Sport: Ducks

More than 7,000,000 U. S. citizens took out hunting licenses this year. Last week, with the first frost on the pumpkin, farmers took down their cherished fowling-pieces, bankers assembled their shiny shotguns and the army of U. S. hunters took to the woods, the marshes and the prairies for their fall shooting. From Cape Cod to the Sierras, most of them were after rabbits. Many had their minds on quail, pheasant, grouse, squirrel, deer. But the most excited U. S. gunners last week were the 1,000,000 duck shooters looking forward to their rendezvous with canvasbacks, mallards, black ducks, pintails.

This year, winging south from Canada, come the heaviest flights of wild duck in ten years—20% more than last year, thanks to providential June rains in the Canadian breeding grounds and the efforts of Ducks Unlimited, a popular-subscription organization that has spent a quarter of a million dollars in the past two years restoring duck-nesting marshes in Canada.*

Around whiskey bottles, wherever duck shooters gathered at dusk last week† shop talk was the same. Oldsters held forth about the good old days when there were flights of 150,000,000 ducks instead of 65,000,000, when the season was 3½ months long instead of 45 days, and there was no such thing as daily bag limits (this year's daily bag limit is ten ducks, four geese or brant). Tyros tickled oldsters with their newfangled theories learned on the skeet fields. Everyone grumbled about the Federal "nuisance" regulations: no shooting before 7 a.m. or after 4 p.m.; no more than three shells in a gun; no live decoys; no baiting in duck-shooting areas. And many an ardent wildfowler gained an audience by quoting passages from the latest duck-hunter's Bible, A Book on Duck Shooting* by famed Sportsman Van Campen Heilner.

Sportsman Heilner's opus may prove as valuable a handbook for duck hunters as his Salt Water Fishing has been for big-game anglers. Packed between its covers—in addition to his memoirs and 150 pages of photographs—are: a guide for identification of 58 species of ducks and geese; a treatise on sun spots and their influence on the abundance of waterfowl; maps of the North American fly ways; statistics on the speed of birds; a chapter on U. S. duck clubs, ranging from the commercial clubs (no more private than a night club) to the exclusive groups with $10,000 membership fees.

Astounding to most readers will be Hunter Heilner's facts & figures on the 3,000 duck clubs in the U. S.:

> Some $76,000,000 is invested in wildfowl shooting properties.

> Some 3,000,000 acres of waterfowl marsh are privately owned.

> U. S. duck clubs give employment to 2,500 persons the year round, an extra 6,500 during the 45-day shooting season.

Welcome to all tyros will be Hunter Heilner's hints:

>Never shoot into flocks larger than seven or eight—you can't kill them all and you will only frighten away the others for a long time.

>In shooting mallards, decoys are unnecessary if you have a good duck call.

>If you suffer from cold feet, use rubber boots lined with sheepskin and no socks.