Having hunted many of California’s public waterfowling areas, I should feel all warm and fuzzy now that one of the newest members to my state’s Fish and Game Commission is on record as being concerned about the challenges faced by public area hunters.

In a question and answer feature entitled “Meet Your Commissioner” in California Waterfowl magazine, the bi-monthly publication of the California Waterfowl Association, new commission member Richard Rogers was asked, “Do you believe that spinning wing decoys (SWDs) and other high-technology devices should be legal in the pursuit of fish and game?”

Rogers replied, “I believe in the protection of the resources. If any method, high tech or not, interferes with resource protection then we should not use that method.” And then he waffled, saying, “To pick on a particular method of attraction (other than baiting and the like) seems to me to be beside the point. Getting the birds’ attention is often very difficult for the hunter on public land as opposed to the hunter at a private club. It does not seem particularly fair to advantage those who can afford the cost of a private club by precluding attracting methods that are effective, as are spinning wing decoys. In any event, daily bag limits, hunting times, and season lengths are the ultimate tools for protection of the targeted resources.”

Why, then, as one of the “disadvantaged,” do I feel like I’ve been kicked in the groin? Because once again the misinformed opinions of a disconnected political appointee threaten to keep fair chase and ethical waterfowl hunting covered in the mud that SWDs – and those that support their continued use – have slathered upon them.

Rogers’ disconnection starts with the fact that public waterfowling areas in California are some of the most productive hunting venues in the nation. The intensively managed, high-quality seasonal marshes on areas like Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge in the high desert northeast corner of the state, Delevan NWR and Little Dry Creek State Wildlife Areas (SWA) in the Sacramento Valley, and San Luis NWR and Mendota SWA in the San Joaquin Valley, to name a few, are renowned for drawing myriads of ducks. Indeed, these and the other two dozen or so state and federal managed hunt areas have tens of thousands of acres of huntable, premier habitat that rival those found on the most exclusive and expensive private clubs anywhere in North America!

Public-area hunters are not at the disadvantage Rogers believes, as the birds, most times, are there. Aside from the difficulty of gaining access to some of the more popular areas, the challenges public area hunters face are in dealing with the unscrupulous, unsportsmanlike conduct of some individuals who call themselves hunters and learning the basic craft of hiding from while at the same time enticing the waterfowl within gun range using traditional methods practiced by generations of skilled, successful hunters.

When I first tried my hand at public area hunting some two decades ago (the first fifteen or so years of my waterfowl hunting was on private clubs with my grandfather and family friends) I was delighted to find that most of the state’s public areas were lightly restricted “free roam” areas. For a nominal fee, the state allowed access three days a week to these areas ranging in size from several hundred to several thousand acres and, in effect, said, “There’s the marsh, have at ‘em.” There were few, if any of the established and camouflaged blinds that are commonplace on private clubs. Public area hunters had to figure out how best to conceal themselves with either portable or makeshift blinds; no easy feat, especially in short-cover habitats like the pickleweed on Grizzly Island SWA or alkali bulrush at Lower Klamath NWR.

Yet I – and hundreds of hunters like me – not only accepted this challenge, but embraced it. Our goal was fourfold: 1) to place ourselves, through advance scouting efforts, where the birds wanted to be; 2) conceal ourselves so well that the ducks would not know we were there; 3) to place our decoys and make our calls in such a way as to create a welcoming illusion and 4) to time our shooting to that precise moment when the birds were perfectly positioned for clean kills and easy retrieves.

Those that were willing to accept the challenge eventually – after much effort, through trial and error, coupled with success and failure – excelled at the art and science of public area waterfowl hunting. We found the public areas were more than capable of offering world-class duck hunting for pennies on the dollar.

While an analysis of the daily bag ratio on these areas will show they still provide plenty of birds per hunter, it’s what the numbers don’t show that is disheartening. Beginning with the trend towards liberal regulations in the mid-1990’s and gaining rapid momentum with the widespread use of SWDs in 1999, the quality of the hunting experience on California’s public areas has declined dramatically. Armed with SWDs and enticed by liberal limits on mallards, disillusioned hunters from the state’s low priced rice and pasture habitat private clubs – where the beleaguered and bag limit restricted pintail was king – have descended on the public areas in droves.

At first, killing ducks was easy for those who had the SWDs, but eventually rapid proliferation caused the ducks to behave in an altered manner. One veteran public area hunter had this to report: “Almost every refuge hunter now uses SWDs, often several at a time. Birds that show an interest swing from set to set, checking out the spinners. Sooner or later somebody gets greedy or loses patience and takes that 70 yard shot, afraid that the next guy will if he doesn’t.”

He went on, adding, “The tendency to lose patience has been enhanced by the fact that HeviShot can kill at extreme ranges, although like every other load, it is more likely to cripple than kill at the margin. The net result is that SWDs, combined with greater long-range lethality (of HeviShot) …is causing everyone to reach (for higher shots) with more crippling and more frustration.”

And so, like some of his current colleagues, and several of his predecessors, Commissioner Rogers is errant in his judgment of the effect of spinning-wing decoys. SWDs not only have failed in the long run to help the public area hunter, they have diminished the quality of the public land experience by increasing competitiveness, escalating hostile confrontations and nullifying the skills once learned and passed down through generations, thereby turning a day in the marsh into a circus-like event.

Moreover, the reports from around the state of increased crippling rates caused by the escalating use of the devices, along with the market-hyped, sky-blasting ethic associated with newly approved shot alternatives, clearly show that SWDs do, indeed, “interfere with resource protection.”