On May 27, 2004, Ducks Unlimited issued a report entitled: “A Race Against Time – The Pintail Initiative.” The report describes an effort to conserve and protect 6.2 million acres of boreal forest plateau in the southern portion of the Northwest Territories of Canada. According to the report, this area supports 12 to 14 million breeding ducks “including a significant number of pintails.” The area gains critical importance during dry years on the western Canadian prairie when roughly half of the pintail population overflies the prairie and attempts to nest there.

The Pintail Initiative represents a positive effort to arrest the decline of these magnificent birds. DU is a significant partner in that effort. The effort also represents a belated recognition by DU that the pintail are in dire straits, a fact that DU has had difficulty accepting for a number of years.1

By far the most arresting feature of the report, however, can be found in the last paragraph under the heading “Winter Pintail Numbers Static.” I quote the paragraph in its entirety rather than paraphrase – and risk accusations of importing an editorial bias.

“Waterfowl biologists counted 1,139,749 pintail wintering in California during the year’s mid-winter waterfowl survey. This was almost exactly the same number of pintail found during the previous year on the wintering grounds. The count came as a surprise to biologists who had projected a 43% increase in birds based on surveys on the breeding grounds in the spring of 2003. While no further drops in pintail numbers might be considered a success, given past declines, the early false indication of a significant increase in numbers coupled with the fact that the current pintail population is significantly smaller than it was in the early 1970s demonstrates that the plight of the pintail continues.” (Emphasis added).

So the significant bounce in pintail numbers, heralded by many in the spring of 2003 as the beginning of the great rebound that justified an immediate increase in the pintail season and limit, has proved a mirage. Thinking back, I seem to recall that bogus number as virtually the only good news we got in the spring of ’03 – unless you consider it “good news” that conditions have not deteriorated from the year before.

But there is something far worse here. We are now told that the breeding pair counts are prone to large error – when we had been informed repeatedly that those counts are the most reliable and true indicator of populations. If the spring counts are no good, what have we got that is? A false 43 percent change can hardly be shrugged off as a statistical error or minor aberration. How can you possibly make a mistake that large (or even suspect that you have done so on the basis of reliable evidence) without admitting to serious flaws in the methodology, casting a far wider net of doubt over other numbers, similarly derived?

Once again, we encounter the “oops” factor – the regular disclosure that bad as things are, they are actually worse than we are being told. Subsequent revelation overrides any fragment of good news. Only the bad endures. Next, we’ll probably be told that pintail are inherently difficult to count, given their restless ways, so that the error shouldn’t be taken too seriously. Of course, no one said that in the spring of ’03.

Does anyone else find it interesting that this pattern took hold – to coincide with the sharp decline in the quality of our hunting – shortly after the introduction of spinners? No, I don’t blame spinners for the decline of the pintail. That decline started long before 1998. The continued and growing use of such devices could certainly blunt any recovery effort, however, given the conclusion in some of the studies that pintail are particularly vulnerable.

Maybe it’s just a Karma thing. Spinners emerge, hunting goes into the dumper, gross flaws in our “science” emerge, bird behavior appears to change in ways that reduce the quality of hunting, the tide of irritation, frustration and conflict rises, etc., etc. Does someone see light at the end of this tunnel? If so, please let me know.

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Webster’s defines “nostalgia” as “a desire to return in thought or in fact to a former time in one’s life . . .” Ambrose Bierce may have hit closer to home when he defined it as “the vapors that ascend from the corpse of dead memory, pleasing to the nostalgic, tedious to others – and a remote parody of truth.” A caution to those of us prone to reflect on the past, I take Bierce to heart and engage in such reflection reluctantly, only as needed to make a point.

I recently moved my office after 28 years in the same place. A move after such a long tenure requires one to confront the enormous pile of stuff that accumulates with time, saved for reasons long forgotten in drawers and envelopes perhaps not opened for a decade or longer. In the moving process, I found a bunch of faded old pictures hidden among the debris. One in particular caught my eye, taken on the last day of the ’72-’73 waterfowl season. I hunted that year in the Suisun Marsh, at the western end of the Sacramento/San Joaquin Delta, a few miles east of San Francisco Bay. My hunting companion and I stand grinning in our gear against the background of a marsh gleaming in winter sunshine. We hold straps of drake pintail. I recall that we got our limits (six each, I believe) with relative ease on a brisk day of north wind, bright sky, limitless visibility and with birds as far as the eye could see, near and far, high and low.

Pondering that picture, it occurred to me that very few hunters under the age of fifty are likely to remember how a true pintail sky is supposed to look, sound and feel. And without such memory, how can one appreciate the magnitude of the growing crisis? What we see today, even on the good days, is nothing like what used to be common throughout the season. What a pity. What a loss. At some point, we may have nothing for requiem other than an Adamson painting and the vapors that ascend from the corpse of dead memory.

Perhaps this is old hat. Perhaps the same thing occurred with the canvasbacks and redheads. Their dramatic decline hasn’t truly registered with me because I have never hunted them. They have never been part of my life. I have taken a few by accident, while set for other, more common species. Not so the pintail, the perfect example of the boiled frog syndrome, something that slips away little by little while you hardly notice – until the cumulative loss becomes too large to ignore, too systemic to rectify.

Maybe the new Pintail Initiative will start the long process of arresting the decline and begin to restore some semblance of the former flight. At least the leaders of the initiative are out in the field, working to protect natural wetlands. After all these years, spending money and time on further studies (that lead to nothing conclusive except a determination to undertake still more studies) should have a low priority.

When we are forced to confront serious questions about our supposedly most reliable counts, the time has come to fall back on good old trial and error, guided by common sense.2

And in the meantime, brace yourself for more bad news. There’s a lot more of that in the pipeline than light at the end of the tunnel.

1We have criticized DU on Madduck for its apparent lack of interest in hunting and issues important to hunters, in derogation of its origins. It deserves credit for serious and important efforts in this instance.

2I understand that The Pintail Initiative DU representative is Dan Connelly. Anyone interested in getting more information should contact him at (916) 852-2000, Ext 5333.