Old vs New Delta

[Bankermane]

MadDuck.org
MIDNIGHT IN MISSISSIPPI
By Charles S. Potter Jr.
On a clear January afternoon in 1983 I stood at the confluence of Black and
Steele Bayous at the northeastern corner of the famed Yazoo National Wildlife Refuge
near Hollandale, Mississippi. I was concluding my five month journey along the
Mississippi Flyway. For over 2,000 miles I had followed the ducks from The Pas,
Manitoba to the mouth of the Mississippi south of Venice, Louisiana.
I had at times seen memorable concentrations of ducks on their southward
passage, but few held my attention as the one this evening off the Yazoo. The growing
din from passing ducks created an incessant roar. Mallards chuckled, pintails whistled
and widgeon peeped. Wood ducks in black clouds emerged as dusk deepened. It was a
whirlwind of wings and duck music that lasted into the Delta night. A constant flight that
grew invisible in the darkness.
On a clear January afternoon in 2008 I sat, shotgun across my knee, in a pit blind
200 yards north of the confluence of Black and Steele Bayou, just off the northeastern
corner of the plundered and no longer duck-rich Yazoo National Wildlife Refuge. There
was not a duck in sight and as afternoon’s shadows lengthened eventually bringing on
sunset, I counted a total of 19 wood ducks on the wing. I downed one that my Labrador,
Bingo, brought to hand. Not a mallard quacked, nor a pintail whistled. With the exception
of the wood ducks, only cormorants and snow geese, neither of which was present in
1983, passed over my decoys. In the course of a quarter century a mallard Mecca had
been transformed into a duck desert. Had I not watched this transformation over the
years, I would have not believed what I did not see. I would not have believed the silence.
Yet, what I saw or, more accurately, did not see, is the modern day reality of much
of Mississippi’s wintering grounds, especially those in the region of the once famed
Yazoo National Wildlife Refuge.
From the earliest ages ducks flocked to winter in the Mississippi Delta, the vast
alluvial plain that lies in the northwestern part of the state between the Mississippi and
Yazoo Rivers. (It should not be confused with the Mississippi River Delta in Louisiana
which is some 300 miles to the south.) The cypress swamps, pin oak flats and flooded
sloughs held teeming numbers of ducks. It was often said that Arkansas had the public
relations machine and the ducks; Mississippi just had the ducks. Throughout the
Mississippi Flyway no state had a higher per hunter seasonal bag than Mississippi. The
Delta had little commercial duck hunting, relatively few private duck clubs and lots of
places to hunt.
In 1983 this is what I found and it stole my heart. So much so that shortly
thereafter I, along with a few friends, purchased land on Black Bayou directly adjoining
the Yazoo National Wildlife Refuge. It was the first place the ducks flew over when
leaving the refuge to feed. From the blinds one could hear the ducks on Swan Lake
quacking up a storm in the pre-dawn darkness.
In the decade of the 1980s through the mid 1990s, I heard few other shots
in this area. Duck hunting was a distant second in popularity to deer hunting. The duck
hunting proved consistently good from mid-November to late January. One could follow
by vehicle the ducks leaving the Yazoo National Wildlife Refuge for nearly 20 miles to
the east as they headed for the flooded soybean and rice fields off the Sunflower River.
Each December as the winter rains descended sheet water and backwater became
plentiful on this poorly drained land, providing a full buffet for sky blackening flights of
hungry ducks. The swarms over the stubble fields at a distance took on the appearance of
bees.
It was an ideal environment for ducks. The Yazoo National Wildlife Refuge,
much of which had been condemned in 1961 from the Swan Lake Hunting Club, was
created to forever provide the ducks with a winter home. It provided the ducks with a
secure base for a large portion of the southern Delta.
The refuge was intensively managed to attract ducks. Impoundments were
flooded and crops planted. No place in Mississippi held more ducks on a consistent basis
than did the Yazoo National Wildlife Refuge. And for miles in all directions surrounding
the refuge were farm fields stuffed with waste grain. The millenniums-old hardwood
forests that were still standing when Teddy Roosevelt came to this area to hunt his
famous bear had been cleared to plant soybeans and leveled to grow rice. These farming
practices were just what the duck ordered. Harvesting practices left plenty of waste grain
and combines cut deep ruts in the soft soil. Moreover, in wet years, low lying areas never
saw a combine. Thousands of acres of grain were left standing.
By 2008, Mississippi’s version of the “Cadillac Desert” greeted the few ducks
returning to their ancestral wintering grounds. A gradual change that seemed small at first
had grown over the past 25 years to be all encompassing. Fields that had swales were
leveled, fields that once flooded were now drained, ditches that held backwater were
cleared and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers did the rest to move the water downstream
in a hurry. The corps invaded the grounds of the old Swan Lake Hunting Club and ran
draglines to speed the waters’ flow. It cleared a swath through a cypress swamp – a path
of destruction over seven miles long and 300 yards wide that destroyed one of the largest
wood duck nesting grounds in the South. It left thousands of acres of once duck rich
habitat a wasteland.
In addition, the management at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decided to stop
planting much of the refuge with duck attracting crops. The pressure to provide avenues
for additional deer hunting led to fewer acres being flooded as well. In the course of a
few years in the 1990’s this key refuge was transformed. Yet, the ducks kept coming as
the grand buffet table throughout the south Delta was still set.
Importantly, the handful of duck hunters that once scattered about the region
suddenly were joined by hordes of new hunters attracted to the area by a burgeoning
commercial guiding business that erected blinds in many of the favored remaining duck
retreats. Where once ducks had been able to find refuge off the refuge as the Yazoo itself
became unusable, there grew an environment where if the habitat was there so was the
likelihood that hunters were as well.
2
Early into this century one could still stand on the bridge where Black Bayou met
Steele Bayou and see ducks throughout the day. One could go to Whiskey Shoot, Panther
Swamp, Lake Jackson or east to the Sunflower River and know the magic of the mallard
flight. Albeit reduced greatly, it was still impressive.
Then the other shoe fell, technology advanced the agriculture clock. Soybeans
that were harvested in early November were now cut in September. Rice that was
harvested in October now was combined in August. Fields where waste grain abounded
were now swept clean by improved efficiency combines and to make matters worse,
plowed under in preparation for next year. Fall plowing, a virtually non-existent practice
in years prior, became the norm. A place without food, water and sanctuary is not a place
for ducks. This is the new Mississippi Delta.
This grim reality gripped me with a sadness that I could not have imagined. I was
alone in a place where I was never alone. Friends both near and far seldom turned down a
chance to be in the “South Field” or the “West Field” for a duck hunt. Over the preceding
two decades they had come from as far away as England, Canada and California to hunt
ducks in a setting where the sky seemingly moved, where one could not say it was a
cloudless day because clouds of ducks were usually present.
On this evening in January 2008, it was just Bingo, me and a few frogs who had
taken up residence in the flooded corn. The sky as the sun moved westward towards the
River was cloudless and empty, the air devoid of the sounds of any distant gunfire, or of
quaking, whistling ducks. It was as though the life had been sucked out of the landscape.
No one stands on Main Street in Hollandale and looks up to see ducks flying
overhead anymore. The commercial guides have mostly come and gone. The landowners
seldom have enough ducks to warrant a hunt, and when they do it is usually a case of
here today and gone tomorrow. The Yazoo National Wildlife Refuge lays ravaged from
the scars of draglines, a testament that the government is often not the best caretaker of
precious natural resources. Over the dead bodies of the old Swan Lake Club members,
the government drained and plundered and squeezed the life out of this wilderness
cypress swamp.
As I picked up my last decoy I did not want to leave. Images of thousands
of ducks that used to drop in here each evening seemed as fresh as the smell of gun
powder. In my mind I could see the flocks silhouetted against the western horizon,
winging across the sky in waves, whistling in the air overhead, splashing in the water
before me. Where did they go? This I want to know. They are now almost entirely gone
from a place that had been their winter home since the beginning of time. As I slipped my
last decoy into the bag, my mind grappled with this tragic thought – the sun had set on
more than just the end of another duck season.
Charles S. Potter Jr. is the former chief executive of Delta Waterfowl. He currently is president of
the Max McGraw Wildlife Foundation.
If we take care of the ducks, the ducks will take care of us


Ain't it true ! !

[Duck Nawteek]

good read bankermane

[JMCMILLIN]

all i can say is .... dang

[Gumbo]

freakin sux but true....
I remember as a kid thinkin you couldn't kill out the ducks in mid and south delta...

[7mmREM MAG]

all i can say is .... dang

Yeah, what he said!

[weimhunter]

Good read

[rustypjr]

Good read.

[jacksbuddy]

thank you.

[bigwater]

Sounds identical to the area we hunt around silver city.. i can't speak for the past history of the silver city area.. but i can speak for the last 5 years.. and damn theres a lot of days where you won't see a duck hardly in the sky..

that part of the s. delta frustrates me too the point that I'd choose a couple of holes i know about in East Miss over the silver city area any day of the week..

[GET-N-RITE]

Good read right there, and yet so true.

[McClintock]

Touching. It makes me wish I had been hunting ducks longer.

[CB]

So true!!!!!!!!!

[Doc & Nash]

I remember hunting flooded breaks between Hollandale and Greenville when I was a kid. Back then shooting ducks was like taking candy from a baby. Mallards were the norm and anything other than a mallard got to fly with the exception of the Drake Woodie which were so few you were lucky to see one in a season. I specifically remember once, a hen woodie dropped in the dekes and no one would shoot, I started to ease up my gun and you would have thought I was gonna shoot the family dog. Everyone in the blind went for my gun, That is when I learned about the meaning of my signature.

Know more than ever the need for lower limits and less days is obvious. When it comes to duck hunting, more is not always a good thing. All the newbies we have hunting today is nothing other than another $$$$$ to the people promoting duck hunting. Cut the days and the limits and watch them disappear, along with all the guide services. Sure you will still have your occasional newbie, but he/she will be a person that was gonna hunt ducks no matter what. The remaining guide services will be the ones that truely care about taking folks out to introduce them to hunting, not the ones just wanting to pay for their lease or make enough money so they can hunt for free.

I look back at the last 20 yrs of duck hunting and it makes me sick, I personally place alot of the blame on DU for making duck hunting the thing to do. The people who were incharge of building the membership were far more successful than the biologist that were incharge of protecting the habitat. And I am sure somewhere along the way the marketing specialist out numbers the biologist 3 or 4 to 1, again the all mighty $$$$ came into play.

Worst part is, it is not going to get any better, that is unless we speak out. We sit by and watch, when the ACOE forces one of their projects thru, we sit by and watch as large tracts of land are gobbled up in the name of progress, we sit by and watch when the ducks do not show up at the places they once did, and we wonder why.

Before to long duck hunting is going to be more like bird watching, and when that happens I can't wait, because when we get out of the way and quit trying to make a dollar off of duck hunting and quit using duck hunting to get a group of people together to back a lobbiest who's only concern is who ever is paying him the most, maybe then things will change for the better. But until then the average duck hunters can expect the bag numbers to get less and less the lease prices to get more and more, and the number of hunters to grow to the point where no duck in its right mind would even think about flying South for the winter.

DU has a new President, His actions over the next year will pretty much determine the future of duck hunting in Mississippi. I guess the good side to that is that he is from Mississippi, the down side to that is I doubt that he hunts public property nor does he ever care to. (Odds are he probably hunted the nicest hunting clubs along the mississippi flyway this year.) When someone gets to that prestigous of a position, history has shown us that the only that they care about is what ever the person who is donating the most cares about. Sad how years and years of hard work volunteering can be bought so cheap. But hey, what do they care, they know have a great place to hunt for the rest of their life, while places like Yazoo, Askew, and The Mud Hole are continuing to be over crowded often with more hunters than ducks.. This year opening weekend at The Mud Hole experienced 27 truck loads of hunters for an area that is not any bigger than about 500 acers. But they all had their membership paid up to DU...... or at least the stickers on the back glass suggested such.

Good Luck Bruce, your gonna need it.

[bigwater]

hunt february

[GordonGekko]

a LOT of truth in that article...as painful as it is.....