The effort to secure a ban on spinning wing decoys (“SWDs”) in California, similar to the one just enacted in Arkansas for the 2005 season (and beyond), has foundered to date on the argument that the devices are a “sideshow,” a transitory issue of small import not bearing directly on the future of waterfowling – and pernicious because the issue has divided us at a time when we should be speaking with one voice. Those who brandish the “sideshow” label claim t

The sideshow folks (who include two of our California Fish & Game Commissioners1, the President of the California Waterfowl Association and a bunch of other influential people) tell us that the birds will adjust and hunters will turn away from the devices, even though they have been in ever expanding use since their commercial introduction in 1998, with new and more sophisticated types introduced every year.2 In somewhat contradictory fashion, the “sideshow” folks also proclaim that SWDs are essential to the arsenal of public land and marginal land hunter because the hunters on those lands would kill few ducks without them.3

In his best selling book, “The Tipping Point,” Malcolm Gladwell describes a number of instances where apparently small things, seemingly irrelevant factors, have produced profound differences in mass human conduct, even on issues of critical societal importance. He abstracts from these examples a number of rules. The one relevant here is a rule he calls “the Power of Context.” To illustrate the point, he describes the condition of New York City in the late 1980s, crime-ridden streets, a general atmosphere of foreboding and fear, filth and lawlessness in the subways – and graffiti on every surface. Four determined men succeeded in reversing that grim situation over the course of a few years, cleaning up the city and driving the crime rate from among the highest to near the lowest of any American urban area, despite poor economic times, high unemployment and a continuing influx of immigrants. Criminologists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling, Transit Police Commissioner William Bratton and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani – applying what Kelling and Wilson called their “broken windows theory” – brought about the change.

Gladwell summarizes the theory: “If a window is broken and left unrepaired, people walking by will conclude that no one cares and no one is in charge. Soon more windows will be broken, and the sense of anarchy will spread from the building to the street on which it faces, sending a signal that anything goes.”

These men decided to attack the problem by stamping out, of all things, graffiti, relentlessly eliminating the midnight work of the taggers every morning, morning after morning. To them, this seemingly nuisance level symptom was anything but a sideshow. “‘The graffiti was symbolic of the collapse of the system,’ he [Transit Director David Gunn] says. ‘When you looked at the process of rebuilding the organization and morale, you had to win the battle against graffiti. Without winning that battle, all the management reforms and physical changes just weren’t going to happen.’” And then Mayor Giuliani topped off the matter by using his office as a bully pulpit from which to harangue the citizens on a daily basis, urging them to adopt civil ways, maintain decorum in the streets and in their daily lives, as a matter of pride and self-respect, as individuals and as a community, as a matter of community ethics. He combined that strategy with a relentless attack on the type of small crime that had poisoned the quality of life. These initiatives triggered a startling transformation of the city, rectifying a situation that seemed hopeless, radically changing the atmosphere while reducing the crime rate.

A change in context can be negative as well as positive, of course. Indeed, the “broken windows” theory starts from that premise.

It may seem farfetched, far afield from waterfowl issues – but think about the matter in general terms for a moment. An epidemic of serious criminality and lawlessness in one of the largest cities in the world, notorious for car-jackings, muggings, armed rapes and robberies even in broad daylight, even in supposedly finer neighborhoods, reversed by what? A campaign to stamp out graffiti, to maintain clean subway cars, to badger people into smiling at their fellow citizens and being courteous on the streets. This “cure” sprung from a recognition of what had gone bad in the first place – a pervasive sense of anarchy, selfishness and loss of civility as shown by little things such as broken windows and the graphic symbols that proclaimed the ascendancy of lawless youth gangs.

This is the Power of Context, a startling example of the sensitivity of human behavior to subtle forces: “. . .[T]he lesson of the Power of Context is that we are more than just sensitive to changes in context. We are exquisitely sensitive to them. And the kinds of contextual changes that are capable of tipping [a pattern of mass behavior] are very different than we might ordinarily expect.” Indeed, those factors seem almost trivial when compared with the gravity of the behavior patterns they profoundly affect. “Sideshows” to use the term relevant to this piece.

How does the Power of Context apply to SWDs? Recall the setting in which SWDs emerged. By November of 1998, when the SWD storm broke, three weeks of the fourth “liberal” season in succession had just elapsed. We hunted under joyous waves of plentiful waterfowl. After three seasons of good hunting – seeming to improve with each year – and with a fourth great season in full flow, hunters took the bounty for granted. Very few recalled the lean times of the late ‘80s - early 90s. Fewer still expected those lean times ever to return. Consistently good years, piled one atop the other, convinced the bulk of waterfowlers that our managers had solved the “recruitment” problem. We could look forward to an unlimited number of years of high counts and generous harvest regulations. Above all, hunters embraced the “compensatory kill” theory, the idea that hunter kill does not affect populations and the thesis of “Adaptive Harvest Management” that the goal of management should be to manage for high sustainable levels of “harvest.”

All of this took place in the atmosphere of the time. Our nation stood invulnerable, alone at the peak of world power, threatened by nothing and no one. The stock market rampaged ever upward in a blizzard of stratospheric price/earnings ratios, of IPOs by companies with no earnings and no prospect of earnings instantly creating market capitalizations two and three times greater than those of industry leaders with fifty years of successful history. Our wealth grew like fungus while we slept. We believed that a great unseen force had repealed all the old rules. We believed the pundits who predicted that the Dow Jones would soon hit 30,000. We dismissed anyone who suggested that conditions might change for the worse with a knowing, superior smirk (the facial hallmark of most compensatory kill theorists, by the way). We reveled in a fatuous complacency, a “Masters-of-the-Universe” mentality in which we believed we were entitled to whatever we wanted. And at that propitious time, with the equivalent of a self-indulgent drinking party already in full flow, someone introduced the SWD amphetamine.

That is not a loose metaphor. When hunters saw the effect that SWDs had on the ducks, when they saw the truly incompetent among them coming in with seven greenheads in forty-five minutes of hunting, when they saw birds ignore their long-practiced and skilled calling to pile into the next blind where an SWD flashed and thumped next to a guy who couldn’t imitate the sound of any duck that had ever lived no matter what call he held to his lips, a form of frenzy set in.

By December 1, 1998, the hunting supply store in Yuba City, California, that had an exclusive on the local output of the first SWD manufacturer, had a waiting list over 200 names long. I know of men on that list who bragged that they had paid store clerks as much as $300 to get a slot closer to the top4. Men of unquestioned honor in business would promise not to use SWDs as part of a pact with other club members – and then sneak them out to the blind, just to insure a limit of mallard drakes downed faster than anyone else. Clubs experiencing that sort of behavior dropped their gentlemen’s ban on SWDs rather than discipline the members who violated it. Good intentions fell faster than the men of Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg. Before long, the marsh began to take on the aspect of a windmill farm. Even today, five years on, among the finest clubs, the emphasis is kill not skill, with a competitive feeling in full control. (“If those guys kill more birds than we do and they use, then we’ve got to use also.” No one seems to care if the kill is sustainable so long as they kill more than their neighbors).

The same frenzy took over the refuge hunters. Within a short time, everyone on public shooting grounds either had an SWD (or several) or knew that he would get no shooting until the users filled out and departed. Only the naïve or the terminally obstinate ventured out without at least one of the devices – even those hunters who hated them, thought them unfair and a profanation of our sport. Thus, use became widespread. And widespread SWD use palpably changed the mentality of hunters.

Because SWDs render irrelevant the various skills of waterfowling, they leave only the killing. That became the total emphasis. Anyone who hunted regularly – and had done so for many years – could feel the difference in attitude, in conversation, in conduct – a profound change in context. Nor did one require “exquisite sensitivity” to feel it. Indeed, it remains with us today, impossible to miss – with us in those who seek to diminish SWDs as a “sideshow” because they dread the possibility of a ban and with it an exposure of their incompetence in the marsh, in those who insist that SWDs don’t really work any longer and yet would not venture into the marsh without one, in those who insist that SWDs don’t make that big a difference while using batteries of them in a frenzied effort to kill the best limit faster than their buddies.

When you consider what hunters do, and pay no attention to what they say, it is clear that SWDs and the mentality surrounding them have come to define the Power of Context in the waterfowl marsh in just a few short years. They have come to constitute our equivalent of the “broken windows syndrome.” The dramatic population decline (to which I believe they have mightily contributed) has made the pernicious aspect of the context they have created more obvious and infinitely worse, spawning the mindless clamor for the “opportunity” to kill more ducks even as the numbers dangerously decline.

And this should come as a surprise to no one. Junkies always crave another fix, long past the point when the damage from the last one has become obvious and too painful to bear.

Where in this dark and sordid picture is our waterfowl equivalent of Rudy Giuliani, our wader equipped William Bratton? In the state of Washington perhaps, or Oregon. Certainly in Arkansas where it seems that sanity has found new life and cold-eyed maturity taken fresh root. But not here – not on this segment of the Left Coast.

Here, we still labor under the regulatory yoke of those too myopic to distinguish a sideshow from a tipping point. I confess that I love to face adversaries afflicted with that vision problem in court because it is generally no great trick to kick their butts. But this is different. We argue before neither judge nor jury – no one with the power to decide. And those who use the “sideshow” label to defend the context that is discrediting our pastime and destroying our birds ignore the cold fact that the birds belong to all of us equally, and we all share a stewardship obligation. If SWDs stand for anything, they stand for the opposite – every man for himself and himself alone – and damn the birds.

I wonder what it would take to get one of those Arkansas guys to come out here with the gospel down home truth, buried in a truckload of the standard daily byproduct of the state animal, and dump it in a few places where it would do the most good. A little research is in order. A worthy project that.

1 Commissioners Kellogg, currently President of the Commission, and Commissioner Flores. Mess’rs Kellogg and Flores have the most vocal interest in waterfowl issues and carry the Commission on them.

2 Reporting on a patent infringement lawsuit between various manufacturers of spinners, The Wall Street Journal stated that the manufacturers expected to sell $15 million worth of spinners during the 2004-05 season. That hardly signals a decline in use. Cabela’s Fall Catalog (2004), for example, features a variety of SWDs and mechanical decoying devices, p.245, obviously expecting strong demand. Catalogs of all the other suppliers have as many or more of the devices.

3 Advocates of this position turn the issue into one of class – rich guys with access to the best grounds against the less fortunate who have to scramble on the refuges. Another example of attacking the messenger when the message creates discomfort, and a false argument to boot.

4 I have read that similar incidents occurred along the Mississippi Flyway in 1999 and 2000 when SWDs appeared there. A famous supplier in Stuttgart, Arkansas, reputedly has sold roughly $1 million a year worth of SWDs ever since they arrived in that part of the country. At $150 apiece (or less), that’s a lot of spinners.