They Shoot Ducks Every Year, but Conservation Efforts of Hunters of Grasslands Have Shown They Really Are. . . : For the Birds

Seconds before a fire bell clangs to jar the Salinas Gun Club into consciousness at 4:30 a.m., Pete Ottesen awakes to the wet nose of Lady, his chocolate Labrador, nuzzling him in his bunk. Hunting dogs know when the game is afoot.

Ducks know, too. About an hour later, with the pink promise of daybreak in the east, quackers around the historic Grasslands of California’s San Joaquin Valley will fly to sanctuaries where no hunting is allowed. They even know that duck season reopens Saturday through most of the state.

John Beam, manager of the California Department of Fish and Game’s Los Banos Wildlife Area, said, “On non-shoot days, 70% of the birds are out in the (shooting areas). On shoot days 90% to 95% are on sanctuaries. With their biological clock of when they get shot at and when they don’t, they know when to leave.”

Hunters understand the theories. The first thing Ottesen does is to stumble outside in his pajamas and ask, “Which way’s the wind blowing?”

No wind is bad. A north wind is best because it means a storm front, and ducks, contrary to what many believe, hate bad weather. Beam related the theory of Dr. Albert E. Hochbaum in hisbook, “Travels and Traditions of Waterfowl.”

“He thinks birds are driven by changes in barometric pressure in their internal ear (which) tells birds to move out of the way of a storm,” Beam said.

The old phrase “great weather for ducks” really means great weather for duck hunters. If in their flight the ducks see a flock of comrades loafing on a pond, they’ll assume it is safe to land there and rest. But the comrades are decoys, set out around a blind where hunters are waiting.

For that privilege the hunters will pay thousands to belong to clubs or sleep in pickup trucks in line for one of the limited spots on a public hunting area, hoping for the chance to sit in a hole in the ground, cold, wet, miserable and afraid to sneeze lest they alarm a potential quarry. Nobody really understands ducks or duck hunters.

“It’s part of the mystery and the magic of it,” Beam said.

It’s also a poor economic investment. There are 160 private clubs on the Grasslands Ecological Area’s 160,000 acres with names such as the Lonesome Mallard, the Loony Spoony and Duck City. Their members have endured long waiting lists to pay initiation fees of up to $50,000 and annual dues of $1,000 to $1,500.

And yet the accommodations at most of the clubs would need upgrades to qualify as rustic. Some lack indoor plumbing or electricity. Millionaires spend their weekends there and pump their profits into improving their habitat. Duck hunters are the backbone of waterfowl enhancement projects throughout the Grasslands.

The Grasslands are the state’s largest contiguous wetlands--30 miles long and 25 miles wide. While federal wildlife refuges cover 33,000 acres and state wildlife areas 16,000, private duck clubs make up the other 111,000. Charles van Gastel, a Grassland Water District director and treasurer of the Stillbow, one of the wealthier clubs, spent much of last summer with a backhoe cutting a two-mile-long, 12-foot-wide ditch for transferring water between ponds on the club’s 600 acres.

“Hey, we do shoot ducks, but I spend a lot more time out here working in the summer than I do shooting in the winter,” he said.

Most of the clubs limit their hunting to fewer than half of the 59 available hunting days each year, although birds seem plentiful. The Central Valley is the main route for 12 million, or 20%, of North America’s migrating waterfowl that use the Pacific Flyway, one of four major routes on the continent. The clubs want to make sure it remains that way.

“The thing that amazes me and makes me talk about duck hunters almost like they’re saints is their commitment to put their money up front for their avocation,” Beam said. “These guys are putting up more money than most other conservationists ever thought of putting up.”

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Until late in the last century, during each rainy season the San Joaquin River would overflow its banks and flood the four million acres of lowlands known as the Grasslands, maintaining a natural cycle of wetlands. Migrating birds were drawn when cattle ranchers Henry Miller and Charles Lux dug canals to irrigate pastures and grow grains. Ducks were hunted for market, not for sport.

Miller and Lux started selling their land in the 1920s, and duck clubs steadily displaced market hunting. When they also sold their water rights to the federal government in 1939, it spelled apparent doom for the Grasslands. The Friant Dam plugged the San Joaquin in 1944 and the government served notice to landowners that water would be shipped farther south starting in 1953.

The Grassland Water District was formed and won an allotment of 50,000 acre feet per year--not nearly enough but adequate when supplemented by 100,000 acre feet of agricultural drainwater.

Then, in 1983, came Kesterson. When deformities started showing up in birds at the Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge, authorities discovered heavy selenium contamination from the drainwater and shut off that supply.

“We knew nothing about (the dangers of) selenium,” said Tim Poole, a Grasslands biologist.

But they figured it out in time to isolate the problem to 1,200 acres of Kesterson’s 10,000.

“Thank God for Kesterson,” said Ottesen, an outdoors writer and lifelong duck hunter. “It saved 160,000 acres.”

Late last year the Miller-Bradley bill was passed, guaranteeing supplies of fresh water from the Central Valley Project of up to 180,000 acre feet by 2002, or 75% in a drought year--at no cost to the water district, and all for wildlife. The water started arriving in April. The Grasslands were saved. For now.

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Projections of a population boom around the Grasslands worry many people, including Gary Zahm, project leader for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s San Luis National Wildlife Refuge complex, which has converted 18,000 acres of farmland to wetland refuges in the last three years.

“We’re in a race against time to get this area protected,” Zahm said.

Ed Smith, supervisor of DFG biologists for Region 4 and chairman of the State Wildlife Area Habitat Committee, said that in 1989-90 when wildlife watchers contributed $223,000 through the California Wildlands program, duck hunting brought $16,993,974 through licenses and donations, as well as $11 million to the economy of depressed Merced County.

Much of the money is spent on what Smith calls “moist-soil management”--draining ponds at different times to grow different crops preferred by different birds. The average bird will eat up to one-third pound of grain per day.

“Hunters are a necessary ingredient,” Smith said. “You’re not going to get anybody else to take that responsibility.”

Butch Phillips, a hunter from Salinas, doesn’t belong to a club but was among those in line at Los Banos the day before a hunt.

“It costs me $150 (in licenses and ammunition) before I even pull the trigger,” he said.

But, Phillips added, “If they took away the hunting they wouldn’t be getting . . . from me.

The benefits go far beyond ducks. More than 200 species of birds use the Grasslands but only 23 are hunted. Songbirds are abundant in April and May. There are millions of resident blackbirds and one of the 19 largest migrating populations of shorebirds in the Western Hemisphere.

There is still hope to somehow reroute the drainwater that skirts the refuges in canals dating to 1870 and leeches into the wetlands. Diversion gates partly manage the problem, “but that doesn’t solve the problem,” said Don Marciochi, manager of the Grassland Water District.

Agricultural interests are helping. Tri-Valley Growers, a tomato co-op, manages its waste water for chemical balance of the land to grow healthy grass for nesting habitat for migrating birds. It also has offered part of its property for construction of the Grasslands Environmental Education Center.

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All of that has preserved the Grasslands as an avian wonderland. Bob Nardi, a director of the Grasslands Conservation District, runs a landscaping business in Pleasanton but lives on his own 270 acres in the northeast corner of the Grasslands--a 200-mile round trip commute.

“When I’m here it doesn’t matter,” he said, looking out his bay window at a sunset over a marsh that runs to his front porch. “There’s life here year-round. It’s worth it to me.”

Beam had said, “That’s what’s so difficult to get across to people who don’t hunt ducks. Just spending a day in a marsh is mesmerizing.”

A north wind is blowing. The birds are restless. The next morning Ottesen loads Lady in the back of his truck. She whines all the way on the short drive to the blind, then splashes happily around the shallow water as Ottesen spreads his decoys. A siren from the club signals the arrival of the shooting hour. Ottesen settles into his manhole-size blind, with Lady lying beside it.

Duck hunters have been doing this for so long that it’s easy to take it for granted.

Where the Birds Are

Water agreements and the involvement of duck hunters have rescued the historic Grasslands for more than 200 species of birds.