We at Madduck have often voiced support for the efforts of Delta and what we perceived as its commitment to conservation values in waterfowl management and an ethical approach to hunting issues. We believed that Delta put the welfare of the birds first, adopting the notion that if we support and enhance populations, there will be plenty of migrating waterfowl to satisfy us as hunters and as devotees of a tattered winter sky, teeming with waterfowl. Thus, we were more than a little disappointed to read a copy of the letter written by Rob Olson, president of Delta on August 10, 2005, to Brian Milsap, chief of the Division of Migratory Bird Management, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Olson wrote to protest the service’s proposed reduction of the daily bag for scaup – bluebills to most of us – from three to two in the three eastern flyways and from four to three in the Pacific. The service adopted the reduction despite Olson’s letter, so one could consider the matter a dead issue. Unfortunately, it is not.

Now it is true that most of us don’t hunt bluebills, nor do we hunt the areas that they frequent (or perhaps more accurately, used to frequent). Even in the long gone halcyon days of diver hunting on Chesapeake Bay, the dedicated hunters of diving ducks prized canvasbacks and redheads over bluebills. The same preferences held true on San Francisco and San Pablo Bays, as they did on the Great Lakes, from what I have read and been told. 

But for all practical purposes, the divers are virtually gone now, with the exception of isolated and widely scattered pockets, a sorry remnant of a once prolific flight that fired a once proud sport. Cans and redheads have been subject to special restrictions and/or the threat of closed seasons for decades. They are remembered primarily by collectors of old decoys and those who cherish the oils and watercolors lovingly painted by our dwindling stock of aging masters. Those artists could depict scenes they actually experienced. Anyone trying to produce a similar work today would be hard pressed to find a richly populated wild setting to replicate.

In a sense, these artifacts are like headstones in the graveyard of memory. For it takes a lot of work to hunt divers – special watercraft and literally hundreds of decoys – and most of the sport’s devotees have given up for lack of potential quarry. The drastically diminished populations, reduced bag and seasons, do not justify the effort to pursue them for most hunters.¹ Populations of canvasbacks and redheads are so low as to prompt special restrictions even in the current climate of “liberal” frameworks. The principal question posed for the Service with respect to canvasbacks each year is whether or not to put them on the protected list altogether. Bluebill populations currently stand at an all time low on a trend line that has plunged unabated for the last several years. Worse, no one seems to know why – or how to reverse the trend.

Olson wrote to protest a reduced bluebill limit against this background of unrelieved gloom, making three arguments:

First, no science supports the notion that hunter kill affects scaup populations – and without such evidence, the service should not act to curtail kill. In short, the compensatory kill theory applied to yet another declining population in the name of science, when the scientists admit that the compensatory kill theory cannot be proved. Stated another way, until someone proves the unprovable, we should be allowed to keep killing at the same rates that have prevailed while populations have declined alarmingly.

Second, reduction of the limit will discourage diver hunters and create momentum for those who would ban hunting altogether. But aren’t diver hunters primarily discouraged by the lack of birds? And how can we argue that hunters are the truly enlightened stewards of the resource – the stakeholders with the greatest interest – when we defend and advocate killing rates that have coincided with drastic population declines? The service notes that while the total kill of scaup in recent years has declined, the harvest rate – the percentage of the population shot by hunters – has increased. Doesn’t that suggest that additive kill is at work here?

Third, we need more scientific studies and should await their outcome before we take action. Those with shorter memories than mine (and mine is pretty mediocre) may have forgotten that we heard the same song with respect to the pintail in the early ‘90s, spent tens of millions on a study in which the cream of the waterfowl biology fraternity participated, to produce a report that was inconclusive in all respects save one, i.e., the firm recommendation that more studies should be done. Someone might suggest that when you are heading at full speed toward the edge of a cliff, you don’t need a scientific study concerning the force of gravity on a moving vehicle in thin air to decide that a more conservative course of action might be appropriate – something like a foot applied forcefully to the brake pedal.

Once again we confront the call for “scientific” answers in a field where science is at best a blunt instrument, as the experience of the last decade has repeatedly established. To rely on our “science” in the face of a crisis proclaimed by the scaup numbers celebrates another triumph of hope over experience. Given its mission statement, one wonders why Delta would choose the role of chief celebrant.

It is worthwhile to explore the limits of wildlife biology by examining the cauldron of controversies spawned by the Endangered Species Act, where high financial stakes collide with conservation activism, where science is called upon to serve as arbiter of hot-button political and property rights issues supposedly determinable by that science. The failures mount, as the conventional wisdom of each passing year discredits that of the previous year, only to be replaced by new wisdom equally ephemeral, a phenomenon lamented in a growing chorus of criticism. For example:

“The supreme misfortune in most of conservation biology is its utter, irreducible uncertainties about what constitutes a minimum viable population, about what a population is genetically, and even about how to find any of these things out.” (Emphasis added.) Colburn Trading Spaces: Habitat “Banking” Under Fish & Wildlife Service Policy,

JOURNAL OF NATURAL RESOURCES AND ENVIRONMENT, Vol 20,No. 1, p.36 (Summer 2005).

Sound familiar? Think of “compensable kill” theory, the cornerstone of our “liberal” framework and Adaptive Harvest Management that manages for maximum sustainable kill – a supposedly scientific hypothesis that the experts admit cannot be proved or disproved for lack of ability to control the myriad variables.

The same article contains an even more somber statement of chilling relevance: “Indeed, for many of America’s extant wildlife populations, their fate has already been sealed – we just do not know it yet.”

In criticizing the service’s habitat and mitigation banking policy, the author contends that we don’t know enough to support activist management policies – long winded $5 words for “go slow, for you have no idea what you are doing, and the situation is more dire than you suppose.” The author cites numerous articles and studies to support his grim thesis. Although he does not focus on waterfowl, his observations hit home. Our “science” rests on hypotheses that simply defy proof, one way or the other. In that climate, general appeals to scientific verity are nothing more than hucksterism, the deceptive mouthings of snake-oil pitchmen or a smokescreen for a different agenda.

One can shrug all this off as the musings of alarmists, as Olson apparently would do on the bluebill subject. But the recent history of our diving ducks, our apparent helplessness in the face of steep decline and virtual loss of that branch of our sport devoted to them cannot be denied. That should be bad enough. Who can argue that we are not facing a real risk of permanently closed seasons here? Who can tell us what the minimum viable, sustainable population of these species might be and how to stabilize them at that level? Will the secret keeper of that wisdom please step forward?

In this climate, how is it possible for the organization that claims to be the leader among all waterfowl associations in stewardship values to argue (if unsuccessfully) for a higher daily bag than the service recommends? After all, one can hardly accuse the service of conservatism, given the purpose of Adaptive Harvest Management and the results that system has spat out since its inception. (A prize will be awarded for the best answer to that query. Personally, I haven’t a clue. Perhaps my capacity to perceive the answer has suffered a paralysis of disappointment).

It is enlightening to note that in December of 2004, Delta sent out a solicitation to its membership to fund a program entitled “Voluntary Restraint,” encouraging hunters to shoot only drakes and presumably follow other practices consistent with a Leopoldian sportsmanship ethic. In addition the solicitation letter – signed by the same Rob Olson, as president of Delta – strongly implied that such restraint could be essential to the preservation of our sport:

“Your support of Delta’s Voluntary Restraint program is an important step to ensure the sport of waterfowl hunting for the future. The positive impacts of a quality hunting ethic and focus on responsible harvest will have long-term benefits.” (Emphasis added).

Apparently, the ethic, the philosophy, behind “Voluntary Restraint” either doesn’t apply to bluebills or to mandatory restrictions. I may be a cynic, but I believe that for every adherent to notions of voluntary restraint, there are at least ten hunters who will go as far as the law allows – who will regard the limit as an entitlement and act accordingly. The limits convey their own message – those supposedly in the know believe that you should kill no more than the stated number regardless of opportunity, and those behind a badge will bust you if you kill more. That message speaks more loudly to more hunters than voluntary restraint ever will, sad as that may be. Thus, if one truly cares to achieve sustainable populations, one must advocate for realistic legal limits as an essential part of the framework required to “ensure the sport of waterfowl hunting for the future.” Voluntary restraint will have a few noteworthy adherents, but it is a utopian concept and should be viewed as such, impractical as a control device.

And I also believe that advocacy of responsible, conservative bag limits as part of a responsible and conservative stewardship regime constitutes the best antidote we will ever have to the threat posed by the anti-hunting crowd. For in the end, they win when they can argue that we are killers, not sportsmen – short-term despoilers rather than long-term conservators of the birds.

How difficult will it be for us to carry that message when all of our organizations have abdicated – either abandoning hunting issues altogether as in the case of DU, or becoming advocates of kill, the course Delta has apparently chosen, at least on the scaup issue?

Chalk up one more for the dark side.

1 Jim Phillips likes to tell the story of some rich Baltimore types who bought an island on Chesapeake Bay a decade or so ago to hunt ducks in the storied manner. When it quickly became apparent that the rafts of cans and redheads of that famous waterway had become a fading figment of memory, they took to shooting buffleheads. Those birds being scarce as well, they took to baiting for them – and got busted for it. It is difficult to imagine a more inexplicable rap sheet than one noting a baiting arrest in aid of bufflehead kill.