The Missing Years:
The Rings On Our Family Tree Didn’t Add Up
Delta Waterfowl’s birth certificate says it was born in 1911, but the details of our existence prior to 1938 are somewhat of a mystery.
Here’s what we know: As duck numbers dwindled during the 1930s, Minneapolis industrialist James Ford Bell recognized the need for a science-based understanding of waterfowl behavior and offered his hunting property at Manitoba’s Delta Marsh as a research facility.
Bell solicited the support of Aldo Leopold who, following a series of events he later described as, “erratic as a flight of teal”, sent his student H. Albert Hochbaum to establish a research program at the marsh.
James Ford Bell
The year was 1938.
Prior to 1938 Delta’s role—well, that’s the part we’re not so sure about. The details of our existence leading up to Hochbaum’s arrival are sketchy.
Our long-standing claim of being “founded in 1911” is based on a faded document that contains the names of our founding fathers but little else. There are no financial records, no newspaper clippings or faded photos—not so much as an inscription in a book—to explain the lost years.
Our mission was clear: We’d sift through the annals of conservation history in search of the missing branches of our family tree.
The job began with the list of our original trustees. We traced their names back to 1911, and along the way discovered a little-known story about the unsung heroes of the conservation movement.
By Dan Nelson, Editor
By the end of the 19th century, North American waterfowl populations had been decimated by unrestricted market hunting, spring shooting, habitat loss and the advent of repeating shotguns. As drought seared the breeding grounds, conservationists realized that drastic measures would be necessary if the wildfowling tradition was to survive.
The gravity of the situation wasn’t lost on the shooting sports industry, and in 1911 Harry S. Leonard, vice-president of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, visited the New York City law office of William S. Haskell offering $125,000 in support of an organization that would preserve and propagate wildlife in the United States.
Within months the American Game Protective and Propagation Association (AGPPA), with a hearty endorsement from Theodore Roosevelt, was incorporated and representatives of the various sponsoring manufacturers werenamed directors.
When John B. Burnham became president, the businessmen promptly ceded leadership of the association to respected conservationists like George Bird Grinnell, Frederic C. Walcott and Augustus S. Houghton.
Burnham and the AGPPA breathed new life into the effort to protect migratory birds, and in 1913 the Migratory Bird Act was approved by Congress and signed into law by an unsuspecting President William Howard Taft as his final act of business before leaving office.
The Migratory Bird Act, also known as the Weeks-McLean Law, ended market hunting, eliminated spring shooting and authorized the Secretary of Agriculture to set waterfowl seasons. Still, the act likely would have been repealed or ruled unconstitutional had a not been for a clever ploy by Sen. Elihu Root, who quietly introduced a resolution allowing the president to enter into international agreements for the protection of migratory birds.
Root’s seemingly innocuous resolution, which effectively allowed the president to sidestep Congress, was approved, and in 1916 the U.S. entered into migratory bird treaties with Great Britain and Canada. In 1918 Congress bowed to unified pressure from conservationists, farmers and sportsmen by approving enabling legislation, and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act became law.
Delta Waterfowl Timeline
1911
1913
1921
1924
1926
1928
1929
1930
1931
1932
1934
1935
1938
1946
1951
1998
Aided by a series of wet breeding seasons, waterfowl populations were noticeably improved by 1921, but there was a growing concern among conservationists that steps must be taken to protect waterfowl habitat, which was already being consumed by population expansion and intensive agriculture.
The treaty act had given the government authority to regulate hunting, but it lacked funding to establish refuges or enforce the new game laws. There would be little help from the states, most of which were still resentful about losing control of hunting to the federal government and thus felt no responsibility to manage the resource.
Lack of public shooting areas was another concern. In 1921 Walcott, who still served on the AGPA board, wrote a powerful article called “The Necessity of Free Shooting Grounds”. The article, which appeared in the association’s Bulletin, was illustrated with a stamp-like sketch of Canada geese by well-known wildlife artist Belmore Browne.
Walcott convinced Sen. Harry New of Indiana and Congressman Dan Anthony of Kansas to introduce into the 67th Congress bills authorizing a $1 hunting stamp, the proceeds of which would be used to create refuges with adjacent public hunting areas. This was the first of many attempts to establish what would later become the duck stamp.
Thanks to the public support generated by Walcott’s article, the bill sailed through the Senate 36-17 only to fail in the House, where opposition from states’ rights advocates trumped endorsements from the Secretary of Agriculture, the National Association of Audubon Societies, the AGPA and others.
“If it (the New-Anthony bill) had been enacted when first introduced,” wrote conservation historian James B. Trefethen in 1961, “it might have saved millions of acres of wetlands and altered the future course of the waterfowl conservation movement.”
Despite an outpouring of public support, subsequent attempts to pass the Game Refuge-Public Shooting Grounds Bill failed in the 68th and 69th Congresses, partly because conservation interests ran into fiery opposition from hunter-turned-protectionist Dr. William T. Hornady.
Dr. Hornady called public shooting areas “slaughter pens”, and portrayed AGPA president John Burnham as a tool for the arms and ammunition industry, which he accused of “unsportsmanlike and selfish purposes”.
Hornady never missed an opportunity to chastise Burnham or anyone else who sided with AGPA’s goal of using a national hunting license to finance refuges and shooting grounds. Even one-time allies like Walcott were branded “game hogs” and “butchers”.
Hornady’s venomous crusade cost him credibility, and eventually he lost his position as director of the New York Zoological Society. Burnham’s reputation had been tarnished by the feud as well, and in 1926 the gun and ammo industry, in an effort to salvage AGPA’s tattered image, withdrew its support of the association.
The fourth attempt at securing a duck stamp came in 1929 when Sen. Peter Norbeck of South Dakota and Rep. Anthony introduced a yet another hunting stamp bill in the 70th Congress.
Following a bitter floor debate, a gutted version of the bill—the critical public shooting areas eliminated and the self-financing provisions replaced by a meager Congressional appropriation—passed the Senate.
Rep. August T. Andresen of Minnesota placed the amended bill in the House hopper, and after eight years of contentious debate, the emasculated version of the Migratory Bird Conservation Act sailed through both houses of Congress.
Some supporters felt the bill was better than nothing, but by 1929, biologists were already seeing the early signs of a collapse of waterfowl populations, and the paltry $8,000 Congressional appropriation provided by the Norbeck-Andresen Act was powerless to reverse that trend.
Walcott, who was elected to the Senate in 1928, wasn’t about to give up. In a move that would have far-reaching implications for long-suffering conservation interests, he and Sen. Harry B. Hawes of Missouri introduced a resolution to establish a Senate Special Committee on the Conservation of Wildlife Resources.
That resolution was adopted and Walcott was appointed chair of a committee that, according to Trefethen, “…was responsible for enacting some of the most important wildlife-conservation legislation ever written.” One of the most important of those pieces of legislation was just around the corner.
In 1931 Walcott’s committee resurrected two mostly forgotten proposals for funding refuges and public-shooting grounds: More Game Birds in America, headed by Thomas Beck, supported a one-cent tax on shotgun shells, while Burnham and the AGPA backed a $1 duck stamp.
In April of 1932, after hearing heated testimony from more than 100 individuals, the committee voted in favor of the duck stamp proposal. Sen. Walcott sponsored the bill in the Senate and Congressman Richard Kleberg of Texas introduced it in the House.
In 1934 Sen. Walcott met with President Franklin D. Roosevelt seeking his support for the duck stamp bill and urging the president to spend $1 million in Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) public works restoration money on the breeding grounds.
The duck stamp bill was signed into law by FDR on March 16, 1934, and Darling, who had been named director of the Bureau of Biological Survey less than a week earlier, was selected to design the first stamp.
Meanwhile, duck numbers continued to crash. Spring shooting and market hunting were still taking place because the Bureau lacked funding for enforcement personnel. No duck stamps had been sold and Roosevelt was yet to make good his promise to fund waterfowl conservation.
That summer Darling enlisted the services of Sen. Norbeck, and together they picked Roosevelt’s pocket for the money to launch Darling’s programs.
The Bureau’s management efforts thus secured, at least temporarily, the far-sighted director turned his attention to education. Darling understood that the effectiveness of waterfowl management would be limited by the quality of the researchers, managers and administrators available to execute it, and proposed national wildlife training programs be established at nine land-grant colleges.
To fund his $234,000 proposal, Darling looked again to the shooting and ammunition industry that 23 years earlier had financed the AGPPA. He invited representatives from DuPont, Hercules Powder and Remington Arms to attend a meeting at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York, where he pitched them on his concept.
C. K. Davis, the president of Remington, spoke so passionately in behalf of the proposal that he convinced the others to join him in underwriting the training courses, thus creating the Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit Program.
A few months later Darling and Walcott called a larger meeting during which they founded first the American Wildlife Foundation (AWF) and, three weeks later, the American Wildlife Institute (AWI), which assumed the duties of the old AGPPA.
And with that, our story has come full circle.
When Hochbaum was named scientific director of the Delta Marsh Research Station, his $1,000-a-year salary was paid by AWI, which was supported by the shooting sports industry and presided over by Walcott.
In 1946, some of the public duties of AWI were assumed by a new organization called the Wildlife Management Institute (WMI), and by the American Wildlife Foundation. Bell then ceded his Delta Marsh property to AWF.
In 1952 the American Wildlife Foundation changed its name to the North American Wildlife Foundation to reflect its continental makeup.
Walcott was one of the founders of the old AGPPA and one of the 12 original NAWF trustees. He and the rest of the foundation’s original trustees, men like Harry Hawes, Augustus Houghton and Thomas Beck, also served as directors of the Wildlife Management Institute.
They were all gone by 1998, the year NAWF’s name was officially changed to Delta Waterfowl Foundation.
Gone and mostly forgotten, even by us.
There are those who might say Delta’s connection to 1911 and the old American Game Protective and Propagation Association is tenuous, and they could be right.
On the other hand, the key players in the early conservation movement were so indelibly linked that their efforts and the groups they represented blended like gathering waves. The dizzying succession of organizations during the first half of the 20th century made it all but impossible to determine where one organization ended and the next began—or, for that matter, why.
Their disregard for the historical record suggests these unsung heroes were more focused on the causes that united them than the acronyms on their office doors. Perhaps that’s one reason their story managed to escape the notice of most conservation historians.
They did, however, leave one indelible set of tracks across the years. The old American Wildlife Foundation’s 1935 certificate of incorporation contains the following footnote: “This organization established in 1911 with the program continuous since then.”
As far as we’re concerned, that continuity still exists. What do you think?