From coast to coast this past season, wildfowlers were asking one another the same question: “Where are the ducks?” Most of us spent our mornings in the marsh scanning empty skies. A few of us had at least one good day, either due to rare weather or the fact that some waterfowl species, other than most ducks, remain relatively un-hunted and, therefore, reasonably abundant.

In my own case, the greatest snowstorm in half a century on Virginia’s Eastern Shore provided an outstanding hunt on the morning before the storm -- seeing lots of birds and killing a few. I shot on neighbor Tyler Nickel’s farm. We killed none of the paired black ducks that came to us that day because black ducks are in trouble. Biologist Gary Costanzo estimates Virginia’s resident breeding population has fallen at least 40 percent over the past 10 years. Although by the end of January most of the black ducks we see in the mid-Atlantic are Canadian migrants, we didn’t want to contribute to the decline of an overall dwindling species.

Instead, we focused on drake mallards and, in the case of the younger, keener-eyed Tyler, drake green-winged teal. Despite the approaching storm, the mallards circled warily while we did our best to sweet-talk them down with our calls.

That hunt was on the next-to-last day of the season, and its memory layers over many earlier, disappointing outings, including those on my private pond that is lightly gunned.. But the banner hunt did nothing to disguise the fact that duck hunting today is mostly a matter of scavenging in the ruins of a once great tradition. I began duck-hunting in the late 1940s and early ‘50s, when there were not only millions more birds of most species, but when the season never ran past the first week of January because biologists understood that their marker-species, the mallard, is paired for breeding by then. Since drakes always follow the hens they’ve bonded with, the females are always the first birds to come into the decoys and take the brunt of January shooting.

Of course, biologists resist any numbers that don’t confirm computer-derived “truths”. They live in a world of virtual wildfowl which has little connection to the real world of birds. The biocrats are more concerned with rebuilding the numbers of duck hunters for the sake of license and duck stamp sales than with rebuilding our depleted flocks. Whereas Ducks Unlimited and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service once had an adversarial relationship that kept the lid on overkill, starting in the 1970s the two agencies’ objectives merged, so that today they share the goal of maximizing hunting days, bag limits and the kill.

Their principal tool in this endeavor is the computer. In You Are Not A Gadget, Jaron Lanier (the man who popularized the expression “virtual reality”) warns of precisely the kind of disconnect we have between what the wildfowler experiences and what the biocrat’s computer imagines. Lanier writes that “people degrade themselves all the time in order to make machines seem smart. Before the 2008 stock-market crash, bankers believed in supposedly intelligent algorithms that could calculate credit risks before the bank makes bad loans; we ask teachers to teach to standardized tests so a student will look good to an algorithm. We have repeatedly demonstrated our species’ bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology good, but every manifestation of intelligence in a machine is ambiguous.”

Although the duck season is over, I’ve witnessed further proof of the managers’ inability to connect with the real world. The oxymoronically named Conservation Order Season allows licensed shooters to slaughter snow geese until March 27 or until the geese normally leave Virginia about March 1. It’s been a tough winter for the birds, and when I drive my truck the four-tenths of a mile that runs from my home through a field of soybean stubble to the county road, the snow geese walk warily away, lacking the energy they had a month ago to fly. Young shooters educated by the hunting pornographers and marketers of the outdoor channels cruise local roads in pickup trucks and blaze away at any standing birds they think are in range. They don’t stop to pick up the dead geese or kill cripples, because they’re more afraid of getting caught for breaking the county law against shooting from the road than they are of Uncle Sam’s mandate to make every effort to retrieve all the birds you shoot. After all, it’s Uncle Sam who has waived the rules against using an unplugged gun, electronic calls, and shooting after sunset. He has sent a clear message that snow geese are targets for killing by most any means possible, and who bothers to pick up a species reduced to the status of a target? We don’t do it with clay pigeons; why would we want to jeopardize our reputations by retrieving and eating “sky carp,” a.k.a., snow geese?

As for the regulation that “all hunters who plan to participate [in the Conservation Order Season] must register online or by phone, obtain a harvest report form prior to hunting, and return the report form back to the department within two weeks following the close of the season,” that is treated as a joke. Young shooters think that killing snow geese is mainly a matter of keeping a loaded gun in the truck and blasting away as opportunity allows. If Uncle Sam is really serious about getting boys to slaughter snow geese, he can’t be equally serious about doing all that paperwork.

Some conscientious hunters will file reports, and these reports will form the distorted basis of next year’s hunting regulations. But these few will have little bearing on what really happens in the Eastern Shore counties where Virginia’s flocks of wintering snow geese congregate. Jaron Lanier regards such faulty figuring as “cloud based.” Although biocrats mock statistics gathered in the days before computers, Lanier reminds us that “no one in the pre-digital-cloud era had the mental capacity to lie to himself in the way we routinely are able to now. The limitations of organic human memory and calculations put a cap on the intricacies of self-delusion.”

Yet this is only half the tragedy of modern wildfowling. While biocrats exhibit little grasp of reality, they have even less understanding of the traditions that made wildfowling a sport. My only solace is that misery loves company. This year I have plenty of company, both locally and in distant marshes. My friend and colleague Worth Mathewson, who does most of his duck hunting across the continent in Oregon, rated his Pacific Flyway season as the “worst in memory,” the same words I use to describe my season in the Atlantic Flyway.