The first drake wood duck I shot as a high school hunter turned into a mounted disaster, proof that my future did not lie in science. That’s what happens when you botch the mail-order instructions from the Northwestern School of Taxidermy, in Omaha, and commit butchery on the continent’s most regal species of waterfowl. I flinch at the recollection.
But it’s also remindful of how lucky we duck hunters are to have the woodie still around, because we nearly didn’t. Unrestricted market gunning along with the loss of hardwood forests during the lumbering era came close to making the wood duck a historical footnote. Think of the extinct passenger pigeon, which also relied on hard timber for nesting sites and mast production. The last of those noble birds died in 1914 in the Cincinnati Zoo.
So how did one gamebird manage to survive but the other not?
In the early 1900s George Bird Grinnell, Aldo Leopold and other early conservationists raised the public’s awareness to the plight of wood ducks—as well as other diminishing waterfowl species. The 1916 Migratory Bird Treaty with Canada led to a US ban on killing wood ducks only two years later. When the ban was finally lifted, in 1941, wood ducks were well on the road to recovery.
True coast-to-coast inhabitants, woodies are shy, secretive birds that favor wooded river and stream habitats and standing timber near vernal ponds—those low areas that flood in spring and then dry out in summer.
Unless you’ve posted a river-bottom slough at dawn, waiting for an October sunrise to burn away mists and define the acorn-loaded oaks about you, you have forfeited one of waterfowling’s treasured moments. First you hear the woodie’s frenzied call: a high-pitched zeet-zeet that’s half whistle, half squeal. Better have the gun up, because these incoming little ducks fly like feathered jets and can challenge a snipe for aerial maneuvers. Not quick enough for a shot or two? Wait 20 minutes, and hope the birds return or others flit by. Or you can come back in late afternoon or the next morning.
Whooping cranes and the American bison have gotten more press even though the return of the wood duck is one of the greatest conservation success stories ever. Much credit goes to those duck hunters who build and maintain nesting boxes—and none do more than members of the California Wood Duck Program. Founded by the late Steve Simmons, a former wood-shop teacher from Merced, the group’s nesting boxes were responsible for hatching more than 100,000 ducklings throughout nearly 50 years.
“I shot my first wood duck when I was about 12,” Simmons once told me during a phone interview. “Dad said to pluck the bird, but for three hours I just looked at it, mesmerized by its beauty.”
Yeah, that’s why I messed up that taxidermy lesson.
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