Duck hunting is appreciated most by those who possess a natural bent for visual stimulation. A mallard backpedaling against an autumn wind, wings cupped over decoys. A bluebill wheeling to a waterfowler's call. A wood duck settling quietly at sunset onto a glazy pond. These are masterpieces in motion, and sights that Friday night many Minnesota waterfowlers will dream of in anticipation of yet another duck season, which begins Saturday.
This is true even though long gone are the good old days of waterfowling, when ducks blackened the skies during spring and fall migrations. Witnesses to these grand passages, when lingering skeins of birds rode the backsides of low-pressure systems to points south, are aging now or well gone, their fortuitous timing matched only by those who were alive when buffalo roamed and passenger pigeons soared.
Ethical behavior, the late conservationist Aldo Leopold once said, is doing the right thing when no one else is watching, even when doing the wrong thing is legal.
Leopold was speaking to, and generally about, cretinous farmers who plow ditch to ditch, leaving nothing for wildlife; tone-deaf developers whose blacktopped subdivisions are little more than pollution runways; and misanthrope "sportsmen'' who believe that without killing, hunting has no point.
But, in fact, these individuals and groups aren't the only ones responsible for the fortunes, or misfortunes, of ducks and other wildlife. We all are. The hunter who shoots over his limit or otherwise offends game laws is only the most obvious scofflaw. No better are the vast majority of Americans whose happy indifference to everything except their own well-being exacts an incalculable conservation cost, the bill for which, ultimately, will come due.
"We abuse land,'' Leopold said, "because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.'' To which he added, "I do not imply that this philosophy of land was always clear to me. It is rather the end result of a life journey."
Hunters often develop similar philosophies more quickly than the citizenry at large because to succeed afield, hunters must immerse themselves in, and learn about, nature.
Are wood ducks more likely to fly early on sunny mornings, or cloudy? If divers such as bluebills prefer freshwater shrimp over other foods, where can these morsels be found? If mallards feed in a cut-corn field at night, what chance is there they'll be in the same field in the morning?
