Celebrating Circular Logic (Mad Duck.org)

[Quackcephus]

Celebrating Circular Logic

http://www.madduck.org/circular-logic

Introduction:
Madduck essayist Howard N. Ellman looks at unknown factors that influence waterfowl management and why these defeat efforts to increase the numbers of ducks that wing the length of the continent.

By Howard N. Ellman

“You can’t bank ducks!” We have all heard that declaration from one or more experts, pronounced with a solemn certainty worthy of the Tablets of Stone. It stands, of course, for the notion that as the birds will die anyway, we might as well shoot them. And as propitious nesting conditions will bring about a near miraculous revival of declining or depressed population numbers, we do no harm with our killing. In short, “you can’t bank ducks” represents the culminating battle-cry of the compensatory kill theorists. In that role, it deserves careful – and critical – examination.

We begin with the conclusion that ducks not killed by hunters would die in roughly the same time period due to natural causes – the heart of the compensatory kill theory. Setting aside the fact that no one can point to the dead bodies that such a high level of natural attrition should leave as its calling card, (particularly during those rare periods of shortened seasons and lower bag limits), what data supports the hypothesis?

It begins with the conclusion that ducks have a short life span on average – one and one-half to two years being the mean – basically two migration cycles. That data has its origin in band returns. Hunters turn in most bands, of course. So band returns provide a sound sampling of ducks that fall to the gun. But is that a fair sampling of the population as a whole?

We know that hunters primarily harvest juvenile birds, those that have not experienced sufficient hunting pressure to develop effective defensive strategies. Juveniles have not yet learned the importance of finding and sticking to sanctuary ground, of limiting flying time to the dark hours, the difference between safe and unsafe altitude, the mortal danger that lurks somewhere near those large sets of immobile duck replicas on an otherwise attractive pond.

The real question then is this: what would we learn by studying strictly the adult population? Or even before that, how would we begin to study it – to gather the data on the life expectancy of those ducks that have survived the vulnerable juvenile years and have now become relatively invulnerable to the gun? How long do they live – and does that lifespan fit the model of the compensatory kill mavens? For obvious reasons, we don’t recover most of the bands members of that population carry.

Several years ago, my practice required that I help a large landowner work out a conservation easement to be administered as part of the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge complex – the entity that would become the manager of a substantial wetlands restoration and conservation program on the property. In order to gain an understanding of the type of habitat the easement terms were intended to encourage (and that my client would have to provide in exchange for the money received for the easement), the senior manager of the entire refuge complex (all the lands in the federal refuge system in the Sacramento Valley and lands held under federal easement as well) took me on a tour of Sacramento NWR during the waterfowl season.

It should come as no shock that the refuge was loaded, despite a brisk north wind that hunters normally regard as a force that moves the birds off sanctuary ground. Ducks, geese, swans, shorebirds, everything and in great numbers filled the skies over the Refuge as well as the ponds. We traveled slowly along the nine-mile viewing trail (a gravel road with various types of permanent and seasonal wetlands on both sides) as the Manager described the different habitats as well as the process of creating and managing them that my client would be required to undertake. After all, I had to write the document that described these obligations.

We came to a viewing stand at the southeast edge of the portion of the marsh that the viewing road encircles – a stand that provides an outlook to the east, a thousand acres of “no go” area, flooded and then left completely undisturbed throughout the season, with round-stem bulrush, willow islands and emergent marsh habitats, combined with meandering stretches of open water. Although the ponds held a few natural food plants, they served primarily as resting ground.

The area held even more birds per square yard than the westerly portion. Indeed, it was hard to see how any more ducks could have crowded in, although a funnel cloud of waterfowl circled in the landing pattern over the area, looking for space to join those on the water. It was a sight and sound remarkable to experience – and yet one can experience it almost any day during the hunting season at that location. It is a happening today I am sure – as I write this.

What do we know about this segment of the population, I wondered? Suppose we could identify the banded birds in that seething flock and find out how long they had lived? Has anyone tried to conduct such a study? Think about it. What if we found that the birds imprinted on sanctuary ground included banded birds that had lived as long as eight or ten or even fifteen years? Wouldn’t that shoot an enormous hole in the compensatory kill theory by demonstrating that a significant segment of the population that had escaped the gun did not “die anyway?” And wouldn’t that provide an explanation as to how the population survives to reproduce and preserve the heritage, even in multi-year drought cycles, despite the compensatory kill hypothesis that the birds have only short life spans, regardless of hunting “harvest”?

I was honored and privileged to participate in negotiating and documenting that deal in 1991. It has proved to be incredibly successful. According to the federal refuge managers, the property now holds five to six times as many birds as it did in the years before the restoration program – and it was famous even then.

On an evening during the hunting season a few years back, I stood with a small group on a dirt road bounding a “no-go” federal sanctuary in the middle of that property. We were there to watch the “fly-out” – the evening exodus as the birds that had rested safely there all day left to feed in the rice fields to the east. It was one of those special sunsets, brilliant light setting scattered clouds aflame in oranges and reds, shifting with the moving cloud patterns and declining light. Darkness seemed to rise from the ground, accompanied by a noticeable chill. No breath of air stirred. The roar of thousands of restless waterfowl just a few yards away provided the only sound – a joyous wild raucous noise that would have drowned out anything else. To a dedicated waterfowler, no symphony could ever sound better.

At about a half hour after sundown – with the sky still bright on the western horizon, the birds lifted as one and flew low over us. They did not flare at the sight of men as they would have done during daylight hours. Experience had taught them that they were safe. Time to eat. Nothing to fear. It was a sight to behold, yet a commonplace, occurring each evening just as certain and as surely as the predawn return from the feeding grounds to the sanctuary (an area, by the way, remarkably devoid of feed and sought solely for its attributes as a secure resting place). Nor is the happening unique. It occurs daily at every sanctuary in our valleys, public or private, whether formally established or a mere product of circumstance.*

What do we know about these birds, their age, the ratio of juveniles to adults, the relative representation of the various species in those enormous flocks? Insofar as the literature is concerned, little or nothing. Not surprising – for if we are not recovering bands from these birds and leave the sanctuaries totally undisturbed, how would we know? But that’s not the point.

As far as our so-called leaders are concerned, it is as though that segment of the population doesn’t exist. And yet for the future of the flight, the future of our sport, it may be the most important segment of all. For those are the breeders who will not die, who will survive to perpetuate the flight so long as we leave them be and don’t cave in to the killer call of those who would open the sanctuaries to the gun in the stated name of “hunter opportunity” and the real goal of commercial aggrandizement.

I suspect that the regulatory establishment and the compensatory kill theorists downplay the importance – and even the existence – of this segment of the waterfowl population because it is an embarrassment to them. How, after all, can they speak as all-knowing scientists when they know so little about something so large. And worse, a phenomenon that if truly understood would cut the heart out of their cherished theories? How would they explain such a thing to their clients – the commercial interests that thrive on hunting and currently drive policy in our sport?

Our experience in 2007 provides a provocative backdrop for these questions. Due to an unusually wet spring in the mid-continent, pothole counts were a much higher than normal level. We ended up with far more propitious habitat in the Prairie Pothole Region than birds to use it. Prime conditions without breeders do not produce ducks. Only ducks produce ducks. Whereas we can’t control the richness of habitat in those areas where we depend upon uncertain and cyclical rainfall, we have a degree of control over the number of birds that return to the nesting grounds in the spring.

If, in fact, large numbers of those sanctuary birds will survive to migrate again the following fall, even if they cannot find suitable nesting grounds due to drought or other condition, why not manage for optimum production rather than for optimum harvest? Why not assume that we can indeed “bank ducks’ after all and gain the benefit of the “interest” that such an account will yield when the habitat is there for them? Those birds won’t die anyway. Indeed, with the strategies they have learned, they will likely survive for another round or two of migration.

The compensatory kill theory gives us an excuse to manage for harvest. But if those adult birds imprinted on sanctuary ground have a life span much longer than the compensatory kill mavens theorize, then their theory is exposed as a codpiece for maximum killing, in support of those who thrive on that bias at the expense of the resource.

But there is more to waterfowl enjoyment than the gunning season. I like to get out into the marsh a week to ten days after the season ends. There are generally a few chores to provide an excuse – picking up decoys, looking for those that have slipped their moorings and floated away, stripping blinds, planting willow shoots, mindless fun to get the city out of one’s head. And it only takes a week for the birds to lose a good quotient of caution as they go about their business of choosing mates, getting ready for the breeding season. It only takes a week for the sanctuaries to thin out, to hold only a minor fraction of the birds rafted up there when the wetlands reverberated with shotgun blasts. Those birds celebrate their survival by carrying on overhead while I pretend to be engaged in important work. A beautiful sight in its own right, it carries a promise for the distant fall, nine months in the future when some of their less educated offspring may make a mistake in my skies.

There are those who theorize that we have created the phenomenon of night flying, sanctuary imprinted birds by over gunning. No one can prove that any more than they can prove that “you can’t bank waterfowl” and “the birds we shoot would die anyway.” At some point, empirical observation has got to transcend the demeaned status of “anecdotal evidence” and our scientists will have to recognize observable phenomenon taking place across the country.

Whether that thought takes root or not, it does seem a little strange that we have hung a supposedly scientific theory at the heart of waterfowl management on something like band returns when we know that those primarily originate with juvenile kills, producing a grossly misleading picture of the population as a whole – in a cave of ignorance so dark that we can’t even guess how gross is gross.

In a televised interview shortly before he resigned (or was fired) as Defense Secretary, I watched as Donald Rumsfeld tried to explain to bemused journalists the difference between “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns.” He was speaking of Iraq, of course, (or at least that’s what his listeners surmised from the context of the meandering cerebral dump in which he engaged) but there’s a point of more general philosophical significance lurking here. Slippery stuff, no doubt. But it seems clear at least to me that we have a major known unknown at the heart of our management philosophy – and have elected to treat it as an unknown unknown by denying its existence. I have not been able to contact Secretary Rumsfeld to see if he concurs with my analysis – but I am comfortable with it.

One truth cannot be denied in any case. If you construct a model primarily to prove a preconceived point – and then use that point to reinforce the model, you gain no more enlightenment than that of a dog chasing its tail in a dark closet.

Are you dizzy yet?

*1 A few weeks ago, I killed a banded mallard from a blind located roughly two hundred yards from that refuge boundary. A storm wind had the birds stirred up. We had wave after wave come over us from the sanctuary ground. The certificate sent me when I turned in the band stated that my victim had been banded as an adult in the spring of 2000. Proves nothing, of course; but according to compensatory kill dogma, a seven plus year old mallard is a true rarity, a senior citizen that has beaten long odds. I cleaned that bird. It was fat, robust, in great shape and tender off the barbecue, not tough, wizened or off in any respect. Proves nothing, of course.