I never used to pay much attention to regulatory policy and wetlands management issues on a scale that transcended the small properties for which I was responsible or where I hunted. I took the regulators at their word when they announced the seasons and bag limits each year, never questioning their methodology.

I never became involved in association matters aside from making annual contributions. I read the magazines on occasion – but never have gone to the dinners or the various marsh day events, never wrote letters to the various magazine editors or took an active part in promoting the aspirations of nominees for the various offices. The possibility of winning a shotgun I don’t need, or a boat I won’t use doesn’t engender in me an irresistible urge to participate in a gathering of hunters, to eat and drink too much in a ceremony of happy talk and truth embellishment where such items (and others) are to be raffled off.

I know, hunt and am friends with some who participate actively in such affairs, but the affairs themselves hold no interest for me. This is not intended as a judgment – but merely a statement of personal choice, based on the role that waterfowling plays in my life.

My law practice requires that I deal with bureaucracy, the political process and the court system on a regular basis, usually in matters of controversy, replete with the high-pitched tension of an adversarial atmosphere. The last thing I need is more of the same for fun – more of the same in a recreational pursuit I love for the precise reason that it provides a total escape from the other. And a total escape from the sorts of contention, controversy and political infighting that seem to be inevitable byproducts of any human organization.

As for wetlands management matters, I managed my own, using common sense, experience and observation as guides. I read few books and treatises on the subject, although I took every opportunity to pick the brains of professionals I encountered, the muddy-boots mosquito-bitten variety, who spent most of their time in various local marshes and had produced the results I sought for my own small property.

When things went well or badly I knew who to praise or blame. I confronted the responsible party every morning when I looked in the mirror. Above all, I cherished the experience of the winter waterfowl marsh. I aspired to the skills of waterfowling as a high art and respected the men who possessed and valued those skills.

When the spinning wing decoy emerged from the devil’s workshop and polluted the marsh in November of 1998 – and along with it, the mentality and ethical balance of too many waterfowlers – it blasted me out my isolated, insulated, close-to-the-ground complacency. It was no longer enough merely to spurn use of the devices on a purely personal level. If one cared about our birds, our heritage, our sport, then the time had come to get active. To get active meant getting informed, questioning what one had accepted without much question in the past. I quickly discovered what I perceived to be serious flaws in the thinking on which so much of the regulation and management of our sport is based.

I had never realized, for example, that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service saw its role in terms of maximizing kill rather than maximizing populations, with kill being only a byproduct, a secondary effect of that goal. I had never realized the extent to which that same mindset prevailed among many waterfowl associations, driven by the bureaucratic imperative of preserving and nurturing the bureaucracy itself with the mission becoming secondary. Increasing membership, sponsorship and contributions takes precedence, even if it requires painting a picture more suited to salesmanship than faithful reporting. It takes a tough-minded, dedicated association leadership to avoid succumbing to that persistent current. Sooner or later, those types of leaders tend to get circumvented -- like a rock in a river that erosion ultimately overpowers – unless they are truly strong.

In any case, “getting active” has included writing the forty or so pieces that have appeared on Madduck, among other things. It has also included a continuing investigation into what is really happening in our world, a continuing quest for answers. And what I am finding is that there seem to be almost no true answers – only opinion based on fragments of data that support the conclusions based upon them only precariously, if at all.

Case in point: Since my awakening, I have become acquainted with a man highly placed in the waterfowl section of our California Department of Fish and Game. I respect him as a dedicated, hard-working, honest individual who does a good job – although he tends to see himself as a servant of that segment of the public who wish to kill as many ducks as possible rather than as a steward of the resource.

I spoke to him a few weeks ago to get his take on the latest data, winter counts, prognosis on local nesting conditions, etc. During the course of our conversation, I asked him why he thought that our hunting had declined so drastically over the last three seasons, beginning with 2001-02. He answered without hesitation: “Decomp water. We’ve got 600,000 acres of decomp water that isn’t hunted and the birds are rafted up on it. They get good feed there and have no reason to move around, even on windy and stormy days. That’s why so many guys are complaining that they aren’t seeing birds even when conditions are perfect. We still have the birds. That’s where they are.”

You can’t critique this statement without some background.

In the late ‘80s or early ‘90s, air quality rules forced California rice farmers to dispose of their straw by means other than burning, the traditional method. The rule was prompted by complaints from the growing populations in rural areas that straw and stubble fires fouled the Valley air so badly during September and October that it was hard to see or breathe on many days. So with much angst and gnashing of teeth, and pressured by the law, the rice farming community cast about for alternative stubble disposal techniques. According to conventional thought, they could not just plow the stuff into the ground without risking disease and root rot that would destroy the crop in the ensuing years.

Chopping and rolling the straw, followed by flooding the fields became one of the accepted alternatives. Land treated in this fashion is known as “decomp ground,” or “decomp water” or “rice-rot ground or water” because the process decomposes the straw through bacterial action. Ground flooded for decomp becomes wetland attractive to waterfowl in the same fashion that any other flooded rice fields are attractive – more attractive in some locations than others for reasons that only the birds know.

Those who are still with me are probably asking: “So what?” For starters, and contrary to my DFG friend’s statement, there have rarely been 600,000 acres farmed to rice in California in the last 20 years. Last year, for example, official sources pegged the number at 485,000 acres. More significant for my thesis, the number varies from year to year but was actually higher during several years in the ‘90s, including years when we had great hunting.

Second, only about half of rice acreage becomes decomp water. At $30 to $50 per acre to employ the decomp technique, farmers who farm in floodplain areas, for example, would prefer to wait and see if floodwaters will carry off their straw – at a cost of $0 per acre. Burning is still allowed under limited circumstances and on limited acreage. That also costs next to nothing. Other farmers can’t use the decomp technique because they can’t get water at the critical time of year. So the decomp acreage is far lower than my DFG friend thinks it is. But what is more important, it has not increased significantly, if at all, since the mid to late 90s when we had great hunting. These are facts, numbers readily available from public sources.

Third, the decomp technique works best when the stubble and straw is flooded while the weather remains warm enough to promote maximum bacterial action. For that reason, farmers who use the technique want to flood early. Anything after November 10 risks being too late. But early flooding increases the risk that the waste grain in the fields will germinate or ferment. That happens when the water reaches 60 degrees or higher. The scientists tell us that germinated or fermented seed has little food value for waterfowl and does not attract them. Thus, decomp water may have less food value than is commonly thought to be the case.

And this leads to a related variable -- the entire issue of waste grain as opposed to seed loadings on land left fallow and managed as habitat.

“Waste grain” consists of the rice kernels that the harvester misses or that blow out the back with the chaff instead of falling into the bin with the harvest. The quantity of waste grain left behind in each case and in each field depends upon a number of factors including the state of the crop when harvested (whether standing or matted down by wind or rain) and the quality of the harvesting equipment. The then manager of the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge Complex told me in the 1991 that rice farmers left between 800 and 1,000 pounds per acre in the fields, whereas lands managed for watergrass and smartweed produced 1,100 to 1,300 pounds of seed per acre. On these numbers, he argued that conversion of rice ground to managed, seasonal wetlands enhanced the value of those lands for waterfowl. By the mid-90s, studies suggested that waste grain was far lower (250 to 400 pounds per acre) and wild seed loadings far higher (1,500 to 1,800 pounds per acre).

Since then, improvement in harvesting techniques has supposedly reduced waste grain in harvested rice fields to a negligible number1. Thus, if we are focusing on seed loadings, decomp water has far less value as feeding ground than “natural” habitats – and that value has declined since the late 90s when we had great hunting, even though we are now being told that a higher percentage of the birds use the decomp water than did during those banner years.

So. Is my DFG friend wrong? If decomp water is such an overwhelming factor today, why was it insignificant in the late 90s when we had as much of it and it contained several times the grain seed food value per acre that it contains today? Certainly he is wrong on his numbers – but I’m not so sure that he is totally wrong on his main thesis.

It may be anecdotal, but the birds do tend to raft up on certain patches of decomp water that are not hunted. They do the same on seasonal wetlands managed as habitat. I know of and have access to (for observations purposes only) certain places where the waterfowl concentrations last far longer than the seed loadings could possibly sustain. Stated another way, the birds hang around long after the ground in question has been “fed off.” Perhaps, they are getting something other than seed that the ground is generating. Perhaps they stay only because they are not hunted or harassed on those particular fields.

On the latter point, the Service maintains a 900-acre sanctuary in the middle of a large holding in the northern part of the Sacramento Valley. When the birds are in, no one is allowed to venture on that place except in the case of emergency. During the summer, the Service does virtually nothing to encourage the growth of feed – and the parcel looks like a wasteland, fit only for jackrabbits. When flooded during the fall and winter – particularly during the hunting season – there is no room for another duck there during daylight hours. The sights and sounds quicken the blood and warm the heart. About an hour after sunset, the birds leave, en masse, as though someone had blown a bugle, to return in the pre-dawn hours, a strategy perfectly timed to avoid all exposure to guns other than those wielded by poachers who specialize in night time “drags.”

Time to get to the point – and the point is the troubling preponderance of unanswered questions. Assuming that the acreage of decomp water has not materially changed since the late 90s when we had great hunting (a point that can be proved empirically), is a larger percentage of our flight now using that ground as my DFG friend implicitly suggests? If so, why? What caused this shift? Is it a genetically induced trend that we have created by killing off the birds that are not imprinted on such lands, or is it simply the fact that it takes several years for birds to find and become habituated to a parcel congenial to their interests? Do the birds seek sanctuary or feed on such ground? If the latter what are they getting, since reduced seed loadings could not sustain some of the concentrations that we have seen?

We currently face a strong push to open sanctuary ground to periodic hunting to satisfy those who put hunting ahead of stewardship. How can we do that without knowing whether undisturbed sanctuary ground is critical to the well being of the flight? If it is, how much do we need, what features should it have and how should it be distributed geographically? What special qualities, if any, should we provide to meet the differing needs of the various species? Is it enough to rely solely on the private sanctuaries provided by a few wealthy landowners for their own hunting and bird watching enjoyment – or do we need more, and more land under public control?

How can we manage our waterfowl prudently in this state (or any state, for that matter) without answers to these questions? I submit that most of the answers lie beyond practical reach. Indeed, how would one begin to structure a scientific study that might shed light on even a few of them, given the number of uncontrollable variables involved and the difficulty of establishing a base case?

In short, we wallow in a quagmire of uncertainty.. The lack of knowledge tells us to focus on what we know and, above all, exercise caution. It tells us to be conservative, to protect our heritage and even revel in the mystery of it – as our forebears 20,000 years ago reveled in the mysteries of the nature they depended upon for sustenance and celebrated in their cave paintings and other art.

Ignorance is bad enough. But it can be handled when we grant it the cold respect it deserves, acknowledging the limits of our knowledge. The ship captain attempting to navigate a reef-strewn channel in the fog knows to proceed slowly. Soldiers traversing an unmarked minefield do the same. Ignorance compounded by the arrogance of assumed knowledge represents a far more destructive condition. History is filled with tales of catastrophe brought about by those who didn’t know -- and were complacent in the belief that they did.

It is certainly appropriate to look to our scientists to provide the answers they can actually obtain, based on solid analysis. But they owe us a duty of candor in acknowledging the questions that lie beyond the reach of scientific proof. And we owe ourselves and the birds an obligation to question them without mercy.

One of the reasons I prefer well-founded, anecdotal evidence over some of the stuff that masquerades as science in waterfowl matters is that the former is real – whereas the latter often is not. The more questions you ask, the clearer that truth becomes. The deeper you go, the darker it gets. Better to acknowledge the irreducible uncertainties and act with caution than to plunge headlong over the cliff of disaster, following false prophets who are often in error, but never in doubt.

1 Waste grain and wild seed will vary dramatically depending upon conditions and are inherently hard to calculate accurately in any case. So take these numbers with an appropriate dose of salt. I repeat them because they are the best we’ve got, insofar as I have been able to learn.