At 4:30 in the morning, December of 1958, my hunting partner Chip Garrigher and I had stopped at Karie’s Koastside Kafe for a cup of coffee before tackling Pescadero Marsh, a salt marsh, lagoon and estuary on the Pacific Coast, across the coast mountains from San Jose, roughly forty miles south of San Francisco, about an hour’s drive from our homes. We didn’t have time that morning to go further afield – and with a big winter storm on the horizon during duck season, we had to go somewhere to avoid bouts of severe depression. What, after all, could be worse for an avid duck hunter than sitting at home during the height of the season, studying or doing chores, with sheets of rain driving against the window on the wings of a honking wind?

Karie’s was one of those old style rural establishments that celebrates deep fried food, pies with over thick crust and deferred maintenance, where the surly, high-mileage graveyard shift waitress bantered with all the regulars – and doled out the bilge water coffee with a cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth. The window sills at Karie’s served as the final resting place for dozens of deceased flies whose carcasses would have remained undisturbed indefinitely were it not for the vagrant air currents admitted by cracked windows.

Garrigher was a recreational disputant who wasn’t happy unless he was debating about something. I’m confident that he would have argued regularly with telephone answering machines if they had been invented in those days. The subject for that morning was to identify – and argue about – the location of the worst, most cloying and impassable boot-sucking slime that we had tackled in our hunting forays over the last two seasons. We had encountered a number of prime candidates for that dubious accolade, from the fine pumice at the bottom of the drains above Agency Lake in Oregon through the mudflats around San Francisco and San Pablo Bays to the bottomless alkali silt on the east side of the main drain at Mendota Refuge, with many other candidates in between.

My heart wasn’t in the discussion. The thought of how hard we worked to get into spots where there often weren’t any birds was something I saw no need to dwell on. And we faced an immediate problem that morning – for several formidable obstacles ringed the honeyhole at Pescadero. We would be struggling the five hundred yards out to it in the face of a robust Pacific gale with nothing between us and 6000 miles of open storm-tossed ocean but a line of low sand dunes, with the wind and rain directly in our face.

We were “public land” hunters in those days. (I considered public land to include refuges, the margins of navigable waters, rivers suitable for drifting, lakes in National Forests – and any place to which a hunter could gain lawful access with a payment no greater than the price of a general admission ticket to a Major League baseball game, plus parking, but excluding the Polish hotdog, garlic fries and beer). We applied for draws at the state and federal refuges – as many as the rules allowed – staggering dates so that Garrigher would be my guest on my draw, and I his on his. But even when we had no draw, we always found someplace to go, spending all night in sweat lines on several occasions. We used truck tire inner tubes with camouflage cloth as sleds for gear, flotation devices for getting across otherwise impassable drains and even blinds from time to time. We had thirty battered decoys between us that we carried in burlap sacks – those old, hard plastic Victors that looked like no duck that had ever lived, with mallard and pintail colors incongruously painted on the same improbable mold.

Bad as it was, we lingered over that coffee a bit too long and felt rushed when we pulled into the turnout off the dirt road that served as our jumping off point. The access belonged to a local artichoke farmer who charged $5 for the use of it on a daily basis, $50 for the season. Garrigher and I were day players. $50 was a little steep for married students. Besides, we had learned the hard way that Pescadero was a lot of work -- and worth the effort perhaps three times a season, if that. On most days, ruddy ducks and buffleheads were the only birds in the marsh. Those ducks made such heavy weather getting airborne that you mostly shot them while they were running across the surface – and then you had a virtually unpickable and inedible duck on your hands. The whole deal ranked near the bottom on the aesthetic scale of waterfowling.

The first few drops of rain began to fall on a rising wind while we were suiting up. No light tinged the eastern horizon when we set off. Wiser men might have waited for more light – but we wanted to be in position at legal shooting time even though the storm clouds on the ridges to the east would probably make it too dark to shoot until some time thereafter.

Feeling our way, we worked through the first barriers – blackberry thickets that would have done justice to the barbed wire used to defend the trenches on the Western Front during World War I. (For five bucks, “access” to the edge of the marsh was all you got, with absolutely no help whatever thereafter, despite the farmer’s equipment parked nearby that would have easily cut a path through those blackberries). Using our tubes, we managed to get across the first tidewater drainage channel and slog through the pickleweed on the other side. That took us to the edge of a shallow finger of lagoon, about fifty feet wide.

I thought about using the tube like a boat again, as we had done to cross the tidal channel. But that took time, to unload the packs and get the gear properly arranged – and was slow going when pushing into a strong wind. We chose haste over caution. The water was shallow, the bottom seemed relatively firm and a fever of anticipation gripped us – a form of temporary insanity, one might say.

No more than ten feet out from the edge, I stepped off firm footing into bottomless mud, pulled out of my boot in the effort to get free and pitched face forward into about ten inches of brackish water, my gun pinned underneath me with a bag of decoys and other gear on my back. Water invaded my waders and every part of my clothing, interior and exterior. Unable to gain any kind of purchase on the soft bottom, I was well and truly stuck, like a beached whale on a dark strand. My hands and arms pushed down into that soft goo and found nothing solid to grab hold of or push off of.

As soon as Garrigher saw that I could raise my head above water and was not in danger of anything worse than embarrassment, he gave in to a totally classless ceremony of mirth at my expense, hooting and hollering like an idiot. It took him a few moments to recall that I had the car keys somewhere in a submerged pocket deep within my inundated waders. He could help me, stay there for the long term or walk home. After a short pause to gain a grip on hilarity and ponder the options, he moved forward to help – and stepped into the same quagmire with precisely the same result.

It took us a full twenty minutes to maneuver out of that slime pit, using the tubes for leverage. We would have been totally screwed without them. Gray light suffused the marsh by the time we had achieved a partially reorganized state, with the storm increasing in intensity all the while. We could dimly make out a few small flights of pintail working over the honeyhole, now roughly two hundred yards away. Although we were wet to the bone, the temperature was only in the 50s and we were heavily layered, with a good outer coating of mud. With good birds in the air, it didn’t feel all that cold, despite our discomfort. Being old style Remington pumps that could stand up to almost any conceivable abuse, our guns still seemed functional – so we pushed on.

No need to prolong this tale. The morning proved a disappointment. After two and half hours crouched in awkward and uncomfortable postures beside the honeyhole, a 10-acre open water bay off a larger tidal lagoon, we had five drake pintail. We had expected better. (With a seven-bird daily bag limit, we could have taken fourteen). Normally, a storm such as this would have brought wave after wave of pintail over the hills from the southern end of San Francisco Bay, if the birds were there. On prior occasions, we had seen pintail in the thousands materializing in the gray skies above the ridge defining the northern edge of the Pescadero marsh, swinging along the edge of the eucalyptus grove on the face of the ridge to come over the marsh 20 yards high, filling the air with the rush of their wings and their distinctive whistling call, a call so haunting and evocative that I hear it in my daydreams all year ‘round, even today. We had seen thousands of pintail on the Milpitas mudflats during a foray after class earlier in the week – so we had had the highest of high hopes for this particular storm. But after two hours of slow action followed by a 30 minute spell of driving rain and ferocious wind with nothing overhead but seagulls, we packed up and struggled out of there.

It took a full half hour at the car to strip out of soaked, mud impregnated clothing and secure our battered gear on top of the car, all in heavy seething rain. Anything loose tried to take wing on the wind. It was an epic struggle. When we finally finished and got into the car to leave, I was preoccupied with the effort to get my fingers to function sufficiently to put the key in the ignition. A long, creative string of obscenities, uttered by Garrigher in a voice filled with anguish, broke my concentration. Looking up, I followed his gaze.

The storm sky had lifted slightly, just enough so that we had a clear view of the honeyhole, obscured by scud and rain up to that moment. A veritable funnel cloud of pintail gyrated over it. Thousands of birds had already alighted on the pond, their dark heads and white bodies clearly visible. Thousands more poured over the ridge, moving gracefully along the face of the eucalyptus grove before turning for final approach. We looked at each other in dismay. Going back was out of the question. We could never have gotten our gear back on in its current condition – and we didn’t have the time, even if we had had the energy. Besides, the flight might have ended before we could have gotten it done.

Without saying a word, I started the car and we pulled out of there. Neither of us glanced back as we turned onto the County road that led to the state highway.1

What’s the point?

From many years of hard experience, I understand public land and marginal land hunting. I believe that it takes skill, energy, perseverance, creativity and no small amount of cunning to be successful at it. Hunters who succeed at it on a regular basis are probably the best pure waterfowlers among us. It is an exercise in which the gullible have no hope. Above all else, the successful public land hunter is a hard-eyed realist with an acute BS sniffer when it comes to marshcraft and all matters that pertain to the hunt.

That being the case, why is that segment of the hunting fraternity so resistant to the idea that we cannot restore our flights without restraint? Why is that segment of the hunting fraternity most vocal in its support for long seasons, late seasons and high bag limits, even as the populations and the quality of our hunting experience declines?

After all, when the flight thins out, whose hunting suffers? That of the guys who own half million dollar memberships in the best clubs, the guys who own the best ground, the guys who can spend millions creating attractive wetlands – or the hunting of the public and marginal land hunters? Not a trick question. And you all know the answer.

From experience, from reading their websites and the e-mails we get at Madduck, it is obvious that the public land hunters employ skepticism in a highly selective fashion. If someone whose credibility has not been firmly established tells them a tale that directly pertains to tomorrow’s hunt (as in: “Hey Bubba, you shoulda seen the mallards fogging into that second pond north of Parking Lot A last night”), they figure that it’s deliberate misinformation – a story intended to entice them away from the best area. Yet, when someone, supposedly in authority, tells them, without proof of any kind or the ability to provide proof, that hunter kill doesn’t affect the populations, they go for it without question; despite substantial evidence and dismal recent experience to the contrary.2

Public land hunters are the hunters who have the most to gain through restoration of the conditions we experienced during the period 1997-2000. We at Madduck share such a restoration as our goal, and would view a return of those conditions as strong evidence of management success, in contrast with the losing streak our managers have currently amassed -- and to which they seem dedicated for the future.

So here’s a challenge for all you guys who could have given my partner Chip a good and thoroughly field-researched argument as to the location of the worst, boot-sucking mud pit in creation, among all the likely public access ground candidates. With the skies of 1997-2000 still fresh in the hard-drive of retrievable memory, how would you restore those conditions without restoring the numbers that created them? And if we need those numbers, how can we achieve them while killing the breeders it will take to produce them?

Isn’t it long past time for you to start demanding answers to those questions from your “leaders” – and passing their responses through the same filter of skepticism you would a apply to that yayhoo trying to get you to bite on the fog of mallards in the second pond north of Parking Lot A?

Believe it or not, we want what you want.

1 Pescadero Marsh is part of the California State Park system today. Hunting is not allowed. A conservation group has created a few trails and bird watching stations. Aside from those improvements, the Marsh remains pretty much as it was in 1958. Great Blue Herons have established a major rookery in the eucalyptus grove on the ridge that defines the Marsh on the north. When I walk there occasionally in the winter and spring, I see a few mallard, spoonbill and teal – but no pintail. Ruddies and bufflehead remain abundant. The farmer who thought he owned the Marsh (being largely tidewater, it probably belonged to the State) and who sold us access, died many years ago. I lost track of Chip when he took a job on the East Coast after graduation.

2 This may be an easier issue to frame for Californians interested in our mallards, for they are a relatively finite population more or less under our control. Consider: our breeding counts run roughly 375,000 on average. (The count was considerably lower this year, and was well above 500,000 in ’99). We kill roughly 300,000 every season. The compensatory kill theorists would have you believe that knocking off a number equal to 80% of our entire breeding population has no impact on production. The only way that such an outlandish proposition could have any validity at all is if we had insufficient nesting ground to accommodate more breeders. There is absolutely no evidence of that. And if it is true, has CWA suggested that its Mallard Legacy Program to create more breeding habitat should be coupled with restraint to allow our breeding pair populations a breathing space to build up to 1998 type numbers? For more habitat is useless without ducks to breed in it. Maybe you have heard CWA leadership make that point. I have not. Instead the mantra seems to be: “If we create it, they will come . . . out of thin air in an outburst of spontaneous incubation.” Unlimber that BS sniffer, men.