Delta’s Town Hall Meetings: Taking Conservation Back to Duck Hunters
Launching a Grassroots Revolution

By Rob Olson President, Delta Waterfowl

For over 60 years Delta Waterfowl was the best-kept secret in duckdom, a science-based organization quietly conducting cutting-edge research on waterfowl and wetland ecology with little fanfare and even less notoriety.  

We were recognized and respected by wildlife professors, graduate students and waterfowl managers across the continent, but only a handful of duck hunters had ever heard of us.  Delta’s mission was to conduct the research and pass our findings along to other organizations and agencies for implementation.

Occasionally Delta pioneers like H. Albert Hochbaum would kick up a fuss about waterfowl regulations or the state of waterfowl management, but for the most part Delta confined its rabble-rousing to the waterfowl management community. 

When conservationists snubbed Hochbaum’s research showing that small, temporary wetlands are far more important for duck production than the large, permanent marshes that were being purchased with duck hunters’ dollars, Al kept objections “in the family”.

It would be decades before the management community accepted Hochbaum’s findings and set out to preserve the wetlands nesting ducks need. 

Half a century later another generation of Delta scientists demonstrated that managing predators can dramatically increase nest success for ducks. Their research—coupled with countless studies documenting the growing impact of predators—should have spurred the conservation world to action, but again Delta’s findings were ignored by conservationists who seemed to have lost touch with their constituents.

At the same time that duck production was slipping over large parts of the breeding grounds, so were the number of waterfowlers.  In Canada, the number of duck hunters fell 70 percent since the 1970s.  Yet despite this alarming trend—or perhaps because of it—the focus on waterfowl and waterfowl production seemed to be taking a back seat to broader environmental agendas.

The pendulum of our increasingly urbanized, disconnected society seemed to swinging away from hunting, and waterfowl conservation appeared to be reflecting these social shifts.

It became clear to Delta’s board of directors and scientific staff that if we hoped to secure the future of waterfowl and waterfowl populations, our mission would have to evolve.   If we wanted to see our research put to work raising ducks for duck hunters, we’d have to become outspoken advocates for the resource.

After all, without duck hunting, why bother with all this conservation work in the first place?  Surely there were enough mallards to keep bird-watchers happy.

Putting our research to work required the support of a membership, but we were a bunch of duck biologists who knew nothing about building a constituency.

We decided to become missionaries, traveling the country and spreading the word about trapping and Hen Houses, tools scientifically proven to hatch more ducks.

We weren’t sure where we were going and didn’t have any money to get there, but we knew we had to go.

Launching the Revolution

Stuttgart, Arkansas was duck hunting’s Mecca, so Delta staffers Jim Fisher, John Devney and I jumped into a rattletrap research truck and headed south in search of an audience.

We called ourselves the three duck musketeers. 

We lived on burgers and slept three-to-a-room, sharing cheap motels with smelly hunting dogs. We measured every expense in $25 increments because we knew we’d have to pay for the trip by selling memberships.

An average crowd was four duck hunters huddled in a corner.  It was a slow, tedious and often frustrating process.

And it was the best times of our lives.

We quickly figured out that most of the waterfowlers we met had two things in common: They lived for duck hunting and they were starved for information about the factors that determine how many ducks visit their decoys. They asked a million questions, and we did our best to answer each.

We were building a family of duck hunters one at a time.  We were harnessing the power of passion in a special way that can only be accomplished by a genuine exchange among waterfowlers.

Along the way we launched a grassroots revolution with the potential to push back the social forces that are taking the focus off of ducks and duck hunting.

The Three Duck Musketeers Hit the Road Again

Late last winter our phones began ringing off the hook with hunters asking “where were the ducks?”  After receiving so many calls we decided to revive our earlier “town hall meetings”, hitting the road to visit with hunters about the challenges facing ducks and Delta’s vision for keeping our rich waterfowling heritage alive.

Mossy Oak graciously agreed to underwrite the cost of the meetings and cover our gumbo bills, and the three musketeers were on the road again.

We had our power-point presentations down pat, but we were totally unprepared for what we were about to encounter.

If our earlier trips attracted three or four hunters at each stop, this year’s town hall meetings attracted 30 to 80 fired-up duck hunters a night.

Some of their questions were off-the-wall and some were challenging, but all attendees had one thing in common: An in-the-gut passion for ducks and duck hunting. In most cases we could have talked well into the night.

Most hunters were surprised and thankful that we’d taken the time to come talk to them. Clearly, hunters are ravenous for information about ducks and want to be heard by the people managing waterfowl in their behalf.

I got the impression hunters were looking for accountability from waterfowl management agencies and conservation organizations. They wanted to know what we were collectively doing for ducks and what our success has been.

I applauded hunters for their interest, telling them they could greatly contribute to keeping the focus on ducks, the breeding grounds and duck production through their passion and energetic pursuit of knowledge.

Southern hunters were also quite angry about the lack of ducks. They wanted to know why duck populations were so low and what, if anything, could be done about it.

Our fundamental belief at Delta Waterfowl is that by informing duck hunters about the process, history and current state of play in waterfowl conservation, we will empower them to secure positive change for waterfowl populations. Waterfowlers have a long and proud history of looking after the waterfowl resource but they have to know clearly what the challenges are to direct their passion and energy.

We quickly surmised on our tour of the south that many hunters’ expectations for the past waterfowl season were too high. They’d been lead to believe it was going to be a “banner year”.

We told them that the number of ducks they see is a function of that year’s spring breeding conditions within the Prairie Pothole Region, and last year’s conditions were only average: Below average ponds and an average population of breeding ducks does not equate to a banner hunting season.

We discussed the incredible importance of the breeding grounds. Research tells us that over 80 percent of the factors controlling duck populations are breeding-ground issues.

Nest success is the primary driver of duck populations—if they don’t hatch, they can’t fly south—but hen survival during the breeding season and duckling survival are also critical.  Hunters understood, but many were unaware that vast areas of the breeding grounds are no longer as productive as they once were.

The Problem and Some Potential Solutions

We described to hunters that the big challenge facing ducks is that they have too little nesting habitat and an unnaturally destructive predator population eating the eggs, ducklings and hens. We explained that to be successful, hens must be a “needle in a haystack” of grass nesting cover.  Instead, hens are often forced into small areas of habitat where they get hammered by predators. Hunters’ heads were nodding on these points.

Research tells us that for ducks, the haystack must be 40 percent of the landscape, and asked them to imagine trying to put 40 percent of their state into nesting cover for quail.  When they thought about it that way, hunters quickly grasped the enormity of the challenge of buying our way out of our duck production problems.

Next we described to them that farmers in vast areas of Canada and the US are starting to balk at further land protection and acquisition by waterfowl conservation groups. This puzzled the crowds.

We explained that farmers have to get bigger to be profitable, and increasingly see conservation interests as competitors for land. Because many in our audience were  farmers or had family or friends who farm, they understood the concerns of northern producers.

Once they understood the problems, hunters asked about solutions.

We explained Delta’s three-fold vision for our contribution to waterfowl management: Re-focus existing dollars on the breeding grounds, work with farmers to create a CRP-like program for Canada and expand the delivery of intensive management tools for duck production, including underutilized tools such as predator trapping and Hen Houses.

The three duck musketeers returned home feeling hopeful and excited about the future, because it was apparent that there is an army of passionate soldiers out there who will do whatever it takes to have ducks and hunting for future generations. We returned home feeling like maybe we can change our world.

We couldn’t help but think that our founding fathers—Aldo Leopold, Albert Hochbaum and James Ford Bell—would have been proud of Delta for taking science and waterfowl conservation back to the people who cared the most, the continent’s duck hunters.

As it turns out, this revolution is just getting started.