The End of Waterfowling?

A fire crackled in the large fireplace, and the men sat and chatted, eventually turning to a discussion about the disappointing duck season of the past autumn, yet one more in a series of nearly duckless hunting seasons of recent years. Like many hunters who've experienced disappointment, they lamented that things weren't as good as they used to be. But unlike many other hunters, these men were not content to simply sit and complain.

It was seven years after the Wall Street Crash of October 1929, and the world was still in the midst of the Great Depression. It was also seven years after the beginning of a devastating drought across the Prairie Pothole Region that had yet to relinquish its grip. The ducks were suffering their own depression, and many hunters believed they were about to see the end of waterfowling.

The federal government did what it could in the United States, creating many of the national wildlife refuges we know today, focusing on the prairies of the United States as well as down the flyways, providing breeding habitat in the north and migration and wintering habitat elsewhere. In 1934, at the behest of waterfowlers, the first "duck stamp" was issued, with the money earmarked for duck habitat. But it was not nearly enough. The Bureau of Biological Survey, which would become the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, could only work within the United States and only spend duck-stamp dollars there. And there was no counterpart at the time, and no money to even create or fund a counterpart, in Canada, where the majority of the continent's ducks were raised.

For the average duck hunter, these were frightening times. Their passion, their lifestyle, was possibly nearing an end. To witness this crushed the spirit of many waterfowlers of that era.

In The Ducks Came Back, published in 1945, author S. Kip Farrington Jr. described the mood of duck hunters in 1936:

Duck hunters all over the United States were putting their fowling pieces in mothballs or attempting to sell them. Many devotees of the sport who were in moderate circumstances refused to buy even a federal duck stamp or a license, let alone a box of shells. They claimed that it was not worth the trouble . . . From all corners of the United States, the same old cry was sounded—"It just isn't worthwhile to go duck hunting these days—having to get up early in the morning or sit out in hard weather for a shot or two all day. I wouldn't want my son to pursue a sport that I love so well that has sunk to such a low level after the way I have known it."

A great debate among waterfowlers had come to a head a year earlier at the 21st annual American Game Conference, sponsored by the American Game Association, forerunner of the Wildlife Management Institute. On the closing day of the conference, held in New York City in January 1935, the New York Times published an article headlined "Proposed Ban on Duck Shooting Brings Sharp Debate at Game Conference," which captured the unfolding drama:

The campaign for a closed season on migratory waterfowl, one of the most controversial issues ever to come before the nation's sportsmen, precipitated a stormy session at the American Game Conference in the Hotel Pennsylvania yesterday morning . . .
More than 800 delegates, the largest gathering in the history of the organization, jammed the north ballroom and for four hours listened to leading sportsmen, officials, conservationists and scientists present their arguments.
Speakers for both sides were cheered and applauded, indicating a sharp division of opinion regarding the advisability of a one-year ban on duck shooting.
In view of the pronounced disagreement, leaders predicted last night that the conference would not take a definite stand on the question.

In the end, the conference did take a stand, rejecting the resolution to close the duck season. But the mere fact that duck hunters were voting on whether to ban duck hunting illustrates how dire the situation had become. Even more remarkable, the final vote was 38 committee members against the ban and 22 for it. Sportsmen were indeed divided.

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