Sport: Unhappy Hunters

In 3,358† recorded years of duck-hunting, the season that opened last week was the strangest; the ducks were booming —but not the hunters.

Like other sports, its trouble is the war.

WPB has limited purchases to 25 shells, but farmers have priority on the first ammunition released for civilian use since June 1942 and hunters will be lucky to find their quotas. Most will rely on hoarded ammunition. When that is gone, the only weapons will be the bow & arrow and the slingshot. This season may be the last for the duration.

But there are more ducks this year than in 20 years. Eight years ago droughts and free shooting had sliced the North American duck population to 30 million. Hunting laws were tightened, the Government started a huge conservation program. And Ducks Unlimited, an organization financed by alarmed sportsmen, reclaimed a million acres in northwest Canada for protected breeding areas. Result: this season there are 125 million ducks.

Hunters in such famed areas as the Chesapeake Bay, Arkansas’s White River bottoms and Suynsun Marshes in California will have good shooting this year—if they can find anything to shoot with. Luckiest hunters of all are U.S. Air Forces pilots along the Alaska Military Highway. To keep their eyes in by skeet shooting, they are well supplied with shells. By switching from clay pigeons to live ducks they will be saving their own skins: duck feathers are used in flying suits.

† Earliest record of duck hunting is by Egyptians, with boomerangs, in 1415 B.C.