On a clear January afternoon in 1983 I stood at the confluence of Black and Steele Bayous at the northeastern corner of the famed Yazoo National Wildlife Refuge near Hollandale, Mississippi. I was concluding my five month journey along the Mississippi Flyway. For over 2,000 miles I had followed the ducks from The Pas, Manitoba to the mouth of the Mississippi south of Venice, Louisiana.

I had at times seen memorable concentrations of ducks on their southward passage, but few held my attention as the one this evening off the Yazoo. The growing din from passing ducks created an incessant roar. Mallards chuckled, pintails whistled and widgeon peeped. Wood ducks in black clouds emerged as dusk deepened. It was a whirlwind of wings and duck music that lasted into the Delta night. A constant flight that grew invisible in the darkness.

On a clear January afternoon in 2008 I sat, shotgun across my knee, in a pit blind 200 yards north of the confluence of Black and Steele Bayou, just off the northeastern corner of the plundered and no longer duck-rich Yazoo National Wildlife Refuge. There was not a duck in sight and as afternoon’s shadows lengthened eventually bringing on sunset, I counted a total of 19 wood ducks on the wing. I downed one that my Labrador, Bingo, brought to hand. Not a mallard quacked, nor a pintail whistled. With the exception of the wood ducks, only cormorants and snow geese, neither of which was present in 1983, passed over my decoys. In the course of a quarter century a mallard Mecca had been transformed into a duck desert. Had I not watched this transformation over the years, I would have not believed what I did not see. I would not have believed the silence.

Yet, what I saw or, more accurately, did not see, is the modern day reality of much of Mississippi’s wintering grounds, especially those in the region of the once famed Yazoo National Wildlife Refuge.

From the earliest ages ducks flocked to winter in the Mississippi Delta, the vast alluvial plain that lies in the northwestern part of the state between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers. (It should not be confused with the Mississippi River Delta in Louisiana which is some 300 miles to the south.) The cypress swamps, pin oak flats and flooded sloughs held teeming numbers of ducks. It was often said that Arkansas had the public relations machine and the ducks; Mississippi just had the ducks. Throughout the Mississippi Flyway no state had a higher per hunter seasonal bag than Mississippi. The Delta had little commercial duck hunting, relatively few private duck clubs and lots of places to hunt.

In 1983 this is what I found and it stole my heart. So much so that shortly thereafter I, along with a few friends, purchased land on Black Bayou directly adjoining the Yazoo National Wildlife Refuge. It was the first place the ducks flew over when leaving the refuge to feed. From the blinds one could hear the ducks on Swan Lake quacking up a storm in the pre-dawn darkness.

In the decade of the 1980s through the mid 1990s, I heard few other shots in this area. Duck hunting was a distant second in popularity to deer hunting. The duck hunting proved consistently good from mid-November to late January. One could follow by vehicle the ducks leaving the Yazoo National Wildlife Refuge for nearly 20 miles to the east as they headed for the flooded soybean and rice fields off the Sunflower River. Each December as the winter rains descended sheet water and backwater became plentiful on this poorly drained land, providing a full buffet for sky blackening flights of hungry ducks. The swarms over the stubble fields at a distance took on the appearance of bees.

It was an ideal environment for ducks. The Yazoo National Wildlife Refuge, much of which had been condemned in 1961 from the Swan Lake Hunting Club, was created to forever provide the ducks with a winter home. It provided the ducks with a secure base for a large portion of the southern Delta.

The refuge was intensively managed to attract ducks. Impoundments were flooded and crops planted. No place in Mississippi held more ducks on a consistent basis than did the Yazoo National Wildlife Refuge. And for miles in all directions surrounding the refuge were farm fields stuffed with waste grain. The millenniums-old hardwood forests that were still standing when Teddy Roosevelt came to this area to hunt his famous bear had been cleared to plant soybeans and leveled to grow rice. These farming practices were just what the duck ordered. Harvesting practices left plenty of waste grain and combines cut deep ruts in the soft soil. Moreover, in wet years, low lying areas never saw a combine. Thousands of acres of grain were left standing.

By 2008, Mississippi’s version of the “Cadillac Desert” greeted the few ducks returning to their ancestral wintering grounds. A gradual change that seemed small at first had grown over the past 25 years to be all encompassing. Fields that had swales were leveled, fields that once flooded were now drained, ditches that held backwater were cleared and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers did the rest to move the water downstream in a hurry. The corps invaded the grounds of the old Swan Lake Hunting Club and ran draglines to speed the waters’ flow. It cleared a swath through a cypress swamp – a path of destruction over seven miles long and 300 yards wide that destroyed one of the largest wood duck nesting grounds in the South. It left thousands of acres of once duck rich habitat a wasteland.

In addition, the management at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decided to stop planting much of the refuge with duck attracting crops. The pressure to provide avenues for additional deer hunting led to fewer acres being flooded as well. In the course of a few years in the 1990’s this key refuge was transformed. Yet, the ducks kept coming as the grand buffet table throughout the south Delta was still set.

Importantly, the handful of duck hunters that once scattered about the region suddenly were joined by hordes of new hunters attracted to the area by a burgeoning commercial guiding business that erected blinds in many of the favored remaining duck retreats. Where once ducks had been able to find refuge off the refuge as the Yazoo itself became unusable, there grew an environment where if the habitat was there so was the likelihood that hunters were as well.

Early into this century one could still stand on the bridge where Black Bayou met Steele Bayou and see ducks throughout the day. One could go to Whiskey Shoot, Panther Swamp, Lake Jackson or east to the Sunflower River and know the magic of the mallard flight. Albeit reduced greatly, it was still impressive.

Then the other shoe fell, technology advanced the agriculture clock. Soybeans that were harvested in early November were now cut in September. Rice that was harvested in October now was combined in August. Fields where waste grain abounded were now swept clean by improved efficiency combines and to make matters worse, plowed under in preparation for next year. Fall plowing, a virtually non-existent practice in years prior, became the norm. A place without food, water and sanctuary is not a place for ducks. This is the new Mississippi Delta.

This grim reality gripped me with a sadness that I could not have imagined. I was alone in a place where I was never alone. Friends both near and far seldom turned down a chance to be in the “South Field” or the “West Field” for a duck hunt. Over the preceding two decades they had come from as far away as England, Canada and California to hunt ducks in a setting where the sky seemingly moved, where one could not say it was a cloudless day because clouds of ducks were usually present.

On this evening in January 2008, it was just Bingo, me and a few frogs who had taken up residence in the flooded corn. The sky as the sun moved westward towards the River was cloudless and empty, the air devoid of the sounds of any distant gunfire, or of quaking, whistling ducks. It was as though the life had been sucked out of the landscape.

No one stands on Main Street in Hollandale and looks up to see ducks flying overhead anymore. The commercial guides have mostly come and gone. The landowners seldom have enough ducks to warrant a hunt, and when they do it is usually a case of here today and gone tomorrow. The Yazoo National Wildlife Refuge lays ravaged from the scars of draglines, a testament that the government is often not the best caretaker of precious natural resources. Over the dead bodies of the old Swan Lake Club members, the government drained and plundered and squeezed the life out of this wilderness cypress swamp.

As I picked up my last decoy I did not want to leave. Images of thousands of ducks that used to drop in here each evening seemed as fresh as the smell of gun powder. In my mind I could see the flocks silhouetted against the western horizon, winging across the sky in waves, whistling in the air overhead, splashing in the water before me. Where did they go? This I want to know. They are now almost entirely gone from a place that had been their winter home since the beginning of time. As I slipped my last decoy into the bag, my mind grappled with this tragic thought – the sun had set on more than just the end of another duck season.