Make Ours Bluebills

By Dave Books; Classic Artwork by Les Kouba

“To arrive too early in the marsh is an adventure in pure listening. . . . And when a flock of bluebills, pitching pondward, tears the dark silk of heaven in one longrending nose-dive, you catch your breath at the sound, but there is nothing to see except stars.” —Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

Standing on a narrow dike between two ponds in the predawn darkness, we could hear the familiar sounds of the marsh—duck wings cleaving the sky high above us, and from out on the water the contented chatter of a hen mallard. It was opening day of duck season, and my hunting partner, Swede, and I had our decoys set on a state wildlife management area in north-central Montana. A bit later, as we waited for the clock to tick down to legal shooting time, we heard the unmistakable roar of a flock of scaup (a.k.a. bluebills) ripping over our decoys and splashing down in the pond. Maggie, Swede’s yellow Lab, pressed against his leg and whined softly. She knew that sound as well as we did. A few minutes later, we heard them wheel away into the fading night.

The magnetic force that draws us back to this place every year, aside from the gold-and-russet beauty of the autumn marsh, is the variety of ducks—mostly puddle ducks like mallards, teal, shovelers, gadwalls, and pintails—but also divers. Here we have a chance to bag a redhead, a ringneck, and an occasional canvasback. But there is something else, something rooted in our DNA as waterfowlers. We are hoping, if just for a few moments, to revisit a time when vast flocks of bluebills rocketed down from the north and darkened the prairie skies.

We knew that we were not likely to see large numbers of bluebills this early in the season. A great many of these birds breed farther north and migrate later in the year. Then there’s the fact that the bluebill has suffered hard times over the last half-century. A population that stood at around 6 million birds 50 years ago has declined to about 4 million today. While the scaup is still one of our most abundant ducks, the downward trend is troubling and something of a mystery. To help the population recover, the US Fish and Wildlife Service has reduced the bag limit and shortened the season.

The bluebill has a rich history in North America, dating from the market gunning days of the late 19th and early 20th centuries to the sport hunting era of later decades in places like the Chesapeake Bay, the northern Great Lakes states, and the western prairies. While not as highly prized for the table as canvasbacks, bluebills—often called “blackheads” or “broadbills” along the Eastern Seaboard—were nonetheless highly sought and heavily gunned by market hunters. When the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 put an end to market hunting, duck and goose populations began a recovery that ushered in a new era for American waterfowlers.

One of those hunters was Gordon MacQuarrie, outdoor editor of The Milwaukee Journal from 1936 until his death in 1956. Sage of the Wisconsin lakes and woodlands, MacQuarrie entertained his readers with the exploits of the Old Duck Hunters’ Association, Inc., headed by Mr. President, his rascally duck-hunting mentor. Writing for national outdoor magazines as well as The Journal, MacQuarrie immortalized the late-season bluebill gunning of northern Wisconsin with stories like “Bluebill Day,” “The Bluebills Died at Dawn,” and others. “Bluebills,” wrote MacQuarrie, “are the staple flight duck of Wisconsin. . . . Willing decoyers, their huddled, formless ranks, smashing into the decoys, have given sport to more Wisconsin flight hunters than any other duck.”

My introduction to the bluebill mystique began several years before I’d ever hunted them. Years ago, when I was just beginning a career in conservation, I had a chance to visit the legendary artist Les Kouba in his studio in downtown Minneapolis. I had recently written an article for the old Naturalist magazine, a Minnesota treasure that showcased the work of the state’s best artists and photographers, and the editor had invited me along to watch Kouba do the layout for the upcoming issue.

It was shortly before Christmas, and customers were stopping in to shop for artwork. Many of the items going out the door were Kouba’s iconic paintings of bluebills in flight (always 13), often set against a stormy sky, a favorite of Minnesota hunters. I was thrilled to meet Kouba, who was a true gentleman and a warm and witty man. I watched and listened in awe as he and my editor friend chatted away about art, ducks, and conservation topics of mutual interest. That’s when I knew that one day I wanted to experience the scenes I saw in Kouba’s paintings.

As a faint ribbon of light cracked the eastern horizon and slowly began to suffuse the sky in a rosy glow, the marsh came alive. A northwest breeze sang through the cattails, bringing with it the rich smell of mud and decaying vegetation. Across the pond a dozen blue-winged teal swerved and dipped along the shoreline, then headed toward our decoys. “Down!” Swede hissed, although staying hidden may not have mattered. Those teal had their minds made up and were on us in a flash, zipping across the decoys. We were a little rusty thanks to the long off-season, but we managed to drop two of them. When Swede said “fetch!” Maggie churned out to retrieve the first pretty drake and then the second.

Our next customer, a drake mallard, flew high over us, turned, and committed to the blocks. Swede whispered, “Your bird, take him.” So I did. Swede may have later wished he hadn’t been so generous, because a break in the action left us holding steaming cups of coffee and wondering if we had bagged our last duck of the morning. But an hour later a wedge of high-flying wigeon, white wing patches flashing in the sun, circled the decoys. On the third pass Swede said, “They aren’t coming any closer. Let’s try ’em.” As luck would have it, we raked a hen and drake from the flock. A bit later another band of teal whipped past and two of them stayed behind.

Another lull left us looking at empty skies for a time—empty save for an occasional swarm of migrating blackbirds. But then a flock of gadwalls drifted in, putting us back in business. The drake gadwall is often overshadowed by his puddle-duck cousins—the mallard and pintail—but he is beautiful in an understated way, a handsome blend of gray, black, and brown with a white patch on the rear edge of each wing. We downed three birds from the bunch of about a dozen, and Maggie charged out to retrieve them.

With the sun rising higher in the sky and the morning warming up, we were close to dozing off when a volley of shots in the distance woke us from our reverie. Alert to new possibilities, we watched as a dark smudge appeared on the skyline and soon morphed into a flock of ducks headed in our direction. As they grew closer, the wingbeat pattern suggested divers, but they were still too far for us to be sure.

If one word epitomizes the mind-set of duck hunters everywhere, that word is “hope.” We hope to be there on that memorable day when ducks hurtle down from the north, we hope to see cupped wings over our blocks, and we hope our shotguns find their mark. What Swede and I had hoped for at the outset, standing in the dark and listening to that squadron of bluebills strafing our decoys, was that more of their tribe would grace us with their presence once the sun was up.

And then it happened. Bluebills! They came pitching toward our decoys all “a-spraddle,” as MacQuarrie once wrote, with the loud, sweet music of their wings roaring in our ears, webbed feet braking, reaching. I centered a bird on my side, a hen, and Swede brought down a beautiful drake—the one bluebill apiece allowed in the Central Flyway portion of Montana. For a few moments we stood in awe, transported back to an earlier time, when our forebears greeted the dawn at places like Manitoba’s Delta Marsh, Wisconsin’s Eau Claire lakes, and Maryland’s Susquehanna Flats.

When Les Kouba was chosen as Ducks Unlimited’s Artist of the Year in 1976, he said of his painting Bluebills in Lifting Fog, “I chose bluebills as the subject because that was my first love in hunting.” Swede and I may not have said it, but we were both thinking it: Ours too, Mr. Kouba, ours too.

Les Kouba artwork courtesy of Michael Haase and artbarbarians.com