I think they should do away with all mojos votex and etc…. Lets go back the old school way straight decoy's and good calling that’s all I use! Think about it, the second split in Louisiana the ducks flair from the mojos. I think all this is getting worst as the years go by. I feel all the states should band all that, and go back to just decoys, and if you cant kill ducks with just decoys and calling them, then you shouldn’t be hunting!

DU will fight to keep it because they cant hunt with out it...

If everyone else is using mojos and the ducks are flaring on them, then don't put out a mojo and throw out a jerk string. But puttin out a jerk string should be a no brainer every time.

I think we killed 300 birds the second split with a mojo!! I havn't used them for the last five years.. Get it with remote use only to get attention then turn off!! School is out!!!

remotes are the only way to use mojos. I like to put them somewhere that they are distorted by brush or something and use the remote to get a flash when the ducks are on the swing. not just sitting out in the middle of the spread propped up on a pole.

I just scout.

x2 And observe all the other "hunters" who thought it was a good idea to set up 50 yards away.

We're not priveleged here to have millions of fat corn fed mallards that will come to anything. I can call decent and my hunting buddy can call probably better than most ducks, and we have seen much better success with the mojo's, maybe because we are one of the few in our area that use them. Our wild mixed bag here isn't stupid, it takes a lot to get a duck to come here for some reason, seems like we work our asses off sometimes for minimal results, so if a remote controlled duck is the difference between going home skunked and going home with 2 birds, then so be it.

Ofcourse i a m old school, i have followed in my dad and grandpas footsteps since my family's hunting resort (LABOVE'S SHOOTING RESORT) on hunting birds with decoys and good calling, with the right spread sometimes you don't have to call but hey calling is the fun part, nothing like seing a passing duck thats not even interested cup up after you hit it with a greeting call.

im gona put in my two cents here!!

i think mojos should be allowed! we hunt alot of open fields and run 4 to 7 at one time! alot people say the birds are flaring off the mojos but alot of times it aint the mojos! theres bad calling, hunters not hidden very well and movin around! and late season the birds get shy!

my brother bought one of the new super mojos the automaticly turn on and off and different times, i think thats the way to go, i cant call, watch, and use a remote all at once! i agree with some of the other guys! . . . water movement is a big help especially on calm days! thats why im gona have a mallard machine before this season!!

phuck a duck

Friend of mine had a mallard machine, it wasn't bad except it would dig itself a hole after a couple of uses, we would have to go out there and move it because it was practically sinking. Real soft bottom where we were at though, maybe if you had a hard bottom it wouldn't be so bad.

Tank.... Ur way behind da curve dude. This shit has been beat to death a long time ago.

Good luck

No doubt. More regs for duck hunting are the last thing we need.

I still say a tag system like deer. 60 day season x 6 duck per day bag limit. Give me 360 duck tags and let me fill em as I please. If that means all in one day then so be it. Lol

I can't take credit for it... I heard it first from Poker1. Best idea I ever heard though!

There would have to be tags for each species because of the bag limits being different, but I could deal with that. Like Poker said, some days you'd be lucky to use them, then some days you'd work their ass over, it would make up for all the bad days. It's all thought out though, if we actually killed 360 birds apiece, the limits would be way lower. They don't want you taking more than 6 on your good days.

Interview with Dave Ankney

What do you think are waterfowl management’s major accomplishments during your career? What are the things management got right?

Ankney: One of the very first formal things in waterfowl management was the U.S. duck stamp program. It went a long ways to accomplish what it set out to do. I think at the moment is has probably become a little skewed and not enough money is being sent down to the breeding grounds and attempts to change that around, but weren’t successful. But overall, the duck stamp program has been a tremendous boom for duck hunters and for ducks.

Defend spending a bigger piece of the duck stamp pie on the breeding grounds.

Ankney: From everything I have read, everything that I know and everything I've heard, I’m convinced that if we have a limiting variable for waterfowl, it’s breeding habitat, not wintering habitat. That’s not to say the wintering grounds aren’t important, but at the moment I think there is a far greater threat to breeding habitat than to the wintering grounds. Obviously there’s some local places where that is not the case, but overall the breeding grounds and breeding success are what drives duck populations. So I think we would be well served if we spent nearly all if not all of that money on the breeding ground and breeding habitat.

I think the initiation of the breeding ground surveys way back when was a very important step because it provided us, that is waterfowl managers and waterfowl biologists and waterfowl hunters, the data that we can use and can now say that Lynch was right that it’s water that is driving the breeding populations and not harvest. So I think those surveys, the initiation of them, was a very important step. Finally, much more recently, is, I think, getting conservation order and spring seasons for greater northern snow geese is another important step in waterfowl management.

Conspicuously absent in your list there were the North American Waterfowl Management Plan (NAWMP) and the North American Wetland Conservation Act (NAWCA).

Ankney: Well, they started with some great ideals, but for a list of reasons, it never got very close to accomplishing those goals. A lot of money has been spent, but it’s hard to be able to say that that money was spent wisely and that we had any more ducks today than we would have had without it. I mean, we probably do, but not measurably. Not obviously.

Where did we go wrong?

Ankney: Well, on the breeding grounds and at least in prairie Canada, I think where we went wrong was getting involved in too many people-intensive projects, that is trying to put projects on the ground, like dense nesting cover and short-term things like paying farmers to not hay, when the big picture is to be buying or putting easements on upland habitats and prairie wetlands. I think very, very little of the money was actually spent that way. Certainly in prairie Canada, we’ve been losing wetlands a pretty scary rate ever since NAWMP came in and there doesn’t seem to any sign that that’s slowing down.

How about our mistakes, where did we go wrong?

Ankney: Overall, I think the biggest mistake we’ve made, the one that has caused us a horrible amount lost opportunity, has been the over-emphasis on harvest. Way back when, when the Migratory Bird Treaty was signed, clearly over-harvest due to commercial hunting was a very, very important thing to deal with, and by the 1950s I think by and large it was not an issue. But we continue to treat harvest as if it’s the still the same prime mover of duck populations as it probably was back in the early part of the last century.

We still have these ridiculous possession limits and nobody thinks about when the first Migratory Bird Act came in and the duck limits were 25 per day and 50 in possession. And that was before people had freezers, so it was very difficult to even be able to deal with 50 birds. Now, people, of course, have all kinds of ways to keep birds and now they are allowed twice the daily limit, so it’s 10 or 12 birds.
To get more specific in terms of the over-emphasis on harvest, the most obvious recent example with scaup is that everybody, including the director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, acknowledged the harvest wasn’t the problem, but they turned around and treated it as if it was. Nobody who looked at the data suggested that it could be harvest, yet we treated harvest. I suppose that's because it’s the only thing we could do, but that’s pretty simplistic. We treated harvest as the source of the problem so we’ve got the ridiculous bag limits all the way down to one for the one season, knowing full well it will have absolutely no impact.

Look at canvasbacks. We’ve gone through closed seasons, short seasons, one-bird bags and up and down and back and forth for years and years and there are just as many cans as when we started. The redhead is another example of a species that we treat as if it's in danger of being over-harvested; the pintail is the other ridiculous example, where for 20 years we’ve had highly restrictive bag limits and pintails continue to fluctuate in a lower level than they were during the '50s. If you can’t get any detection that you solved anything in 20 years, it ought to convince everybody we're approaching this from the wrong point of view.

When where you first introduced to Johnny Lynch’s “Escape from Mediocrity?"

Ankney: I think it was 1971. I was writing my Ph.D. proposal when I wrote to Johnny about getting some reports he had written about goose surveys he'd done in the arctic, and when he sent me those reports he put in a mimeographed copy of the original “Escape from Mediocrity.” The accompanying letter was just classic. I don’t remember all of the details in the letter, but his typewriter was old, and the letter O cut a hole in the page, so he said when you open this up it will look like I patterned my scattergun on it, or something to that effect. Reading that paper was just a real epiphany for me.

And did you save the letter?

Ankney: Oh, yes, I did. I’ve given it to Johnny Lynch’s daughter. His two daughters are setting up a small museum in Louisiana, so I gave her that original letter and the original copy of “Escape from Mediocrity.”

Why did you say that reading that paper was the turning point in your career?

Ankney: I grew up as a duck hunter in the ‘50s and ‘60s seeing 30-day seasons in Michigan with three-bird bag limits. Then when I was a grad student at Iowa State, there was discussion--I think it was about ’68 or ’69--about actually closing the mallard season, and at the time I bought into that--it seemed to make sense to me. I mean, duck populations are down, we probably shouldn’t hunt them or shouldn’t hunt them very hard. And, of course, I had waterfowl management classes, and everybody was of that opinion that harvest was driving duck populations. Sure precipitation is important, but boy, when they get that low we better be really, really careful so we don’t over harvest them.

In retrospect it didn’t really make any sense in the light of what was known about ring-necked pheasants and prairie grouse and rabbits, where we'd have some poor years and good years and we don’t close the season and we don’t assume that we are going to over-harvest the birds. We understand that when the hunting is bad, guys go watch football instead of going duck hunting and when it’s good they go out and hunt, and so negative feedback drives that just like it does a pheasant hunter and grouse hunter.
Lynch's insight into this is nothing new. When he wrote it in the early '50, the breeding grounds were dry and duck numbers were down, but he knew that it had been good before and predicted that as soon as it got wet, it would get good again. Which it did. And he never said, you know we should just never be concerned about harvest, but his point was let’s not get ridiculous here because harvest is in part self-limiting and I think we now know it’s more self-limiting probably than even Johnny thought.

Can a case be made that having liberal seasons year after year, regardless of the biological consequences or lack of consequences that it’s sending a bad message to the non-hunting public?

Ankney: I don’t think the non-hunting public really cares. That’s something that I think has happened over the last 20 to 30 years. The anti-hunting crowd is not nearly as big or as vocal as it used to be. The general public sees too much evidence of the fact that there is plenty of wildlife out there with Canada geese on golf courses and dead deer all along the highways and raccoons in everybody’s garbage cans. They know hunting is going on and they don’t see any sign that we are running out of mallards or geese, so I don’t worry about it from that point of view at all because we’ve had liberal seasons for 15 years or whatever it is now and we’ve still got, look how many ducks we had this spring.

How would you compare the '90s to the '70s to the '50s for duck populations?

Ankney: I don’t have a good feeling for the '50’s, I was just a kid and buffleheads and goldeneyes were my main species that I hunted and, of course, you never know if their populations are up or down anyway. But certainly I did do a lot of hunting in the '70s and the '90s and and I think duck numbers are probably as good now as they were back then. Certainly the breeding population numbers say they are. We have fewer scaup and pintails today, but we’ve also got species like gadwalls, green-winged teal and shovelers that are way, way higher numbers than they were in the '70s. So some species have done very well and we’ve got a couple of species that aren’t doing as well, but you’ve got to remember we still have 3 million pintails and 4 million scaup.

Let’s shift gears here for a second. You communicate regularly with your peers. Do you look at yourself that, as kind of a watchdog?

Ankney: Yeah, I guess, maybe, I don’t know. Yeah, I guess so. Most of this doesn’t directly effect me personally, but as much I love hunting and waterfowl, I guess it does bother me personally to see what I think is the wrong thing being done. I realize just how big of missing piece hunters have been the waterfowl management puzzle. We’ve got a situation where deer hunters and turkey hunters can directly communicate and be heard about how deer are raised or turkeys are raised, but duck hunters are a step or two removed from the people who are making the regulations, and that's true in both Canada and the U.S. Duck hunters don't have much of a voice. Of course, there’s the flyways reps, and some of them do a decent job of representing their constituency, but I think there is a lot of them that don’t do a very good. The flyways don’t speak in a unified voice and the hunters, overall, have no way of being heard. So that’s why I’ve been so pleased to see Delta Waterfowl step up and try to fill that void, that is, be a voice for waterfowlers at local, state, provincial and federal levels. I think Delta is already having a pretty good impact and I’m sure that’s bound to grow, but there is still a long way to go, I think.

Take Scaup as an example. Delta was in the forefront of that issue. They called together that blue-ribbon panel of experts, and that panel’s report more or less tore the Fish and Wildlife Service's scaup model apart and pointed out how seriously flawed it was. But what did the feds do? They just said too bad, we’re going to do what we want to do anyway and that’s what they’ve done. That’s where I think Delta needs to go, because people will probably remember the Environmental Defense Fund’s long and unofficial motto which is "So Sue the Bastards", and they’ve been very, very successful. Not that I necessarily support everything the Environmental Defense Fund has done, but their approach is to do what it takes to be heard. Same thing about the Humane Society. They get Fish and Wildlife Service to dance their tune occasionally.

The scaup issue was the perfect time for hunters to step up and force the Fish and Wildlife Service to defend what I would call the indefensible in court, that is their scaup model and the regulations that they were probably getting based on that model. I thought it was a golden opportunity for Delta to do that. I’m sure there various good reasons why they didn’t, but if that isn’t done, it’s my opinion that the feds are going to continue to get overly restrictive and further into modeling instead of making decisions that are not in the best interests of either waterfowl or waterfowl hunters and cost us days of hunting opportunities.

Aside from academics, retired managers and researchers, there really isn’t a voice for the resource. For political reasons, most managers can't speak out.

It used to be that state guys and game wardens and so on spent a lot more time with the hunting public, which doesn’t happen much anymore. Duck hunters have never had an organization that they could belong to that would take their views to the state and federal levels. The NRA has done a fantastic job of representing gun owners, but there’s nobody representing duck hunters. That's why I’ve been so pleased that Delta is now seeking to fill that void. Delta did everything possible getting that panel together on the scaup issue. They put it out and everybody saw it and it was more or less ignored. I mean the feds just blithely smirked it.

Is that partly the fault of hunters? We fought for that scaup thing and we had people in the Mississippi Flyway who were on our side, but by and large, hunters who don’t care about scaup said I don’t care, it doesn’t affect me.

That’s true. It occurred at the state level, too. Minnesota and the Mississippi Flyway, I mean they really did as much as they possibly could do, short of suing. Even Louisiana, the biggest of scaup of the states in the U.S., didn’t speak out because they said yeah we kill a lot of scaup but our hunters aren’t really that interested in them.

How many people do you communicate with on a regular basis through your e-mail chain?

Ankney: Oh, probably 50-60 regularly.

Who's on your list?

Ankney: Managers, researchers, waterfowlers and some media people too.

Do you feel like it’s making a difference? Or like you’re swimming upstream sometimes?

Ankney: I really thought we had a chance to put it all on the scaup issue and we didn’t, and that was disappointing. On the other hand, the snow goose issue went just the opposite. We did very well there for hunters, I think.

Looking into your crystal ball, what do we have to do assure that we are going to have duck hunting for the next generation and the generations after that?

Ankney: Well, first of all, I guess, we go back to Johnny Lynch’s point that as along as we have water on the prairies and breeding habitat, we’re always going to have waterfowl. We’ll always have waterfowl in huntable numbers. We may not have as many as we’d like to have, but again, we don’t need to. It’s nice to get a limit of ducks every time out, but we don’t need to get a limit every time to have had a fun experience. There's a lot more to waterfowling than simply that.

But to ensure the future of waterfowling means that we’ve got to ensure that we’ve got people who want to hunt, and that means recruiting new hunters into our fraternity--kids primarily, but also a lot of older people who because of where they grew up never had a chance to go hunting but would like to try. I think Delta’s programs and other programs like the National Wild Turkey Federation’s program recruiting people who aren’t kids and especially women is exactly what we need to be doing. Giving people the opportunity. We know that not everybody is going to want to be a hunter, but there are a lot of hunters out there who just don’t know any other hunters so they’ve never had a chance. As long as we’ve got people who are passionate about waterfowl, I think we’ll always have waterfowl and waterfowl hunting. But if there’s nobody that cares, I guess then, nobody cares. But I don’t see that happening anytime soon.

If we lose CRP and all of the high-quality wetlands embedded in CRP, will duck numbers still be just a matter of whether we get wet or not?

Ankney: Well, the highs will be lower and the lows will be lower. Ducks will still populate and will still fluctuate depending on water conditions, but with fewer basins and the less cover, then no matter how wet it gets, the population won’t get as high as it was. Similarly, when it gets dry populations will be lower than they would have, but I can’t see it ever getting to the point where we aren’t going to have huntable waterfowl population. Even with all the habitat we've lost on the Canadian prairies, when it gets wet like (last) year, the ducks still respond. There is still enough habitat to produce an awful lot of ducks there. That doesn’t mean that we don’t need to try to stop the rate of loss and try to restore some of what has been lost, but my sense is things aren’t as good as they could be, but they’re not necessarily as terrible as we might sometimes think.

I think is in our hands, that is waterfowler’s hands. It’s not as much in our hands as it should be and we’ve got to somehow figure out how to get a little bit more control of the process of how hunting is managed. I see that there is discussion about how to do that going around at the higher levels of the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Canadian Wildlife Service and so on about bringing the hunters into the process and trying to figure out what hunters want and so on.

Good read, that put a lot of light on it for me. Didn't know the harvest was so insignificant, and that we were pretty much unheard as hunters on the whole situation.