Hunting: The Duck Drain

It may be small consolation to the water-short U.S. Northeast, but game ducks have long been more parched than people. For five years the great prairies of the central U.S. and Canada have had subnormal rainfall—not bad enough to bother humans but plenty bad for ducks. Thousands of breeding marshes and potholes turned to mud, then dust. That meant that for every 100 ducks that flew north to breed in the spring, only 80 came back through U.S. flyways in the fall. Hatchings were a little better this year but still far below normal times when 170 ducks return south for every 100 that migrate to breeding grounds.

With the opening of the 1965 season only a week or so away, that kind of news is hardly what hunters want to hear. Worse yet, the duck that has been hardest hit, say experts of the U.S. Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife, has been the hunter’s favorite: the big. lumbering and noisy mallard, which normally fills more than half of the Midwestern hunter’s bag. Mallard breeding is at an alltime low; this year alone, hatchings fell 25% in the U.S., 35% in Canada. Now, as migration to winter grounds in the Gulf states begins in earnest, the experts estimate that a scant 13 million mallards will start down U.S. flyways—only 6.5 for each of the country’s 2,000,000 duck hunters.

For U.S. hunters’ other favorite ducks—teal, pintail, redheads, canvas-backs, black ducks—the supply will hardly be plentiful, but not worse than last fall. Happily, a late, wet spring helped restore some of the breeding grounds where these species concentrate. To help the mallard, however, hunters will be sharply restricted: no more than three a day along the Pacific flyway, two along the Atlantic, Mississippi and Central routes.