A recent issue of Delta Waterfowl featured an interview with Frank Rohwer, Delta’s scientific director and a professor at Louisiana State University. At page 84-85, the following appears.

Q: “In your opinion, what are the biggest threats to ducks and duck hunting?”

Rohwer: “I think the biggest threat to duck hunting is the loss of duck hunters. And the biggest threat to ducks is the potential loss of duck hunting because of ethical objections. If the anti-hunters win and hunting disappears, we’ll lose the incentive to do what’s best for ducks. Hunters want 20 million mallards and are willing to do whatever it takes to achieve that goal. For bird-lovers, 300,000 mallards are enough. They’re not going to support the wetlands and grasslands and intensive management necessary to maintain healthy populations.”

So our biggest and most pressing problem comes down to lack of hunters, an observation that sparks a few questions.

First, assuming that we reverse the losses and successfully recruit enough new devotees to our sport to make the sort of difference that Professor Rohwer hopes to achieve, where in the marsh will we find room for them? And how will the additional guns further our stewardship goals of higher, sustainable populations consistent with the type of gratifying experience that will keep the neophytes happily buying their duck stamps, paying their association dues and patronizing those who supply us with the “necessaries” while advertising in our magazines?

When the Waterfowl Committee of the Arkansas Wildlife Federation conducted its investigation and compiled its report on the reasons behind the sharp decline in the quality of hunting experience during the early years of this century, it fingered excessive hunting pressure as the number one culprit. It traced that added pressure to a doubling of the number of hunters through the decade of the ‘90s in response to Arkansas’ concerted effort to turn duck hunting into an economic bonanza for the state by (drum roll please) increasing the number of hunters. Hunters in both Tennessee and Louisiana (Professor Rohwer’s home ground) reached similar conclusions – albeit less formally – to explain the dramatic decline they experienced in such storied venues as Reelfoot Lake, among others.¹

Even when added hunting pressure does not produce an immediate decline in populations (a cause and effect relationship that remains unproven and unprovable, despite the pompous vaporings of our so-called experts), it profoundly alters waterfowl behavior experienced in the field by actual hunters who cast their eyes skyward hoping for a little gratification – in contrast with those who cast their eyes downward to scientific studies filled with graphs and charts. When the non-resident season opens in North Dakota, for example – materially adding to the hunter numbers with a corresponding increase in the intensity of the dawn barrage – hunters in South Dakota notice a sharp influx of birds obviously seeking a quieter environment. The Arkansas report noted the same phenomenon, i.e., more birds rafting up on sanctuary ground as soon as the first boom reverberates through the trees. Tennessee the same, as chat room talk and internet postings clearly attest, with frustration and ill-temper shrill and rising all around.

In California, even with declining hunter numbers, we deal with similar complaints.² Here, the forces of evil are those air quality regulations that require rice farmers to dispose of their straw and stubble by flooding rather than fire, thus creating vast acreages of wetland not open to hunters where the birds rest during daylight hours. That phenomenon has become so pronounced and so conspicuous in recent years that even our scientists have conceded the point. What is the point? Added hunting pressure alters bird behavior in ways that detract from the hunting experience. And if adding hunters will destroy the hunting experience for all of us, how many of those new hunters will keep hunting? Indeed, how many of the regular fanatics will stay the course?

Professor Rohwer’s notion overlooks the fact that most new hunters do not start out committed to the sport. They try it. If they encounter frustration, most of them will leave it just as quickly. And it takes time to learn how to become a consistently successful waterfowl hunter – unless our neophyte is a multi-millionaire who buys into a property that presents minimal challenge, with a staff of house guides to shepherd the incompetent. In short, significant frustration is almost inevitable in the early years of waterfowl hunting experience. In the age of instant gratification, that may be enough in the majority of cases to terminate the experiment.

The plain fact is that if someone invented a magic wand that enticed new hunters to take up waterfowling, they would leave just as quickly unless the waver of that magic wand could also provide productive places to hunt with lots of birds overhead. We can’t even provide that experience for the hunters we already have, let alone the legions of newcomers required to feed the demands of ground to sustain a 20 million mallard population – to use Professor Rohwer’s outlandish figure.³

The suggestion that we need more hunters as our number one priority in order to preserve and enhance our sport flies in the face of the most rudimentary field observations. Imagine doubling the number of guns in your area, for example, and you will grasp the full import of this nettle. Recall the number of times you have cursed the unmentionable slob in the next blind or the neighboring property who touched one off just as the birds you have been cajoling locked into final approach. Multiply that three fold and you will capture the essence of the suggestion.

Bluntly stated, until we have a higher and more reliable waterfowl population and a significant increase in passable hunting acreage, we do not need, cannot accommodate – and certainly would not retain as satisfied devotees of the sport – more hunters, particularly as we cannot provide a satisfactory field experience for many of the ones we already have. Any suggestion to the contrary is errant, utopian nonsense.

But that’s not the end of the matter. I submit that we need to explore and expose the core fallacies that spawn such a crackbrained idea out of the womb of misperception. Start with the core notion of 20 million mallards. Where is the support for the notion that “hunters will do whatever it takes to achieve that goal?” We have no idea how to achieve that goal (assuming that we know what it is), even if hunters were prepared to pay the cost of achieving it – which they demonstrably are not, have never been and are unlikely ever to be.⁴

Moreover, we do not even purport to manage to achieve high populations of ducks. “Adaptive harvest management” seeks to achieve high sustainable kill, not increased populations. Indeed, we at Madduck recently commented on an article written by several of the scientific custodians of the AHM methodology in which the authors actually suggested that higher populations could only be sustained with reduced harvest⁵ – a notion inconsistent with recruiting more hunters, even if we had space in the marsh to put them.

The idea that an increased number of hunters will enhance our political power in any showdown with the antis – although unstated in the Professor Rohwer quote above – is inherent in the same thinking as articulated by others. Devotees of that line either cannot count, don’t understand the political process or both. In truth, we could increase our numbers tenfold and still be no match for an inflamed electorate.⁶ The first and foremost secret of survival then is to give the electorate no cause for inflammation.

And here we touch an area of agreement with Professor Rohwer – the notion that ethical objections pose a threat to hunting. But there’s a subtle distinction here. To date, hunting alone, in and of itself, has not created the type of public reaction that coalesces into restrictions and prohibitions. Certain hunting practices trigger that backlash.

Our strength derives, not from numbers, but from the financial clout and political connections of prominent hunters – and maintaining an image as ethical stewards of an important resource. Money, it is said, is the mother’s milk of politics – a mantra that holds true up to a point. But money alone cannot overcome a strong adverse tide of public opinion triggered by offensive or boorish behavior that wanders into the spotlight of public awareness. Why is this still an issue when we have incident after incident, proof after proof, that the behavior of hunters poses the greatest threat to hunting of all types in modern times?⁷

Item: A recent piece in the New York Times reported on a controversy currently raging in Montana over the issuance of permits to kill bison that wander out of Yellowstone Park where the herd is in robust health and growing smartly. These huge animals have no fear of humans and prefer to stand placidly out in open grasslands minding their own simple business. The local Humane Society spokeswoman got the fires of adverse public opinion burning bright when she stated, on camera, that killing these animals took all the skill – and was charged with the same excitement – as stalking into a parking lot to shoot a parked Buick. Stung by the ensuing outcry, the governor – a hunter in a state where there are many – is publicly trying to deflect the heat by finding ways to “level the playing field.” How he will do that is anyone’s guess, perhaps by requiring that permittees pursue the huge beasts clad only in a loincloth armed with nothing but a bowie knife.

In Alaska a few years ago, the public took offense at the practice of scouting for big game animals from the air, landing as close as possible to them and shooting them while the plane engine remained warm. The outcry eventually led to a rigorously enforced rule against shooting on the day of flight. Hunting is a way of life in Alaska – and yet public revulsion over an established practice, that contemporary minds found unethical under the harsh light of heightened scrutiny, forced a change.

New Jersey is currently in an uproar over what to do about black bears, with an active public voice raised against hunting them despite the fact that they have become a nuisance in substantial areas of the state – because the locally accepted hunting practice had involved the use of bait. Many states have banned the use of bait in bear hunting, or the related practice of shooting them off of garbage dumps at night. Laws prohibit night shooting of deer and other game using bright lights, the use of trail hounds in pursuit of certain animals and a variety of other practices. Most of these were legal at one time and became illegal because they transgressed a changing public gag threshold under the harsh light of scrutiny – and their devoted practitioners could not successfully defend the practices against the adverse tide of inflamed public opinion.

Indeed, when you explore the history of most restrictions on hunting, you find that the authorities imposed the ban on a form of behavior that triggered an adverse and strong public reaction after many years, if not decades of acceptance. To tighten the focus to the subject at hand, public outcry and/or core ethical considerations have sparked almost every rule that constrains waterfowling, i.e., no baiting, no live decoys, no electronic calling, no guns larger than ten gauge, no night shooting, etc., etc., and so forth.

With all due respect to Professor Rohwer, I submit that he is no student of history, certainly not the history of blood sports in these United States. I submit that the greatest threat to our hunting heritage lies in the behavior of hunters who exploit modern technology to nullify the skills required in field and marsh. Just as .50 caliber sniper rifles that can reliably kill out to 1000 yards will eventually destroy the sport of elk hunting (which is hardly “sport” when practiced with such a tool, bench rested over the hood of a modern ATV and sighted with a 12x scope), electronic spinning wing decoys, mallard machines, vortexes and similar obscenities, that fill the pages of the catalogs before befouling the marshes with their skill nullifying, mesmerizing effect on the birds (and morally degrading effect on those who use them), will spell our end when the antis mobilize against them. Unless, of course, we wake up and get them banned first.

Professor Rohwer is entitled to his point of view, of course – as I am entitled to mine. In my opinion, he could not be more wrong, or perhaps worse, more irrelevant. But I am less disturbed by him than by Delta, which published his views and endorsed them, at least by implication. Until very recently, we have consistently supported Delta in these pieces, believing that it was the one hunters’ organization truly committed to right thinking in waterfowl matters. And now it appears that Delta suffers from the same destructive bureaucratic imperatives that infect our other organizations. Of course we need more hunters. Translation: we need more members for our fine organization, hunters who will pay their dues, buy raffle tickets, and above all, applaud our efforts like a robotic Greek chorus – even when we lack the courage to take a strong stand against the corrosive forces at work in our sport and cannot provide these new sycophants with the experience we promise.

Hell yes, let’s have more hunters – so long as Professor Rohwer and those who share his views step forward to show them their place in the marsh (hopefully a long way from my blind) – and explain, at the end of the day, why the experience is not quite as advertised.

1 A Louisiana hunter I met during 2003 reported that his club was taking less than 10% of the birds routinely shot there during the ‘90s. He claimed that that experience was typical. Internet reports claimed that the hunting in Louisiana had declined so badly in the early years of this century to justify characterization as the “worst years in history” with mallards almost non-existent. Similar reports emanated from Tennessee where hunters started asking each other what a real mallard actually looked like.

2 From some of the correspondence I get, some of the articles I read and some of the conversations I have had with men prominent in waterfowl affairs in the Midwest, I understand that many Midwesterners have a hard time thinking of California as a waterfowling state. Contempt would be too kind a word to describe some of their attitudes. But according to the Service, we took more birds here last season than were taken in any other state – and we probably have no more than half the number of hunters who regularly hunt in Arkansas, for example. Having grown up hunting in the Midwest and having now hunted in California since 1956, I can assure you doubters that California is indeed a prime waterfowling state, like it or not.

3The North American Waterfowl Management Plan postulates a breeding population of roughly 8.2 million as optimum. It is not clear if Professor Rohwer is using the 20 million number as a fall flight or breeding population target. But just as I have never heard a committed hunter complain that we need more hunters,I have never heard anyone argue for 20 million mallards.

4 There is no evidence that all our efforts over the years since the dark days of the 1930s have materially increased populations over what they would otherwise have been.

5 With the highest population achieved with zero harvest, a concept at odds with the compensatory kill hypothesis that the colleagues of these men espouse.

6 California may provide an extreme example. We have perhaps 45,000 waterfowlers in a state with an eligible electorate that substantially exceeds 21 million.

7 A California legislator introduced a bill to ban dove hunting in the recent session. The bill gained no traction as was quickly withdrawn after the author received a torrent of mail adverse to the effort. Even in a state where hunters comprise a tiny fraction of the population, a state that has adopted prohibitions against certain hunting practices by the initiative process, it takes something extraordinary to create an adverse tide public opinion sufficient to limit or prohibit certain hunting practices.