Most religious beliefs find their purest expression in basic prayers, repeated endlessly. Political parties know the worth of slogans – catchy phrases that carry a supposedly telling point, in simplistic fashion, trotted out repeatedly during a campaign. Advertising and marketing concerns use the same tool in aid of their commercial interests, knowing from experience that a message repeated often enough can become the truth in the mind of many listeners by virtue of nothing more than repetition. Hypnotists and mind controllers of all sorts, both the pernicious and the benign, have used the same tool for centuries. The best trial lawyers use the technique as part of their most basic bag of tricks, structuring each case around a simple message that they can play over and over again.

The field of waterfowl management is no exception. It is a field where the answer to every question that pertains to population comes back to habitat. Want more birds? Provide more and better habitat. Want a more consistent and predictable flight? Manage for more consistent and prolific habitat settings. If the populations rise, you will find the answer in improved habitat. If they decline, habitat deterioration provides the cause. Nothing else matters. No other factor has relevance.

A long and hallowed tradition supports this approach. Ducks Unlimited had its genesis as an organization dedicated to the preservation and enhancement of waterfowl habitat in response to the population crises of the ‘30s. The founders of that organization and other like-minded people had a correct answer for that time -- and the conditions of that time. Their constructive efforts sparked the movement for preservation of wetlands that thrives today.

Without denigrating those efforts to any degree whatsoever, one can still ask whether habitat is the all-pervasive, universal, one-size-fits-all answer today, for the current disturbing decline. The California Central Valley provides an apt, real-life laboratory for examination of this question.

The North American Waterfowl Management Plan identified the Central Valley as the second most critical piece of wintering habitat on the North American continent, targeting it for special attention to arrest a perceived loss of seasonal wetlands. According to conventional wisdom, the Central Valley had once held four to five million acres of such wetlands1 – and by the ‘80s was down to roughly five percent (more or less) of that original total with much of the remnant degraded and subject to continuing encroachment. The Management Plan included specific strategies to reverse the decline, many of which became part of the implementation program adopted by the Central Valley Habitat Joint Venture (“CVHJV”), a coalition of public agencies and private organizations formed to plan for and carry out specific strategies for habitat creation and preservation. The CVHJV plans triggered concerted efforts to restore lands to wetland habitat – most of it so-called “seasonal” or wintering habitat – through easement and fee acquisition and other strategies.

One way or another, regardless of whether the condition is officially acknowledged, whether a tribute to the success of the CVHJV or some other phenomenon, we now have more wintering habitat in the Central Valley than birds to use it. Far, far more. Nor is this a sorry byproduct of our recent population declines. The same condition prevailed at the height of the ‘90s population boom. I know this from firsthand observation and from listening to the experts. It is an accepted fact.

Now we have what could be called a converse problem – so many places for the available birds to find multiple choices of bountiful sanctuary that the hunting has gone into the toilet2. Indeed, with so few birds evident overhead, the very experience of the winter marsh has suffered profound and adverse change. By any reasonable standard, we should declare victory in the wintering habitat war and spend not one dime on creating a single square inch more of it, at least until populations dramatically improve. With the margin for error we currently possess, the wintering ground that currently lies unused, we will have ample warning of any recurrence of need.

What about the other pan of the balance – production ground, nesting and brood habitat? Unlike most states, we produce at home a preponderance of the mallards that winter in this state – and the Central Valley serves as our prime production area.3 Here, we operate on more uncertain ground, never having given production the same emphasis that the CVHJV gave to wintering habitat.

And fairy tales abound in the murk – such as, for example, that our primary production ground used to be the ground that rice farmers “set aside” (i.e., took out of production to comply with the then prevailing support program) ground that is no longer fallowed because “set aside” ended when the support program changed in the early ‘90s. On this theory, we lost production when “set aside” ended and farmers tilled the land in question under the new program rather than letting it grow rank, thus replacing waterfowl production with rice production.

Logical though it may sound, that theory suffers from at least three conspicuous defects: (1) we had the best production year in recent history (if not all time) in the spring of ’99, long after the “set aside” program ended, at a time when the rice farmers were busily farming most of their ground; (2) set aside ground did not typically provide the type of grassy upland considered prime for mallard nesting, generally producing instead sparse, rank broadleaf vegetation unless it is left fallow for several years4, and (3) the total in set aside ground probably never exceeded 150,000 acres – in a Valley that contains many times that much grassland and potential grassland.

The fact is that we have many thousands of acres of grassy upland closely associated with ponds and drains that should be ideal production habitat located throughout the Valley. The Valley holds far more of that sort of ground than the total of all land farmed to rice in this state, let alone that fraction periodically held out of production as “set-aside” ground. The great bulk of those grasslands go unused by nesting waterfowl. Here again, we have more habitat than birds to use it. We could certainly make some of it better (thicker grasses, better brood water conditions, etc.,) but we don’t need more ground. We need better management of the ground we have.5

In short, the “habitat, habitat and more habitat” mantra no longer applies to the conditions that conspicuously exist in the California Central Valley with respect to wintering habitat for all species and production habitat for local mallards – the two elements of the habitat equation that we can control. And yet, fixation on creation of this sort of habitat as the magic bullet to reverse our population decline, while we maintain a liberal harvest package, has become our “Field Of Dreams.” “Create it and they shall come.” To which one might well reply: “Dream on, Homeboy.”

It is a natural human response to prefer action over restraint when faced with a problem. It is good to remember when in the grip of such urges that motion does not automatically equal progress. No action at all is better than unfocussed action that consumes resources and has no bearing on the problem – no relevance to the solution.

Unfortunately, our Pacific Flyway habitat equation contains a third variable, a third constriction point, that may be the most slippery. i.e., habitat that accommodates the birds in transit from nesting to wintering ground and back again. For the Central Valley, that means the Klamath Basin where our migrants marshal on both legs of their annual migration and where our resident mallards fly for their late summer molt. No matter what we do on the wintering and production grounds, our Valley will generally support only the birds that the Klamath can sustain in the performance of the vital function that it serves. The Klamath problem appears intractable, stemming as it does from too many claims on too little water6. But if we are concerned about improving habitat, we should concentrate our efforts and money there – and not in the random creation of more wintering and breeding habitat on private ground, using scarce financial and other resources, that serves no useful purpose beyond appearances and creating a “feel good” state of mind in those who do the work.

No amount of wetland creation can change the immutable fact that habitat without ducks has no more production value than ducks without habitat. Why do we find it so easy to recognize the latter while denying the former? Maybe it’s just too obvious. Or maybe the answer – inherently demanding restraint – is just too unpleasant to face. Knowing that we have a crisis on our hands, feeling that we must do something, unwilling to face what must be done, we divert ourselves with the notion that more habitat creation will allow us to keep killing at the “liberal” rate, to satisfy those who might (perish the thought) give up the sport if we didn’t have long seasons and high bag limits.

Restraint, after all, is hard work. Doing something like habitat creation seems easier and leaves one with a sense of accomplishment, false though it may be. Think of the overweight guy whose doctor has just told him he needs to lose 80 pounds. Will he yearn for a quick-fix weight loss potion or accept the fact that he has to cut intake in half and double his exertion – and stick with it for at least as long as it took to put on that excess 80, if not for the rest of a lifetime? To ask the question is to answer it.

You would not hire a plumber to do brain surgery – or vice versa. You would not use chemotherapy to treat a cracked skull. The doctors who prescribe for our sport have made the wrong diagnosis for what ails us, mindlessly trotting out the old mantra without questioning its relevance to the current situation. They are currently working on an impressive losing streak. Unfortunately, that indisputable fact neither deters them nor causes them to engage in self-doubt.

Seeing that we don’t have enough breeders, they prescribe more habitat instead of less killing, as though the habitat could produce birds spontaneously. Until we face the true cause of our ailment, habitat creation will do nothing but raise our standing in the eyes of those who don’t care a whip about hunting – or even ducks, for that matter -- but are hooked on the cause of wetlands restoration for its own sake. A worthy cause, perhaps – but beside the point.

Time to proclaim the correct diagnosis. The analytic path to it is difficult to miss. And for anyone who is still unclear on the concept, the upcoming season should provide a grim answer.

1 These numbers have been repeated so often that they have become immutable truth. I have read no explanation of the method used to estimate a wetland inventory that predated all human habitation other than that of Native Americans who were too pragmatic to bother about inventorying wetland. Some of the same sources confidently tell us that 70 million migratory waterfowl wintered in California in those days without saying who did the counts or how they did them, or what happened in drought years, etc. You will find these numbers confidently recited in Sierra Club publications, for example, all of which compare them with the current condition as a basis for predicting the apocalypse. See, e.g., Carle, Water And The California Dream, (Sierra Club Books 2000).

2 From what I read, the Mississippi Flyway finds itself in a similar state (responsible, in part, for the call to open up sanctuaries because that’s where all the birds are).

3 Band returns confirm that the great bulk of the banded mallards we take hatched here. The last half dozen I have taken, for example, were banded as hatchlings within forty miles of where they flew into my shot column. This is particularly true of our early season birds. Although experts believe that we winter a significant number of out of state mallards, they have been gunned for several weeks before they arrive – and the survivors find and stick to sanctuary ground, thus frustrating those who rely on band returns for their data.

4 I speak from experience, having owned a rice farm through ten years of set aside programs. The mallards that nested on my property – and there were many – avoided the set aside ground which never had adequate cover, preferring instead a small irrigated pasture on a low hill above the rice fields. I have observed the same pattern on much larger holdings throughout the area.

5 While writing this piece, I received a solicitation from Delta: “Duck Production Is Declining – What Are The Solutions?” Despite CRP and WRP programs, the output of the “duck factory” suffers from pernicious forces that apparently no one understands. Perhaps we should be asking what force could possibly be similarly hurting the output of nesting grounds with so much distance and ecological diversity separating them? Could it be something simple – like killing too many hens?

6 I am not aware of any similar problem limiting the birds that breed in the Prairie Pothole country but don’t use the Pacific Flyway on their migration. One may exist, and could be part of the problem.