In my home state, the California Waterfowl Association actively promotes the idea that we have fewer places to hunt and fewer opportunities for the “unattached” hunter – the guy without a club membership, a rented blind or other access to a spot through a friend or relative to get a day in the marsh. To this end, the association works hard on creative initiatives to open up more private land and lobbies for the notion that certain sanctuary areas should be available for periodic public hunting.

The association has sought to enlist the aid of the Department of Fish & Game in these efforts with some success, since promoting public outdoor recreation constitutes a part of the department’s mission, albeit secondary to resource protection and enhancement. These efforts, I submit, suffer for lack of clear focus on the precise nature of the problem – as in “what, exactly, is true hunter opportunity?” – as well as a more precise idea of the goal to be achieved and how to get it done. As in most analyses, one starts with a careful and hard-eyed look at the baseline condition.

First, the waterfowl hunting landscape in California has undergone dramatic change over the 50 plus years that I have been hunting here. Explosive urban and suburban development, state park and conservation group purchases, annexation to cities that prohibit hunting are just a few of the events that have closed areas that I (and many others) hunted successfully during the late fifties and early sixties. As the human population has grown, the number of hunters has gradually declined in absolute terms. Whereas hunters or private entities that accommodated hunting controlled a large percentage of the remnant wetlands in the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys 30 or 40 years ago, they no longer do as more and more prime wetland has gone under easement.

Second, the size, nature and content of our flight has changed over time. When I first arrived here in 1956, pintail predominated with mallards as a distant second option, rarely seen in any numbers south of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. My first year in California (1956), we could legally take ten pintail per day and it was not uncommon to have such days. One could find good hunting around the margins of San Francisco Bay, San Pablo Bay, the Napa Marsh, the sloughs in the Delta, along the reaches of the Lower Sacramento and Feather Rivers and similar locations to which any member of the public could have access, assuming possession of the right equipment and the energy and initiative to deploy it.

And then there was Tule Lake on the Oregon border to provide a special reward – and challenge – for the adventuresome, willing to take an eight-hour drive for the thrill of a frosty dawn in the dramatic beauty of the Klamath Basin under a sky teeming with waterfowl.

We still have Tule Lake, we still have the rivers, but most of the other venues I have named are either closed altogether or have deteriorated tremendously over the years. You could sit all day and never see a duck today in spots where I used to take four or five pintail routinely in an afternoon after class with an easy forty-five minute trip from Palo Alto. Would we include access to such barren spots within the concept of “hunter opportunity?”

Moreover, I perceive that the main concentrations of our remnant population shifted to the east, beginning with the drought of ’77. Ground on the west side of the Sacramento Valley that had previously been relatively good went “marginal” after that year, as did the Suisun Marsh. At the same time, the hunting on the east side of the valley seemed to improve. Recently, that trend may be in reverse. It could just be part of a natural cycle or a response to the set aside of large tracts of sanctuary ground. As the birds don’t return the questionnaires and no “science” can help, given the nature of the problem and the number of variables, we can only speculate. And we only get in trouble when we confuse speculation with science, based on the training and credentials of the speculator.

But despite this shifting scenario, the dimensions of the “hunter opportunity” conundrum have not really changed. To demonstrate that hypothesis, let’s look at the specifics.

(1)

Fifty years ago, as now, we have the hunting areas on the state and federal refuges. We have more of those opportunities today – more refuges, more slots for hunters, better management of the hunting areas for hunters – than we have had in the past. As the refuge hunters know, the refuges are where the birds are, or goodly numbers of them at any rate. That is as true today as it was before.

(2)

Blinds can be leased on private land all over the valley at prices commensurate with the prices when I first came here, taking inflation into account. Indeed, as farmers have been compelled by air quality regulation to dispose of rice straw and stubble by flooding their fields rather than burning, more of them have started to lease blinds as a way of recouping some of the cost of that management strategy.

There are, of course, those who would dispute both propositions – those who consider the refuges an unacceptable alternative (too tough, too uncertain, etc.) and the blinds on offer too high priced and in inferior or marginal locations¹.

But many hunters, including several who sit on the board of directors of the association, hunt the refuges regularly and are quite successful. Indeed, some of them do better than hunters who have invested big money in private club memberships. And any

¹ I find it interesting that many of our leaders blame poor hunting on the fact that so much rice ground is now flooded for stubble decomposition, thus attracting the birds away from the hunting grounds, and at the same time, dismiss those fields as marginal or inferior hunting grounds when a farmer proposes to lease blinds in them.

particular blind one might lease is good or not depending on the day and the weather and the time of the season when one happens to be sitting in it.

There were a lot of choices for leasing a blind last season that went begging and could have been had for the money freely spent on one weekend in Vegas or one night at a strip club. Some of those blinds of which I have first hand knowledge would have provided some excellent shoots. I can state that confidently with the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, having sat in a neighboring blind and watched the action. Next year could be entirely different.

That’s why we call it “hunting,” which takes us to the real crux of the problem.

It takes skill and experience to hunt waterfowl with any prospect of success, particularly on public ground. A novice cannot hope to simply show up at a check-in station, walk out into the marsh, find a decent spot, set up properly and enjoy a fruitful hunt. Indeed, the successful public land hunters I know, or of whom I have heard, acquired their skills over a period of several seasons.

I spent several years as a regular refuge hunter in my younger days and ended up getting pretty good at it. But my total bag for my first four trips to the refuge that became my favorite consisted of one hapless hen spoonbill. And my fifth trip would have been a bust as well except that the north wind started to blow about ten minutes before I intended to give up in disgust, the pintail started to ride those wind currents and I ended up with five drakes – after shooting all the shells I had brought with me. (It takes experience to learn how to shoot on a windy day, a skill it also took time and lots of ammo to learn).

Based on that history, I have a high regard for the skills and marsh craft of public land hunters – and equal respect for the patience, perseverance and dedication they devote to acquiring those skills. Although I am a target of their wrath on the internet for some of the positions taken in these pieces, I respect them as hunters.

Nor is it a simple matter to choose a blind to rent when the time comes to look for a more settled venue. The valley is full of opportunities in this regard – but which ones are good in the sense of offering a reasonable prospect for a decent experience now and then? How does a novice even begin to find out?

In the early ‘60s, I went in with a small group to lease what appeared to be a highly promising parcel on the west side of the Sacramento Valley near the small town of Maxwell. Two large federal refuges – Delavan and Sacramento National – were just a few miles away, bracketing the property. It had good blinds, well situated and well hidden.

To make a sad story short, we had one good shoot there for the entire season, a north wind day in late October, with the temperature close to 80 degrees, when the pintail cruised over us in their thousands, almost as thick as the mosquitoes at blind level. That was pretty much it – no birds in sight, let alone within range, except for the occasional lost green wing and a rare flight of snows every so often – for the balance of the year. By the end of the season, those of us diehards who still bothered to venture out on that property had christened it the “No Duck Duck Club.”

Finding a decent spot takes research, a lot of hanging around listening to hunters – and a substantial degree of trial and error. Successful waterfowling takes work – and it is not a short-term project. And why should it be?

When someone decides to take up golf, they don’t expect to buy a set of clubs, shoes and a package of balls and saunter out onto the nearest course to shoot a decent round. People understand that it takes time and practice to become even close to proficient at that sport. The same can be said for fly fishing. You need more than just that catalog order of rod, reel, waders and a box of flies, if you hope to become a proficient caster, learn to read water and actually hook a decent fish.

Why do we have a different view of waterfowling? Why is it that nascent waterfowlers expect to be able to buy the gear, drive out into the country, park their car by the side of the marsh and go out and shoot a limit of ducks? Why do they set up a chorus of righteous complaint when that does not happen? Strange, but an observable phenomenon.

Thus, when you think about it, “hunter opportunity” is not limited to having places to hunt. I believe that we have those – for those aspirants willing to put in a little time and work to find them. The real problem is one of perception, education and unrealistic expectation. Learning to hunt effectively takes hard work and careful study. Finding access to a promising place requires research and time spent in the field during the summer. The internet has made scouting for a spot a lot easier – but ultimately, nothing substitutes for field work.

The California Waterfowl Association, among others, holds some seminars and “how-to” sessions attempting to fill the void. But those efforts don’t receive the prominence they deserve, nor do we make a concerted effort to educate interested potential hunters to the issues they must surmount to be successful. To the contrary, in our efforts to maintain hunter numbers, we tend to downplay the difficulties, create unrealistic expectations doomed to disappoint and bring about the very result we have sought to avoid, i.e., guys who decide that hunting is not for them.

It does no good to devise creative programs that open access to hunting grounds if the people we encourage to use those grounds have no clue. You can’t drive down a country road, pull out at a wide spot, wave your hand in the general direction of a blind somewhere out there in the murk – and expect a novice or inexperienced hunter to survey the pond, lay out a proper spread that takes account of wind and weather, hide and call properly, let alone find the damned blind in the first place.

None of this – important though it may be – addresses the true crux of the matter. “Hunter opportunity” becomes purely a metaphysical concept without birds.

I do not express a hypothesis, divorced from reality or modern, fairly recent and somber experience. Consider the Atlantic Flyway, Chesapeake Bay, the cradle of our waterfowling traditions, where the few diehard hunters who have not given up now go afield in the hopes of perhaps shooting a bufflehead, or a pen-raised mallard, with the experience enriched by the occasional sighting of a non-migratory golf course Canada. Would opening up more ground there improve “hunter opportunity?”

Apparently, the Mississippi Flyway is not far behind. When one Adaptive Harvest Management (AHM) proponent recently sought to explain that a few minor adjustments to the AHM formula would solve the problem, a veteran hunter challenged the assertion: “You see minor adjustments – and I see Nero fiddling while Stuttgart burns.”

The plain fact is that true hunter opportunity – the chance to enjoy the magic of the marsh – is a question of quality, not quantity. Without a prolific flight, it lacks all meaning. And yet, we justify long seasons, high daily bag limits, a season extension to the very eve of the nesting period in the name of expanding “hunter opportunity” when we have no reason to believe that these “management” practices will not destroy the flight if they persist.

Since those who defend those practices challenge us at Madduck to support our arguments with science, I issue the same challenge. The proponents of those practices are the people who promoted the change, a change of very recent vintage. If science is required, indeed if it is even available to provide a reliable direction, they are the ones who should have provided it. They did not do so – and have not done so.

Basically, we extended the season in response to the clamor of the killer contingent. It started with commercial interests on the Mississippi Flyway and was extended to all flyways by the service’s belief that “fairness” required, offering it to all if it is offered to one. We accepted the offer in California because hunters frustrated by a poor season came to the Resource Agency Building and screamed for it, frankly proclaiming that they needed it to slake their bloodlust. Science played no part in that exercise – nor did leadership or conservation values. To say that we now need “science” to justify repeal of a craven political surrender that did not even claim a scientific justification is patently ridiculous.

AHM, the season extension, the liberal framework were nothing more than experiments based on unproved hypotheses. Those experiments have coincided with a general decline in the quality of hunter opportunity for all of us. The promoters of those failed strategies have no standing to demand that proponents of a more conservative approach base their arguments on “science” when they did not do so in the first instance

- and when there are too many variables ever to construct a true scientific model for these purposes. Thus, we are left with common sense – something that the so-called experts hate precisely because it devalues their supposed expertise.

As the hunters in Arkansas can attest, continuation of those practices will likely kill opportunity for us all, the experienced, the addicted, and the inexperienced alike, unless they are reversed.

As we persist in squandering our birthrate for the sake of short term killing, it would be useful to keep Chesapeake Bay – and a violin toting Roman emperor as a metaphor for the fabled bottomlands of Arkansas – clearly in mind. That’s the reality toward which we are headed – not some barnyard byproduct wishdream offered in aid of the notion that actions will not have consequences – that killing ducks in large numbers on the eve of the nesting season won’t impair production.

At least in California, we have the luxury of time to change course, at least the remnant of a flight sufficient to provide a vestige of the traditional joy of a day in the marsh. Looking back over the years and the decline I have personally experienced, I would say: Not much time at that.