The 2007-08 season has evolved sufficiently to give the lie to those predictions of a “banner year for waterfowlers,” heralded by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s midsummer population counts and the output of its black box. Midsummer was, this year as in every year, the season of maximum gullibility when hope runs roughshod over the counsels of experience and the cheers of those rendered temporarily insane by anticipation drown out the skeptics. In the era of adaptive harvest management (“AHM”) and its bastard child the “liberal framework,” we should have known better than to expect anything different.

But some genius at the service figured out long ago that long seasons and high bag limits, supported by techno-babble and the trappings of science, would damp down annual episodes of political heat. Can’t blame them really for trying to avoid that heat. If we keep buying their line, despite its proven failures, why should they stop selling?

I am sure that many of you recall the “Peanuts” comic strip. Every year at the start of football season, Lucy promised Charlie Brown that she would hold the football for him to place kick. Every year he believed her – and every year she pulled the ball away at the last second, howling in glee as he kicked at the air and fell on his butt. In some deep recess of the temple where the AHM black box resides, I visualize the priests sharing at least a moment of similar amusement, even as they ponder the subtle changes that will improve the marketability of their tired product for yet another year.

A philosopher once observed that the secret of a happy life lies not in getting what we want, but in wanting what we get. Applying that sensible advice to our current situation mandates that we find happiness in learning to love paper ducks as opposed to those that might actually fly over us in satisfactory numbers. For despite what the authorities tell us, any relationship between the paper version and reality appears random at best, with the former greatly exceeding the latter in number.

This, of course, brings to mind some random and vagrant thoughts.

Why do we bother with limits and seasons in the first place? If we are managing ducks that exist largely on paper, we don’t need gunning regulations. After all, certain European countries have no closed seasons and no bag limits -- to manage their populations of basically no birds. Maybe that’s the direction in which we are headed, maintaining our annual framework ritual to provide employment for those who run it and momentary titillation for those who choose to play the role of Charlie Brown to the regulators’ Lucy. When most of the ducks exist primarily on paper, the figment of a fevered imagination and a pseudo-scientific construct, why concern ourselves with something so irrelevant as a bag limit?

And then we have the goose situation, where the populations have boomed to the point where we celebrate the bounty with spring depredation and population control hunts. Generally ineffective in achieving their object of reducing goose numbers, they provide “hunter opportunity,” employment for guides and similar infusions to various local economies.

Large segments of the Canada goose population gave up on the notion of migration a couple of decades ago and are now regarded as pests by equally large or larger segments of the human population. White-fronts would probably have attained the same low regard but for the obstinacy with which they cling to the migration habit, despite its hazards and heroic futility. You rarely find white-fronts standing around on golf courses leaving copious calling cards while they crop the rough, even though it would probably serve them well and cut down on the stress of long flights over the Gulf of Alaska.

Three decades ago or more, we feared that white-fronts might be doomed as a sporting target, along with the cacklers – small versions of the Canadas – as their populations declined precipitously. Then, a few dedicated men got together and persuaded the powers to restrict the wholesale spring hunting and egg collecting on the Yukon/Kuskokwim Delta nesting grounds in Bethel Township, Alaska. That hunting and egg collection had been justified as essential to native subsistence – essential to preservation of a traditional life-style.

At some point, someone awoke to the fact that every spring saw more than ten thousand “subsistence” hunters in a Township with a total population roughly one-half that number, many of the hunters traveling by private aircraft from Anchorage or the lower 48 to conduct their annual ritual of subsistence. The goose populations responded to the ensuing restrictions by rebounding vigorously – to the end that white-fronts have become plentiful in California’s Central Valley beyond precedent in living memory, to the point where the Oregonians hold a spring depredation hunt to keep down crop damage caused by the birds on their trip north.

This phenomenon holds magnificent irony – for our regulators admit that they have no clear idea how to “manage” goose populations and basically do not attempt to do it. In the meantime, those unmanaged populations explode while the intensely studied and heavily managed duck populations limp along in a ritual of stasis – if you believe the paper counts – or steady decline as to most species if you believe the testimony of your lying eyes. Maybe “non-management” provides the answer to our management shortcomings. Eighth Rule of life: When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

Another issue was illustrated in the most recent issue of California Waterfowl, the official organ of the California Waterfowl Association. It featured an article by CWA President, Bob McLandress, complaining about the fed’s refusal to grant us a flyway specific limit for our pintail. He made the case for an increase in the daily bag limit, based roughly on three arguments: (a) We have had a low limit on pintails for almost 20 years and the population has not increased, suggesting that hunter take does not directly affect this population. (This doesn’t prove that an increase in daily bag wouldn’t further reduce populations – but let’s take the president’s position on this for the sake of analysis, at least as the basis for a conservative experiment – as in a one bird, drakes only addition); (b) We have seen skies filled with pintail in California during the last two or three seasons, reminiscent of the early ‘70s, an observable fact regardless of what the official numbers might purport to tell us. (I agree with this observation, not only from what I have seen personally but from the reports of others who hunt different areas of the state and whose credibility and basis for making a judgment, i.e., field experience, I trust. I also find amusement in the president’ embrace of basically anecdotal evidence, something that he has roundly condemned in the past), and (c) We have higher daily bags on other species with a minor fraction of the continental numbers the pintail population supposedly contains – with no explanation for this disparity that withstands analysis other than “historic” population levels, a measure that becomes increasingly irrelevant with time. (Seems that way to me as well).

The president complains that the federal regulators simply ignore the possibility of a flyway specific approach to a pintail framework despite the evidence and without regard to the benefits that might be attained: (a) more hunter opportunity leading to more incentive and thus more hunters (or at least a decline in the rate of hunter attrition); and (b) more flooding of potential wintering grounds in traditional pintail areas where land managers have given up the practice because a one bird limit rendered it not worth the trouble. (This is the same guy who uses other occasions and subjects to explain poor hunting in recent years by stating that we now have too much flooded wintering ground. Consistency must not be a controlling imperative here).

In the president’s defense, we do have flyway specific frameworks – indeed special management areas within flyways. Why not a flyway specific limit on sprig in response to local conditions, even as an experiment?

McLandress fails to emphasize the point I consider most critical here, despite my agreement with the concept. Recognizing that we have become hooked on a generous daily bag (whether we have enough ducks so that the average guy might hope to shoot a limit one day), and that we might lose significant numbers of hunters without such an appearance of bounty, why not acknowledge another reality and shift some of the pressure off our mallards? The plain fact is that with our dismal local hatch this spring, a seven bird daily bag that could include all mallards made no sense whatsoever. For the feds to set such a number, based on supposed mid-continental population (knowing that most of our mallards have local origins), for our association and state Fish and Game Commission to accept it, represented a true abdication of stewardship responsibilities in my view, utterly spineless and indefensible.

Because the birds will take care of themselves – by rafting up on sanctuary ground and flying only at night – that overgenerous allotment simply enhances levels of frustration as well as disrespect for the regulatory process. Paper ducks create a false promise of non-existent prosperity, doomed to enhance disappointment when the cold truth emerges to dispel the fog of anticipatory euphoria.

The way things work out here, CWA has powerful influence with the state commission when the time comes to set local regs. The CWA board adopts the position of its regulations committee – an efficient little conclave of about fifty members, basically self selected, with no particular qualification required.

This year, the regs committee enthusiastically endorsed the fed framework, despite knowledge of our lousy local production season, despite a field specialist’s report that we had the worst spring banding season in memory, with the egg rescue stations operating at no more than 30 percent of normal egg recovery numbers. Mesmerized by the mid-continent numbers, the regs committee joyously disregarded such unpleasant reality and embraced the counts – based as they are on potholes 1500 miles away and mallards that almost never winter here. If the feds said we could kill seven mallards, who were we to argue? ¹

No one seems to put all this in a larger perspective. How can we lobby for a local pintail framework – and a local mallard framework when we have a good nesting year and the mid-continent is dry – when we refuse to accept the consequences of poor local conditions when we have them? McLandress complains that the feds ignore our advocacy on the pintail issue – yet he said nothing to deter the regs committee from adopting the liberal mallard limit despite our awful local reality.

Doesn’t someone see that we terminally discredit our local framework argument when we deploy it only to justify higher bags and longer seasons, keeping our mouths tightly shut when a local framework would cut the other way? How can we claim to be taking a principled, science-based position when we use those arguments only when it aids in promoting higher limits and longer seasons?

Thus, the reasonable case that we might have made on the pintail issue stands discredited by the consistent self-interest of the advocates. No wonder the feds ignore us. Any reasonable arbiter would do the same under similar circumstances. When a silver-tongued devil uses any convenient argument to push the same position – arguing one side one year and the opposite the next, whichever serves his venal avarice – the messenger discredits the message before he even opens his mouth.

Time to recall a basic truth: A principle is only a principle if it costs something to adhere to it. We sacrificed a splendid opportunity to take a principled stand this fall on the alter of paper ducks – the feds population numbers that basically mean little on this flyway, even if they prove to be accurate. Based on the dismal reports from the upper Midwest current at this writing, even that seems unlikely.

It seems clear to me that we have fallen in love with the numbers the authorities feed us in lieu of the reality in the skies overhead. And if a successful life includes learning to love what we get (after unsuccessfully seeking to get what we want), then the time has come to accept paper ducks as the reality and the feathered version as the dream.

You will know that you have attained that level of ersatz nirvana when you go to a fine restaurant to eat the menu rather than the meal.

¹Those numbers may have been a bit illusory even as to the flyways to which they directly pertain. The Delta 2007 Field Season Report states: “While conditions are amongst the wettest in years, mallard and pintail numbers (in prairie Canada) still are below or at long-term averages, at a time when populations should have increased greatly.” (Emphasis added).