Imagine a business where the production people don’t talk to the marketing people, and vice versa. The sales force beats the bushes attempting to sell product that the factory doesn’t produce – the factory spits out product that the marketing folks can’t sell, with no attempt to bridge the communication gap by either contingent. Not a good business plan, as I assume we can all agree. It came to mind as I read a manuscript entitled “Reuniting Waterfowl Management” ( The “Article”) by a committee of biologists and managers.¹ Although written in somewhat dry techno-jargon, it is too good to paraphrase, so I quote:

“Natural resource managers attempt to effect desirable levels of duck abundance in North America by managing both harvests and habitats. Much of the habitat conservation and management is conducted under the auspices of the North American Waterfowl Management Plan . . .The programs to regulate sport hunting vary by country, so we focus here on the Adaptive Harvest Management program in the U.S. . . . This program is responsible for managing the largest portion of the continental duck harvest. Both the Plan and AHM are continental in their scope, involve an extensive group of stakeholders, and rely on an adaptive process of biological planning, implementation and evaluation. But each program has a unique focus. The Plan is concerned with conserving habitat for waterfowl over a decades-long timeframe, while AHM is a process for setting duck-hunting regulations on an annual basis. It seems evident that because both programs are meant to affect the same populations of birds, their management objectives should be coherent. However, the development of these two programs occurred independently, and as such there has been little recognition that the objectives of one program can profoundly affect the other. In this paper, we argue that harvest and habitat management are inextricably linked, and that the objectives of both AHM and the Plan need to explicitly reflect that linkage.” (Emphasis added).

I don’t know about you, but I have always found the notion that “harvest and habitat management are inextricably linked” rather self-evident. It takes habitat to nurture and produce the birds we harvest. If we harvest too many, the best habitat will remain unproductive for lack of breeders. If we return birds to poor breeding grounds, production suffers, populations and harvest inevitably decline. Isn’t this Waterfowl 101? It seems far more interesting – indeed startling – that such a group of highly placed men had to collaborate on a paper to advocate an obvious thesis. Hence my perhaps crude reference to the dysfunctional business model at the outset of this piece.

But it gets worse – or at least more inscrutable. The authors conclude that the higher our population target, the fewer ducks we can afford to harvest. At a mid-continent population of nearly 12 million, sustainable harvest reaches zero – which can only be the case if we assume a perfect balance between births and deaths at that level. Whereas we have a maximum sustainable harvest of 1.2 million birds at a population of 5.9 million – as in fewer birds can be counted on to produce a 20% surplus. Or the more ducks we want, the fewer we can kill – a conclusion reached with the usual and appropriate number of mathematical calculations, equations and bell curves, explained in the most official bio-speak.

A number of remarkable ideas are at work here: First, the logic falls apart unless we view kill as uniformly additive at the higher levels of population. Yet, higher levels of population presumably mean more breeders and more production rather than less. It should be a lot easier for a 12 million bird population, plus offspring, to support a harvest of 1.2; than for a 5.9 million bird population, plus offspring, to support the same harvest on a sustainable basis. The authors argue for the opposite conclusion – leading to the second remarkable idea: nest density limitations and other factors impose an absolute ceiling on productivity with a concomitant and absolute limit on population. As you approach that limit, you can’t kill any of the birds if you seek to hold the population at that level. And this model applies across the board, without exception, because the algebra and the bell graph so ordain. Thus, the model becomes reality – and reality becomes irrelevant.

I mean these learned men no disrespect, but I have lived long enough to know that the world does not conform to the construct of their (or anyone else’s) beautiful formulae and symmetrical bell graph. The natural world generates far too many random and unpredictable events for such perfection ever to take hold, except perhaps in the field of astrophysics or the study of quarks.

My home territory in California’s Central Valley provides a crude laboratory to test the various premises advanced by the Article and that ricochet around the waterfowl world, an imperfect test tube certainly but one with far fewer variables than the Prairie Pothole Country of the mid-continent. And we can work within the bounds of recent memory.

In 1998, our mallard breeding population count stood at 386,000, slightly above the ten-year average. We had a warm, wet spring with lush grass growth and no serious late flooding to wipe out large swatches of nesting ground. The ducks responded to the favorable conditions with a vengeance. Every wet spot seemed to hold broods with pairs in evidence wherever one looked. When the farmers flooded the rice fields in mid-May, you saw mallards in all the checks as you drove on country roads in rice country – mothers with broods, pairs and small bunches in the sky or scattered about in the fields and drains.

That fall, the regulators gave us a seven-bird limit and a long season with no special restriction on mallards other than a maximum of two hens. In short, you could lawfully kill seven “green” per shoot and the hunting was so good that many often did that year. Far more importantly, the fall and winter sky seethed with life. You could sit in the blind in the pre-dawn dark or in the fog and hear thousands of birds overhead. You could take your pre-dinner cocktail out to a viewing area (or the porch of your hunting shack for those lucky enough to have one) and see thousands of birds silhouetted against the sunset as they flew out to feed.

We have a little house on the property I hunt most often that stands within a few yards of our ponds – and on many pre-hunt nights during that season, the raucous sound of thousands of birds on the water just a stone’s throw from the house was enough to keep even the most jaded awake, anxious for the dawn, like a teenager waiting for that first hunt.

When I hear guys complain that the practice of flooding rice stubble, as a method of disposal through decomposition, has destroyed our hunting by creating impromptu sanctuaries, I like to remind them that we had as many acres of flood decomp ground in ’98-’99 as we have had in every year since. Indeed more in ’98-’99 than in some of the years thereafter. And ’98-’99 was not the first year – a fact to counter the notion that more birds find that ground now with the passage of time. Thus, what was not a problem three years after flood decomp first became widespread in the mid ‘90s somehow became a problem in later years, even though the number of acres devoted to that use did not materially increase.

Flood decomp didn’t ruin the hunting in ’98-’99 for the simple reason that we had a lot of ducks, so many in fact that our ’99 spring mallard breeding count hit 550,000, the highest number in history, a number we achieved despite great hunting and the introduction of the accursed rotoduck in November of ’98.² (Note that if we had 550,000 as our sustainable target population – which it should be – the bell graph in the Article would probably suggest that a closed season should follow because we can’t hit that target unless we kill no ducks).

The conclusion we can draw from ’98-’99 is that when we have strong production, hunter kill probably does not have a pernicious effect on populations. It did not appear to have such effect during ’98-‘99. The years thereafter suggest that when BPoP and production are both average, hunter kill does affect our mallard populations, with the impact increasing as populations decline.³

The conditions this spring provide a remarkable opportunity to test the experience of ’98-’99, for our weather has been similar – warm and wet with rich grass growth. Spring mallard breeding counts came in at slightly above 320,000, below the long-term average but representing a 21% increase over last year.⁴ But we have some evidence of unusually strong production in certain areas, anecdotal though it may be. For example, a farmer I know – who is a heavy supporter of an egg rescue station⁵ – picked up 1,049 eggs while harvesting a 220-acre wheat field. Although he harvested with great care, he probably missed some nests and destroyed a few eggs. If you do the math, you will come up with a probable nest density far greater than any biologist would postulate by several orders of magnitude – yet there it was, an actual count by a hardheaded man of the land, not prone to exaggerate.

Aberration, or mere symptom of a bountiful spring? Could we duplicate that condition with carefully managed brood lands? Stated another way, is it possible that random circumstance can dramatically alter production from the same patch of habitat, creating wide variation from year to year? Who knows? The Article’s immutable bell graph makes no allowance for such phenomenon or even the possibility of them.

The California Waterfowl Association’s Mallard Legacy Program is based on the premise that if we create good brood habitat, the birds will use it – a “field of dreams” approach. Build it and they will come. We can create substantial acreage of good habitat even in dry years through irrigation. We can encourage the wheat farmers to harvest with waterfowl in mind, waiting a little longer and doing their best to salvage the eggs that the harvester would otherwise destroy. As the example cited above illustrates, mallard hens often prefer wheat fields to wild grasslands – and make strong production effort in some years while letting other springs pass with almost no effort at all – for reasons we cannot fathom. The birds perversely refuse to return the questionnaires.

What if the birds respond to the weather and not the condition of the breeding ground? Some scientists believe that a certain segment of the flight migrates in response to solar factors – the shortening or lengthening of daylight hours – rather than to temperature, storm conditions or the dwindling of food supplies. Could it be that the nesting urge operates similarly, responding only to wet and warm conditions, ignoring good brood habitat in years when cold or dry weather prevails? Personally, I hope not. I would like to see the Mallard Legacy Program and other habitat programs like it succeed, most particularly by shoring up the populations when they would otherwise decline. That’s when kill is probably most additive. Reducing the downturns (and cutting harvest in those years) is what we most need if we are ever to stabilize the populations at a higher level, a level where we won’t be compelled to consider a population below the ten-year average a decent level, an acceptable level.

We won’t know the answer to this one in California until we have created more brood habitat that we can irrigate and see how it functions in dry, cool springs. Until then (and maybe beyond), we live with uncertainty, working with what we know for sure and hopefully respecting what we do not.

The situation reminds me of the muskrat holes along the margins of a wonderful meadow trout stream in southern Oregon where I am privileged to spend a few cherished days each summer. You can see those muskrat holes. You can assess their sizes in two dimensions. But until you step into them, you have no idea whether any particular one represents a bottomless, boot-sucking, slime conduit to the center of the earth that will clutch you with the tenacity of a pit bull, or simply a minor depression of no consequence.

With that uncertainty in mind, and prompted by the teachings of unpleasant experience, the wiser person treats each muskrat hole with the wariness that the worst of them deserves. Ambrose Bierce was right on the money when he defined “experience” as what you got when you were expecting something else. Hence cold respect for unwanted and unforeseeable contingency should be the order of the day. A sound rule in the presence of unknown variables of all sorts, I submit. Unfortunately, it is a concept that our biologists, with their mathematical formulae and extrapolations of fixed rules from a few repetitions of otherwise random phenomenon, tend to deny – as the Article so perfectly illustrates.

The natural world remains stubbornly ambiguous, unheroic, unwilling to play by our rules or give in to our quest for certainty. The real disconnect here is the unwillingness of those who claim to be the informed translators of nature’s message to deal fairly with those instances where reality diverges from their translation. The word is not the thing. It is but a symbol for the thing. We do not eat the menu – we eat the meal. By the same token, we do not scan the sky looking for bell curves. We look for ducks. Those who cannot distinguish between reality and their dream of an ordered fantasy are doomed to step into one of those serious muskrat holes and struggle to emerge, liberally slimed with malodorous mud.

There is indeed a disconnect between those who deal with habitat as though harvest had no impact on populations, and those who focus solely on harvest, as though habitat and its output were a constant. But the connection – the inter-relationship between the two – varies with circumstance, a fluid interaction in which many random forces intervene. Failure to acknowledge that and show it the deference it deserves may be the greatest disconnect of all.

In the meantime, we do what we can within the limits of our vision and hope for the best. The Mallard Legacy Program is one of those projects that could produce much good – and has almost no pernicious potential, even if it proves to be a bust in the years when we need it most. It may not work as we might hope – but it is more than worth the effort.

What better judgment can we pronounce with certainty about anything in this field?

1 Michael C. Runge of USGS; Fred A. Johnson of the Service’s Division of Migratory Bird Management; Michael G. Anderson of the Institute for Wetland and Waterfowl Research, DU Canada; Mark Koneff of the Service’s Division of Bird Habitat Conservation; Eric T. Reed of Environment Canada, Migratory Birds Conservation Division; Seth Mott of the Services Division of Bird Habitat Conservation.

2 Rotos did not come into widespread use until the following year as the first manufacturers had limited capacity and the strength of the demand caught them totally by surprise.

3 In 2002, CWA recommended and our Commission adopted a shorter season and lower daily bag than the Service allowed, a cutback of roughly 25%. The President of CWA said that a 25% cutback was chosen because something of that magnitude should have an effect on the BPOP the following spring – if hunter kill affected populations. Sure enough, the spring mallard BPOP count the following spring rose roughly 25% after several years of decline. Both CWA and the Commission took a lot of heat for the decision to undertake that cutback. As a result, the move has not been repeated and no one likes to talk about it any more (except, of course, we at Madduck).

4 The counts are subject to a statistical error factor as high as 20%, so the numbers should be taken as indicators but not necessarily the precise barometer that the use of mathematics normally suggests. I frankly expected the mallard BPOP to decline again, continuing the trend of previous years; and confidently predicted as much before our Commission in August of 2004 and in these pieces. A number of highly placed individuals shared that concern at the time. Wet weather here coupled with dry, cold weather in the northwest could have pushed more birds into California – and prime nesting conditions could have bumped up the BPOP. The conservative approach assumes that any shift of roughly 20% or less likely represents “no change.”

5 Egg rescue stations receive eggs from nests that would otherwise be destroyed by spring farming activity, incubate and hatch the ducklings, raise and release them to carefully selected locations at five weeks of age. All the birds are banded and ban returns testify to the fact that a large percentage of the birds survive and quickly become part of the wild flight, some having been recovered as far away as Northern Alberta. On last year’s opening, I took an egg station greenhead that had been banded four years earlier. With new stations being added, increased awareness of and participation in the program, I believe we will soon see years in which 40,000 or more birds will be added to the flight in this fashion.