nurture such resilience for the upcoming season.  Indeed, we ought to be thinking about how we avoid making the situation worse, while we rehearse our best rain dance in the hopes of bringing an end to our destructive drought.

And this is where character and leadership come in. Wholly apart from what the feds may decide for the rest of the country (allowing us based on mid-continent numbers that have no relevance with respect to the mallards we see in our sky), we have to cut way back this year or face dismal prospects for at least the next several years.

Not even compensatory kill theory can soften this message. The most committed compensatory kill theorists grudgingly concede that hunter kill is probably additive when populations stand near the bottom of the curve, as they are today. Basically that means that we cannot afford to kill mallards as we have done for the last twelve or fifteen years, if we hope to have them for our future and that of our children.

It’s not as though we didn’t see this coming. Numbers of  local mallard on which we depend for the bulk of our greenhead shooting have dropped into dangerous territory more than once since 2000.  Each time, a wet spring or some other phenomenon contributing to robust production bailed us out of trouble. But dry years – indeed multiple dry years – have always been part of the California weather cycle. When you run the breeding stock down into the red zone, you gamble on good production based on warm spring rains to render that action harmless. Whether you do so intentionally or just in the grip of complacent ignorance makes no difference. The lower the breeding numbers, the more you need optimum conditions to cancel out the implications of those numbers.

It’s like the guy who has that third cocktail after work before driving home.  As long as he doesn’t have an accident or get busted, he thinks it’s okay. And it may well be until that night when the flashing red light in the rear view mirror signals that it isn’t.  By then, it is, of course, too late. 

Well, our little reckless gamble with our waterfowl birthright came up snake eyes this year. The red light flashes insistently in our rearview mirror. The notion of the “perfect storm” has become a cliché – but a cliché only becomes a cliché when it acquires the patina of inevitable truth – and its cliché-ness cannot obscure or negate that truth. We acted recklessly for a number of years, got fatheaded with complacency because we got away with it, and now nature has presented its version of the DUI citation, or worse. The situation reminds me of some people I knew several years ago who died on a back-packing trip because they went deep into the high country unprepared for winter-like weather. We don’t get such weather in the Sierras in August, right?  Wrong that year – and wrong often enough in the past to give warning to those who pay attention.

Population declines have resulted in reduced seasons and bag limits many times in past years. We have seen that in the case of canvasbacks, redheads and pintail, that come to mind without much thought. This year, Delta is up in arms over the likely reduction in the scaup limit in response to grim population numbers. In 1991, we had a short season and low limit in response to persistent drought conditions. 

But there’s a key difference between those cases and the one we face in California this year. In all those cases, the feds made the decision and we had to live with it.  As recently as three years ago, we had a one bird pintail limit with a season shortened to one half of that for the rest of the species, including mallards of which we could take seven per day. The canvasback limit and season have been similarly constrained for basically the same reasons. 

This year, it will be up to California – the California Waterfowl Association and the Department of Fish & Game – to define the mallard framework by reference to our local field reality rather than perceived reality in the mid-continent. Having argued strenuously for flyway specific frameworks when it benefits us, we can hardly shy away from the flip side of that coin in a year when it does not without sacrificing all credibility on the altar of hypocrisy.

One could say that a liberal framework does no harm if there are no birds. The mere right to shoot seven mallards does no injury to the population if the seven mallards never appear over the hunter’s blind.  Strictly true, that statement ignores several realities.

First, the framework is supposed to reflect field reality. When it does not, the system that creates it – and those who run it – lose credibility.

Second, those who create the framework are supposedly responsible for waterfowl stewardship. A framework that does not operate to protect a vital segment of the population in crisis represents a craven abdication of responsibility.

Third, the constituents, i.e., the hunters, deserve the truth. It may deflect some flak in the short term to mislead and create unrealistic expectations. But in the long run, that sort of dishonesty will destroy our sport almost as quickly and surely as drastic declines in our waterfowl populations.

And fourth, every duck taken is one less potential breeder for the following spring, one less potential contributor to the hoped-for recovery. Dead ducks lay no eggs.  Only ducks can create ducks.  And when populations are down and in decline, kill is additive, not compensatory.  Indeed, in these conditions, compensatory kill – the argument that ducks killed by hunters would die of other causes anyway and thus hunter kill does not affect the population – is a hypothesis sailing through the rarified stratosphere of the absurd.

I find it curious that West Coast salmon populations collapsed this year, leading to closures of commercial and sport fishing seasons over vast areas that normally host thriving fisheries.  None of the experts can tell us why it happened.  The decline is general, affecting the populations that run every major river along the West Coast.  This suggests to some that ocean conditions caused it.  While we have been spending enormous resources to restore spawning grounds for fish that no longer exist (including huge fights over removal of dams that provide cheap, renewable hydro-power at a time of great need), the fish have apparently been killed by something happening in a segment of their life cycle that we have taken more or less for granted.

Salmon and migratory waterfowl differ dramatically and indeed may have nothing in common at all other than in one respect. Their life cycles depend upon complex ecosystems – and we have an incomplete understanding of those systems as well as all of the ways in which the creatures depend upon them. In a world where we recognize (or pay lip service to the concept) that everything is connected, we have incomplete knowledge of the key connections.  Each nurtures its own enigma.

Given these limitations, is it unreasonable to assume that caution should be the order of the day? Who will stand up for stewardship and conservatism in regards to our local mallards? More specifically, who will advocate for no more than a one bird limit and a mallard season no longer than roughly one half of that allowed for other species?  The feds have done that for pins and cans when they thought that the conditions demanded such draconian action. We lived with it. We lived with drastic cutbacks in the period ’89-’91 and enjoyed the bounty to which that belt-tightening may have contributed after ’95.

A forthright acceptance of reality this year would take character and real leadership ability.  It will be interesting to see if our leaders retain any of those qualities  after becoming addicted all these years to the narcotic of “adaptive harvest management.”