"In winter our fields be full of cranes, herons, pigeons, partridges, and blackbirds: the rivers and creeks be over spread everywhere with waterfowl of the greatest and least sort, as swans, flocks of geese and brants, ducks and mallards, shelldrakes, divers, etc., besides many other kinds of rare and delectable birds."--Alexander Whitaker, 1613
The first Europeans had never before seen such bounty. Coming from the domestic economy of a Europe already characterized by scarcity, widespread poverty, crop failures, and food shortages--and royal ownership of all game--these first settlers saw early Virginia and the Carolinas as paradise. They even remarked that the new lands were in the same latitude as the biblical Eden. Eden it was, for they found not only waterfowl, but rivers flashing with fish, and forests that held turkey, deer, bear, elk, and buffalo. Turkey, deer, and waterfowl were so plentiful that many soon tired of their taste and sought other foods. One writer observed that the waterfowl alone was enough for anyone to subsist on throughout the year.
This was pristine America--inhabited by a few million original Americans, but largely undisturbed throughout its great ecosystems. Its thousands of miles of river marshes were intact, and the tens of millions of acres of wetlands were as yet undrained and unpolluted. There is no adequate way to assess the carrying capacity of such habitat--it was gone before we knew how to measure such things. What we must rely on are the accounts of travelers, hunters, trappers, traders, explorers, soldiers, and pioneer settlers who quickly stepped away from settlements and headed for the back country with all of its danger and promise. Their stories have been told and re-told many times. The figures and counts they offer seem so high that they are sometimes discounted because the land and game was very different from today's conditions.
We just can't believe what they saw and described, and the original natural environment of North America recedes into unreality. We can't believe that great savannas or prairies were here in Tennessee, Georgia, or Virginia--great fields of long grass "that reached a man's shoulder on horseback" that supported deer, elk, and buffalo. One buffalo herd in Georgia was estimated at over 10,000 animals. We can't believe banks of oysters that sometimes reached fifty miles inland from the coast in the tidal rivers. These beds were so rich that one writer said that a person could gather enough food in a day to survive the whole year. We can't believe a world in which cedar trees were often four feet in diameter here in Tennessee or oaks eleven feet in diameter in Georgia.
Nor can we believe the assemblages--there was no way of numbering them--of waterfowl. The first settlers of North America reported waterfowl arriving each year in what one writer described as "millionous multitudes." Another described the noise of a disturbed flock as like an army of men shouting together. Samuel Wilson wrote, "On the rivers and brooks [there] are all the winter months vast quantities of Swan, wild geese, duck, widgeon, teal, curlew, snipe, shelldrake, and a certain sort of black duck that is excellent meat and stays there all the year." About 1750 Andrew Burnaby observed the Virginia marshes and simply noted of the waterfowl that their numbers were prodigious.
And just as we cannot believe these accounts and often interpret them as exaggerations, neither would the early settlers have believed that the elk and buffalo, the turkey and the deer would all but disappear from eastern forests. They could not have imagined that some of the ducks they took without thinking to count would now be endangered or facing extinction. America was too vast, the wild habitat too rich, for these losses to be imagined. Yet, as relentlessly as the earlier advance of the glaciers, though far more quickly, the forests were cut and cleared, the marshes drained, the prairie cut and plowed and sown with European seeds and weeds. Millions of immigrants flooded into America seeking the bounty their ancestors had described. The land was settled and domesticated from coast to coast, and with industrialization came the myriad demands upon land for raw materials and upon waters for power and to carry away the sewerage and waste. By the time National Parks began to be created and conservation organizations began to be concerned, most of the best was already gone. Only fragment natural areas and remnant populations now survive.
I grew up in the lineage and family of duck hunters. My great-grandfather had been a market hunter along the middle Potomac River, killing for the restaurant markets in Washington and Baltimore. As a little boy, I heard my grandfather tell over and over the stories of his days as a boy helping his father gather the ducks after a great shot from the punt gun. The gun was charged with a pound and a half of shot and a pound of black powder. My great-grandfather lay in the floor of the narrow punt with the long gun braced in the stern and passing over his back. He paddled toward the ducks using small hand paddles. The gunwales of the punt were barely above water. The gun was fired by a turn of the head to tighten a string that reached from the trigger to a ring in the stern then forward to his mouth. When the boat was positioned properly, a hundred or more ducks would be killed at the shot. My grandfather had his job too. Once the big gun was fired into the raft of ducks, he used 10 and 12 gauge guns to knock down stragglers and to kill the cripples left from the shot. They then gathered the ducks into bushel baskets and stacked the baskets on the dock waiting for the market boat to pick them up as it headed up river to Washington. Within a few years, the market gunners were out-lawed and a federal agent came to "buy" the punt gun for a museum. This was before 1900.
My earliest memory of the hunting world is going with my father to the trunk of his car just before Christmas and seeing ducks and a goose laid out in a row in the trunk. He hunted each year with a wartime friend from Norfolk. They hunted the Back Bay on the lower Virginia coast over a spread of more than 300 wooden decoys that they would set each morning. To be ready by daylight, they left the dock at 2:00 a.m. and began setting the spread at 3:00 a.m. One comment from my father's stories has haunted me all my life as a hunter and outdoorsman. He told me once that the flocks of ducks were so thick that they would feel a momentary chill in the blind some clear mornings when the ducks flew between them and the sun. And I still remember the heavy weight of the goose as I struggled to carry it by the neck to my Grandmother. It was our Christmas goose that year.
I came late to duck hunting--Daddy had already quit before I started hunting--but it consumed me. I went every day I could and prayed for snow and sleet. I searched the skys always listening, looking. A high echelon of geese or a pair of ducks rising from a roadside pond would distract my mind for miles. In the duck blind, I lived in a pure, secure world cut off from all low and ordinary things by hundreds of yards of water and marsh. For me, there will never be anything to rival the minutes before daylight when the only sounds I hear are the scrape of ice crystals on my waders, the wheezing panting of my black lab, the rising whistle of wings, and the beating of my own heart. The memory of it excites me now as it did then.
Ducks breaking into dawn was like all of America's natural history filtered through my family funneling out of the sky into my blind. Duck hunting made me feel like the heir to a long tradition reaching back through Daddy and Smitty and Junie and Tink to Irishmen before them haunting marshes and driven by something more visceral than hunger. Sometimes in my blind I imagined that in the next blind over was my father, and in the one beyond that my grandfather, and just around the point my great-grandfather, and that we were all together, one long family linked by marsh and river and the endless flights of ducks overhead. I thought that I would never be able to imagine the day when I would not hunt ducks--but that day came.
For several years I worked in our local Ducks Unlimited organization. Each year the statistics we used never seem to vary: this or that species in this or that flyway might be up or down a bit from last year, but overall, the flyway numbers were far below their 1950's levels and no realistic conservationist ever suggested that we would see populations at those levels again in North America. The other numbers concerned habitat--for which DU has rightly worked. A lot of intelligent, compassionate people have given much money and time to protecting and restoring ducks through DU and other organizations, but their efforts cannot match the collective effects of land development, farming, and environmental transformation. California alone has lost 94% of its original 5,000,000 acres of wetlands. When I tallied what we managed to save or protect each year, the totals came nowhere near what we were losing sometimes in single states. We saved wetlands in the tens of thousands of acres and lost them in the hundreds of thousands.
By the time the steel shot scam arrived, I was already disillusioned but deeply concerned. We all knew lead was toxic, yet for all my hunting and prodding of marsh grass with a good dog, I never found one of the millions of ducks supposedly killed by ingested shot. Surely ducks did die of our lead shot; in some species even so little as a single piece in the craw is apparently deadly in its ability to upset hormonal balance and the ability to navigate and ward off disease. But I began to suspect that steel shot was about something other than saving ducks, and I soured on experts whose "science" was shaped by other agendas. While we debated lead and denied the reports of honest hunters that the steel only produced more cripples, the wetland losses mounted and the critical mass of population in some species may have dropped too low. One day I finally said to my DU colleagues, "No more. It is time for us to quit shooting. If we love the ducks, we need to quit." I put away that gun.
Duck hunting as American hunters once knew it is over. The numbers are too far down and the loss of habitat and the effects of pollution and disturbance are too great to be reversed. I have known this for a long time. It was in my gut long before it was in my head. I sat in the blind day after day over good water and the ducks didn't come. Here and there they came--as they still do in smaller numbers along some flyways, but the numbers are permanently off. Going to a prime blind on a good flyway and shooting your limit plus that of your two guides only gives a very unethical illusion that there are still plenty of ducks. I sit here typing with my granddaughter in my lap, and no optimism I can muster lets me think she will ever see ducks as my father and grandfather did. That world is gone.
Some days in the winter when the wind is up and the sky is down, I go to the marsh and watch the lowering sky and the settling ducks. I want to feel the cold and wet. I need to be reminded of that chill that all duck hunters know, the bone deep cold of the underside of all wet things, the cold that never goes away in the summer. The world of ducks reminds me of my mortality, of the passing things of this world, more than all my other hunting. Ducks are not the only endangered things in the hunter's world. I never hear the whistle of wings or see mallards jump from behind cattails that I do not think of my father and a world that is gone forever. I sit in the marsh, feel the rain on my face, and I think of old men and old dogs.