In the 1960s, when my camouflage pants were bell-bottoms, social consciousness was high. And one of the battle cries of my generation for any issue was “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.�?

Forty years later, duck hunters in the Mississippi Valley have made a startling discovery: They may be both.

That revelation comes after four tumultuous seasons across the country. From California to the Chesapeake, skies were often empty. But nowhere was the crisis more intensely felt than the Mississippi Flyway. From Minnesota south through the storied waterfowling grounds in Arkansas, northeast Mississippi, and the Louisiana coast, the most common phrase crossing hunters�?lips consisted of just four words: Where are the ducks?

Experts now are convinced that the winter behavior of ducks has been changed significantly by a warming climate and by shifting agricultural practices. But they also believe the major factor has been the hunting pressure put on a declining population of birds, which has been intensified in large measure by a regulatory system that creates unrealistic expectations for hunters.

It’s not all that complicated if we start at the beginning.

Boom Time As the 1980s came to a close, duck hunting pressure was at a modern low in many states. A long period of drought on the breeding grounds had resulted in 30-day and three-duck limits, and waterfowlers had fled the sport in droves. Even in states like Louisiana and Arkansas, where duck hunting is near-religion, duck-stamp sales fell by as much as 40 percent.

In the 1990s, things changed dramatically. Water returned to the prairies and duck populations soared to modern records. At the same time, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service began setting regulations with a formula called Adaptive Harvest Management. One reason for the move was an effort to make the process more transparent for the average hunter. By measuring spring duck populations, ponds, and other factors, the service would issue a standard set of regulations marked conservative, restrictive, or liberal.

In 1995, the first year of AHM, there were lots of ponds and ducks. The most liberal set of regulations ever were given to Mississippi Flyway hunters: 60 days and six ducks a day.

Buoyed by that news, hunters flooded back into the sport. Also, politicians stepped in to expand opportunities even further, allowing hunters in the North to begin earlier in September, and those in the South to go longer into January. Harvest figures across the region soared. North Dakota, for example, skyrocketed from 60,000 a year to 700,000.

These were high times—but hunters were setting themselves up for disappointment.

Bye-Bye Birdie “In retrospect, everything we were doing was adding extra pressure to these birds,�?says Rob Olson, president of the Delta Waterfowl Foundation. “Think about it. We had more hunters, who were more effective at hunting, who were hunting more days, and who spent more time in the blind than ever before.�?

The pressure was increasing not just in the sport’s traditional hotspots but also along the entire length of the flyway. In the North, the earlier seasons meant birds were being hunted at a younger, more vulnerable age; the North Dakota harvest figures revealed that much. And those liberal 60-and-six seasons (which have never gone away) keep the birds under heavy pressure much longer than ever before, on a daily basis.

"It’s not just the days, although that’s a lot of hunting pressure. It’s also the high daily limit,�?says Bruce Batt, chief biologist for Ducks Unlimited. “With the goal set at six ducks, you have people staying out in their blinds for more hours than ever before.�?

And the longer they sat in their blinds, the more difficult it became to reach a limit. “They were seeing fewer birds because of hunting pressure—and their presence only meant the ducks felt more pressure and stayed away,�?says Batt.

Research using radio collars on pintails wintering in Louisiana showed just how severe that reaction could be. Tracking data revealed that most of the birds deserted their preseason feeding and roosting spots after opening weekend and became almost completely nocturnal until the end of the hunting season.

To the great ire of some hunters, especially those in Arkansas, other studies found that ducks reacted to pressure by retreating to the only safe havens around: wildlife refuges.

Such pressure-related changes are only exacerbated by other factors, and weather had a marked effect. As the Wildlife Society reported last year, steadily warming temperatures have already had measurable impacts on wildlife behavior. For species such as mallards, which fly south only when a lack of food or water forces them to go, a snowless, 50-degree December in the Dakotas means that they can stay put. That has happened several times since 2000. And many researchers think that the new wave of no-till farming, which leaves much more waste grain in the fields, offers weather-dependent migrants added reason to linger.

Liberal Frustration So how could regulations remain liberal if duck numbers were down?

“The idea of AHM is to maximize hunter opportunity, which means allowing the greatest harvest possible without hurting the resource’s ability to sustain itself,�?says Delta Waterfowl’s Olson. “Well, all the data shows that liberal regs are not punching holes in the population, so there’s no reason—according to this system—for changing. But I think people are coming to understand that due to the amount of pressure these regs allow and how the birds react, it may be hard for the harvest numbers to show a negative impact, even as hunters see fewer birds.�?

That’s because as pressure increases, ducks become warier, and hunter success declines, and that means enough ducks have been returning to the breeding grounds each spring to keep the regs liberal.

Hunter Input The Arkansas Wildlife Federation put together a committee of its members, sportsmen all, after the 2002�?3 season to research just what was happening to their beloved sport. Six months later, after interviewing duck experts up and down the flyway, and poring over hunting data, they produced the 58-page report titled Improving the Quality of Duck Hunting in Arkansas.

This remarkable document, which began gaining currency across the nation after the terrible 2004�?5 season, includes a list of recommendations that reveals just how much these hunters learned: They want their state to reduce the season by at least one week, and to include two one-week splits for birds to rest. They want the limit reduced to five, with just three mallards, only one of which can be a hen.

They want spinning-wing decoys banned; more sanctuaries for ducks on public lands, not fewer; a limit on the number of hunters (especially nonresidents); and only morning hunting allowed on public lands as well as on nearby private lands.

“There’s plenty we can’t control—weather, some farming practices, drought,�?says Terry Horton, executive director. “But we can control the biggest single factor ruining our sport. That’s hunting pressure.�?

The bottom line is that hunters know where to look for the solution to this problem: in the same place they found the cause of it. >

SPECIAL THANKS TO FIELD AND STREAM MAGAZINE