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The Vicious Cycle: Part One

Upon reflection, I suppose that the feeling of not being picked for the kick ball team at recess is nothing new. We have all felt it. No one ever wants to be the kid who is left standing alone. All the kids feel like they have a right to play. However, not all the kids want to share the playing time with those outside their peer group. It is never fun to get all dressed up for the party and then find that there is no invitation in the mail box. The feelings on both sides of entitlement issues tend to run high. This is especially so, and especially troublesome, now that conspicuous consumption has come to duck hunting.

In many places, hunters find themselves in the position of the kid at recess. Many hunters are getting dressed up to go to the marsh. Yet, when they arrive, they find there is no place in the marsh available for them. A vicious cycle has been created by several factors working in concert that is changing our sport. This synergy of factors has begun pitting an increasing number of hunters against a decreasing supply of resources. This is a cycle we must figure out how to break, least the sport as we know it cease to exist.

Hunter Numbers and Huntable Acres Drop

In the United States, the number of hunters has dropped precipitously as our nation has moved away from its agrarian base. In simple terms, most families no longer have cropland or any property other than the lot on which their house sits. The back 40 is no longer available to hunt. Even as the number of hunters has decreased since the early 19th century, the number of available acres for remaining sportsmen to hunt has fallen more drastically. Therefore, despite the lowest number of hunters in the history of our nation, the lack of available of land for those hunters is hitting critical mass. The amount of available land has fallen more sharply than the drop in the numbers of hunters. Therefore, a large proportion of the United States population has found that there is simply not enough public land to support a quality hunting experience.

As more and more individuals crowd into remaining public land, the competition for the few prime spots has become intense. To see examples of this, one need not look any farther than Arkansas, or some of the public land in the Mississippi Delta. In Arkansas, it has become a common practice to use runners to leave the dock at 2:00 a.m. to lay out decoy spreads and secure the best spots. Leaving decoys out overnight is common in an attempt to stake a claim to a spot for the next day. Picture the man who does everything right. He is at the marsh on time. He picks a good spot and sets up his blocks. Then as he waits for the sun to come up as shooting hours are about to begin, a boat roars through his decoys. The boat then sets up less than a hundred yards away from him, and begins to shoot at the birds working his spread. This infuriating situation has become all to commonplace at public marshes in the United States.

As overcrowding continues, tempers begin to flare. The abhorrent practice of skybusting ducks that are out of range just to get some shooting becomes common. Then, other hunters begin to shoot the swing and take shots at ducks that are working the decoys of another group of hunters. After all, they think, “if we don’t shoot at these, we might not see any more birds.” In some Waterfowl Management Areas in Mississippi, there are reports of boat lines and decoy lines being cut as the competition for the best locations gets out of hand. I have personally seen boats left in timber holes on public land chained to trees to claim a spot for the next day. I have also seen blinds that have been burned on public land in an attempt to keep new people from hunting a spot. It seems amazing that properly reared adults could act in such a manner.

Sooner or later, public land hunters become more experienced. They also become even more fed-up with the overcrowding situation on the local public land. As the pressure of repeated bad experiences mounts, the true sportsmen begin to look for remote areas with few hunters. This is not as easy as it sounds. Unfortunately, most of the public remote areas have now been discovered. In fact, in some instances you can find GPS coordinates for good public hunting spots on the internet. So, with public hunting opportunities becoming frustrating, the public land hunter starts looking in earnest for good private duck hunting land. He feels that is his only way out.

As a hunter searches for quality available private land for duck hunting, he quickly discovers that he can expect to pay to play. The days of driving along and knocking on farmhouse doors and receiving permission to hunt appear to be over. Farmers with productive real estate have wised up to the fact that there are people who will pay them good money for access to their land. In the early days of leasing, landowners primarily looked at hunting leases as a way to cover the taxes on their property. This has now changed. The land itself is now a major profit center. Many farmers in the Mississippi Delta make more money for the hunting rights on marginal farmland than they ever did by farming the land. As more and more hunters chase good private hunting land, the demand inevitably outstrips supply, and the prices start to go up. This has fueled what some have labeled the recent phenomenon of the commercial hunting lease.

The cycle of supply and demand we have been discussing has combined to make it very difficult for the common working man to have access to duck hunting. And that is a real shame. I recall vividly talking to a fellow pulling a little boat out at Malamison WMA near Grenada, Mississippi two seasons ago. It was a slow spell in the season, and this fellow was looking pretty haggard. I asked him if he had any luck that morning, and his reply has stuck with me to this day. An he said, it’s been terrible. I have not killed a duck all week. Heck, there are hardly any ducks on this place, it’s crawling with guides and out-of-state hunters. It’s the only place I can go now with everything being leased up. But I will NOT be run out of this sport! Not now, not ever. I heard him. I got it loud and clear. And it started me thinking.

Unfortunately, there are several things that have combined to work together against the nice fellow at the boat ramp. The interest in duck hunting has never been higher. Many hunters gave the sport up in the dust bowl years of the 1970's. However, the liberal seasons and bag limits of the last several years have lured many of these hunters back into the sport. Since this has been the most wet decade on the prairies in about a century, the increase in ducks has brought out more hunters. Also, the baby boomers are retiring and looking for an outdoor cold weather diversion other than golf. They have found duck hunting. It reminds them of their childhood. And the boomer generation has the money to pursue hunting with a passion. And pursue it they do, searching out the best property for their hunting passion.

Further working against our friend at the boat ramp is the fact that many southern thirty-something men that grew up deer hunting have gotten bored with that sport. More and more deer hunters of my acquaintance are taking up duck hunting since it is more exciting, and has more cache than sitting in a tree stand all day. What would you rather do, play with boats, shoot ducks and hang out with your favorite dog? Or would you rather sit in a tree all day? It=s a fact, duck hunting is a great sport. And as we begin the new millennium, a lot more people are becoming aware of what the rest of us already knew. Duck hunting has been rediscovered.

It is somewhat of a paradox that we have to be concerned with the access of Joe Average to duck hunting. You see, historically, duck hunting has not been a populist sport of the masses. Although it is hard for us to realize now, the middle class duck hunter is a relatively recent phenomenon based on the memories of the old timers I knew as a child. At the turn of the century, duck hunting was almost exclusively controlled by the competing groups of the market hunters and the very wealthy. The market hunters made their living hunting the birds. They either had legal access to the birds, or made their own access. The market hunters referred to the affluent hunters who did not sell their kill as sports. The wealthy sports for the most part were financially independent enough to be able to take weeks at a time off from their employment to pursue the migration. They also had the economic resources to lock up large blocks of land and build clubhouses and employ caretakers and guides. Duck hunting has never been a cheap sport, given the specialized equipment required. Therefore, other than the wealthy and the local market hunters, not a lot of working class hunters were involved in the sport.

For the most part, the sports and the market hunters did not get along. The sports looked down on the market hunters as game hogs and outlaws. The market hunters resented the condescending attitude of many of the sports, and were vehemently opposed to the practice of the sports leasing or buying up prime hunting spots. In his book, The Golden Age of Waterfowling, Wayne Capooth has dozens of newspaper articles from the Reelfoot Lake area of Tennessee that document the armed warfare and murder that broke out over duck hunting rights on the lake. These stories from Reelfoot show us the passions that can be aroused when one group or another begins to find themselves cut off from access to productive hunting land. Although 100 years later we no longer have market hunting, the common man still finds himself being squeezed out of the sport, one parcel of land at a time.

Despite the fact that duck hunting has never been a very affordable sport, we must find a way to make the sport available to more people. As popular as duck hunting has become, we are not introducing children to the sport in the numbers that will be necessary to cover the loss@ of the baby boomer and baby buster generations. As our numbers diminish, so does our ability to protect the great sport of duck hunting and the very outdoor lifestyles that we now take for granted. Only a tiny fraction of the American population still participates in hunting sports. The anti-hunting coalitions are well aware that the numbers of hunters will continue to shrink due to the lack of new people entering the sport. Thus, they introduce new measures every year in the more urban states seeking to ban hunting, or shut off all access to hunting on public lands. Even as you read this a lawsuit is working its way through the federal court system seeking to prevent all hunting on lands in the federal refuge system. If we have no numbers, we have no voice.

Aside from habitat restoration, the most important thing that we can do as duck hunters and conservationists is to find a way to break the vicious cycle that many perceive as pushing duck and goose hunting ever closer to purely elitist sports of the landed gentry. The present revival of duck numbers is due in no small part to the efforts of DU and Delta Waterfowl with help from Congress and the CRP program. However, despite duck numbers being generally up, contributions to DU are actually down. We need new blood to re-energize our conservation programs. If lack of access to available hunting land causes people to drop out of the sport, we lose even more of our voice as hunters. Quality public hunting opportunities allow hunters to enter into the sport without a massive outlay of capital in the beginning. If we let them catch the fever on good public land, then we have hooked another Ducks Unlimited or Delta Waterfowl member. If no new hunters enter the sport, then we will continue the graying of duck hunting and the ultimate decline of the sport.

The next article in this series will look at the changes that must take place to break the vicious cycle that threatens our sport. We will examine what has gone wrong, and what each of us can do to effect change. Each of us can contribute to beneficial change with some effort. The question becomes: Are we willing to do what it takes? If the hunters of this generation will rise to the challenge of preserving our hunting heritage and expanding it to future generations, history will regard us as the vanguard of the new sportsmanship. It is my firm belief that if we do not rise to meet this challenge, history will not remember us at all.

 Copyright © 2003 by Mark Edwards at WaterfowlReview.com.