In 1935, Aldo Leopold wrote: “The ducks desperately need two things: more marsh and less killing. They need not one or the other, but both, and right away.” Seventy years later, what has changed? With fewer ducks and, in some states, more hunters, we manage in order to maximize harvest and wonder why numbers decline while the quality of our sport deteriorates when our science has improved so dramatically. Or so we are told.

A good example of this problem involves the California Waterfowl Association. Judging by the articles it features in its bi-monthly magazine, CWA has apparently decided to make the compensatory kill theory the centerpiece of its management advocacy, despite declining duck numbers – and despite the experience we had in California when we cut back the season length and bag limit in 2002, for the precise purpose of seeing if spring counts would respond in positive fashion. They did – and we don’t talk about that anymore. CWA must have been hoping for the opposite answer.

This approach exemplifies a peculiar philosophy for those who claim to be guided purely by science: Faced with facts inconvenient to preconceived notions, ignore them. Would you voluntarily accept a ride in the automobile of a driver who lived by such a creed? That boulder in the road shouldn’t be there so we’ll pretend that it isn’t. Fasten your seatbelts.

Last fall, the CWA magazine featured an article by a young biologist preaching the compensatory kill line. When Madduck questioned him, he made the statement that: “There wouldn’t be a single duck in California if it wasn’t for duck hunters.” The point – I surmise – is that having saved the birds, hunters should be able to kill as many as they want, a concept that may have some tenuous connection to compensatory kill, although I confess that the link escapes me.

A few years back, one of our movie studios released a fine film entitled “The Shooting Party,” starring James Mason and John Gielgude. The action took place on an English country estate in the early twentieth century. The Mason character had invited a number of friends and acquaintances to a driven pheasant shoot weekend, with the drama unfolding against that backdrop. Gielgude, playing the role of an animal rights advocate, attempted to disrupt one of the shoots. In the best upper-class British fashion, Mason reasons with him by stating that having given the pheasants life, the estate has the right to take that life at its pleasure, at its leisure and in any fashion it wishes. Have we come to that with wild ducks that breed in nature and under conditions that remain devilishly, persistently and perversely beyond our control? Because our ducks owe their lives to our efforts to save them, we can take those lives whenever it suits us. Is that what our junior biologist advocates?

But the worst aspect of the biologist’s statement is best exposed by the “so what” question. In the fifties and sixties, hunters probably controlled a large percentage of the seasonal wetlands that constitute the wintering ground for our Pacific Flyway birds. The flight might have suffered severely in dry years without that ground, artificially flooded by hunters at their expense.

Then came the easement programs. Private landowners took the money offered by easement purchasers in exchange for committing their land to habitat. I have personally reviewed dozens of those documents – and only one of them gives the landowner the right to terminate the easement if hunting becomes illegal. The termination provision in that easement is unique, according to people who run the programs. So basically, the hunting fraternity sold the only significant bargaining chip it held, i.e., the right to threaten the future of essential wetlands if we can’t use them the way we want.

It may well be true that the birds benefited from voluntary actions by hunters in the past – but the stock of seasonal wetlands in our state no longer depends upon hunters and their volitional stewardship practices. We sold that position piecemeal over the last twenty-five years and now have little practical leverage – another manifestation of the boiled frog syndrome1. Truth to tell, our wintering grounds stand in greater risk from spasms in the world rice market than from anything that the regulators might do about the waterfowl hunting regulations. In California, as in much of the arid West where various entities compete to buy water for agriculture, municipal and various other uses, the wintering grounds face a greater risk from the Los Angeles Metropolitan Water District, currently buying water from rice farmers to slake the thirst of Southern California to make up for deficits in its Colorado River supplies.2

Neither of these considerations have anything to do with hunters – nor do hunters have any control over them. If farmers fallow their ground and sell their water to Met, the birds will take a huge hit for lack of suitable wintering ground to which they can disperse when the shooting starts. One can only imagine the carnage. And when that day comes – for it will come, of that you can be sure – we will lack the power to save our heritage, whether we gave the birds life in the past or not.

Welcome to the 21st century Mr. Biologist. You may have gotten your history about half right – but for current purposes, so what?

We also hear that our Association must support long seasons and high limits because we lose hunters under a more moderate regime. And we must do everything in our power to hold on to the numbers we have to preserve the clout of the Association, etc. CWA President Bob McLandress has expressed these views (along with advocacy of compensatory kill). Here also, the numbers fail to support the thesis.

An examination of the relationship between hunter numbers and season length/ bag limit over the past quarter-century finds no clear correlation. Indeed, the data suggest that the number of hunters in this state has little to do with bag limits and season lengths, spiking only for a year or so in response to robust and dramatic increases in waterfowl populations. But above all, the numbers expose a dark truth – hunter numbers in California appear to be in long-term decline, regardless of regulatory regime or waterfowl populations. Other forces are at work here. And until we face that fact and attempt to come to grips with those forces, we will sink slowly into total irrelevance while our leaders mouth superficialities that cannot withstand the most cursory analysis.

It is worthwhile noting that Carleton S. Fiorina, CEO of Hewlett Packard recently got the ax. No $6,000 shower curtains or accounting fraud was involved – just a straightforward case of failure. Her plan to invigorate HP’s businesses and elevate its profits did not work. The H-P board gave her five and one-half years to get it done and showed her the door when they could no longer tolerate the stagnant results. On balance, for all the hoopla, this was a simple and salutary case of accountability, no more and no less.

Which prompted me to wonder: Where does accountability enter the waterfowl picture? AHM has thrown up a liberal framework since 1996.3 A Greek chorus of compensatory kill theorists has buttressed the result, resisting any attempt to adjust it for population realities, providing pseudo-scientific background music in support of long seasons and high limits. None of these worthies seem embarrassed by the results of the last five years – ever lower numbers and a fundamental decline in the quality of the waterfowling experience.

Whether you adopt the AHM goal of managing for maximum sustainable kills, a more sensible goal of managing for high sustainable populations, or simply strive for the down and dirty idea of maximizing hunter opportunity, (meaning more chances for hunters actually to see and kill wild ducks in the skies over their blinds), our regulators (and those who support them) have racked up a five year losing streak, an unbroken string of relentless failure that seemingly worsens with every turn of the seasons. Where is the board of directors that can thank them for their good intentions and show them the door?

When I listen to some of the smug talk that comes out of the people who have presided over our little unfolding disaster, I am reminded of the attitude of certain tenured professors at a pretentious university. Students are a nuisance to them, just as the hunters seem to be to our regulators and some of our organizations. The professors live to pontificate. Faced with a tough question, they call on someone else or change the subject – or attempt to subdue their interlocutors with condescension. Are we tired of that yet?

The reality is that only true, dedicated hunters can save this sport. And I mean the hunters who can bring the cold reality of the marsh to the table, even if it means driving some of the academics, the regulators and the self-anointed biologists into the street.

Anyone who doesn’t see the current system as severely broken hasn’t spent much time outdoors over the last several seasons. The time has come for some hardheaded realists to take control before any potential fix slips beyond reach.

1 Drop a frog into a pot of boiling water and he jumps out. Place him in a pot of cool water and he sits there as the temperature rises gradually until he is cooked. We lost our power little by little. No one noticed until it was too late.

2 Many years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court allocated lower Colorado River flows between California, Arizona and Nevada. The decision allowed California to use the Arizona and Nevada allocations that those states were not using. Growing faster than its neighbors (and resistant to any restraint that long-term planning might have imposed), California quickly became dependent upon overdrafts of its Colorado River allocation. Now that Nevada and Arizona have stepped up for their allocations to support their own rampant growth, the pressure on Northern California water supplies has become intense, while the Southern California agencies cast about to replace the 800,000 acre feet per year (more or less) they were taking from their neighbors’ shares. Under that kind of pressure, the Met can easily afford to pay far more than a farmer can make using his water to farm rice. If a relatively unregulated water market develops in California, no wetlands manager will be able to afford water to flood habitat except in the wettest of wet years.

3 The International Fish & Game Agency has issued a report on AHM suggesting a “simplification” and modest cutback in seasons and bag limit scenarios. So long as the inputs remain the same and the avowed goal remains to maximize “sustainable” kill, it is hard to believe that these changes would make much difference, even if adopted.