Focusing on Mallards Part VIII: Game markets in the late 19th century—fast transportation and cold storage

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It may be that when the law was enacted, that no such thing was contemplated as that game, killed in the autumn of one year, could be preserved, as in this case, so as to be sold a year afterwards within the permitted period (Phelps v. Racey, 1874, p. 238).

Content Warning: This multi-part blog post contains references to hunting, agriculture, and research practices of killing birds and other wildlife. If you decide not to read on, I respect and admire your choice.

Photograph of a Mallard hen and her downy ducklings exploring a small backyard dragonfly pond. The hen is standing up in shallow water that doesn't reach her chest, while her ducklings are clumped near her in the water, some looking toward her and others showing interest in the pond's stone border.
Photo from the Mallard archive, 2025. Spring is Mallard duckling season, in our tiny suburban dragonfly pond.

[This post picks up where the last left off. For recaps and links to the rest of the series, please visit my Mallard page.]

Unlimited markets for a limited resource

In the final decades of the 1800s, advances in transportation and cold storage expanded market ranges for professional hunters in the United States. Hunters could travel farther, and faster, in search of game. They could ship their harvests to distant markets within hours or days of slaughter, prolonging freshness with ice and/or refrigeration.

Transportation infrastructure was a national priority, supported by massive public and private investment. Rail lines branched and intersected. Paths hardened into lanes and roads. And the waterways thrummed with engine noise.

Sepia-toned image of a long truss bridge over a smooth body of water. The bridge has at least five sections set on stone pilings. A large box-like feature hangs over the bridge's final section, secured within the braces of the tallest truss-element. A bare path/lane runs across the foreground, and a treeline is just visible in the far background.
Photo from the family archive, c.1910(?). Based on its archival context, most likely location is South Dakota.

Cold storage garnered fewer headlines, but gained momentum of its own. Ice markets flourished. Inventors and investors patented cooling devices. Shippers outfitted railcars and boats to transport frozen goods. Spurred by a growing beef industry, Texas became an epicenter for ice production.

With so much infrastructure falling into place, US meat-and-feathers merchants faced a bright and profitable future. All that was needed, to fulfill the promise, was unlimited access to game.

It’s no coincidence that game populations were crashing.

I’m not an economist, but I understand the simple arithmetic of supply and demand. Heavy demand combined with dwindling supply equals increased resource value. And increased value bounces any resource into a complex Venn diagram of economic, social, political, and legal spheres.1 All of these spheres overlap at a historically contentious battleground: regulatory oversight.

Hunters in the Mallard Mine

As I’ve noted before, hunters have always held majority stakes in the US portion of North America’s Mallard Mine. And among the various hunting interests of the 1800s, sport and leisure hunters held majority stakes in legislative bodies. So the regulatory winds, in US branches of the Mallard Mine, blew in favor of sportsmen and against market hunters.

For the sport and against the market. Sounds weird, doesn’t it? Especially in our present (2026, US) context.2 (Maybe it’s not so weird, after all.)

Mallards in the Marketplace

Imagine rolling up to the latest fad grocery chain in search of a freshly slaughtered wild Mallard. Then across to the big-box craft store for a bag of mottled hen feathers (not the cheap domestic feathers—wild-grown only, please). Maybe add an impulse purchase of those expensive iridescent-patched primaries, plucked from a young hen who had been slaughtered, shortly after her first molt, on a production marsh leased out by a hunting conglomerate.

Photograph of a Mallard hen standing in a patch of mown grass in our small suburban back yard. Our wooden fence and a pair of landscape bricks are visible in the background. The primary feathers of the hen's wings are mottled shades of brown, like the rest of her feathers, but with prominent mid-wing patches of bright blue bordered with black and white.
Photo from the Mallard archive. This hen, who visited in 2010, arrived before my Mallard obsession took hold. Check out the blue patches on her wings. In bright sunshine, Mallards’ wing patches glitter and gleam with iridescence.

While it all seems probable enough for dystopian fiction, it’s impossible on an industrial scale. In the US, anyway. Not with today’s populations, both human and duck. Not with our neglected wetlands and wild places—those small, discontinuous, poorly funded refuges in which many wildlife species survive but cannot thrive.

Mallards in the Zeitgeist, 2026

In today’s version of the US, Mallards are scenery, not agriculture. Wildlife, not livestock.

Photograph of a Mallard hen and her ducklings, taken in 2025. Four of the ducklings, in focus in the foreground, are perched on the stone border of the dragonfly pond. The hen was still in the pond, visible in the blurry background, watching over her ducklings.
Photo from the Mallard archive, 2025. Here, four downy Mallard ducklings have climbed onto the stone border of the dragonfly pond while their mother watches from the background.

Wildlife is for nature documentaries; livestock is for grocery shelves.

Yes, sport hunters often (sometimes?) eat their kills. But most of us don’t hunt anymore. Many of us couldn’t afford to hunt waterfowl, even if we had the tradition and urge.

But in the 1800s version of the US, everyone knew a hunter or two. Everyone ate wildlife.

Local market hunters held positions of near-fame. Sawdust-lined crates and barrels stuffed with carcasses of wild-sourced birds arrived, sometimes hourly, at merchant stands. Restaurants served pigeons and songbirds. And Mallards. Such was the norm.

Such was the norm until the pigeons went extinct. Until songbirds and Mallards disappeared from many fields and marshes. Until fields and marshes, themselves, disappeared. Until sport and leisure hunters grew restless under the burden of needing to search farther and wider for binge-shooting opportunities.

Until state legislatures took ownership of wildlife resources.

Gatekeeping the mine (and throttling the market)

Under state ownership, which started in a few states in the late 1800s and quickly trended up, professional-grade harvest equipment was banned from the Mallard Mine. From all the wildlife mines. No more batteries of guns. No more canons or punt guns. These equipment-level prohibitions served as implicit harvest limits.

Sent into the Mallard Mine with only a single- or double-barreled shotgun at hand, like any average sport hunter, market hunters could still harvest hundreds of ducks each day.3 Just like the sport hunters did. But they could no longer harvest hundreds with a single shot.

After leveling the equipment field, invested legislatures set fences around their various wildlife mines and locked the gates. States opened the gates seasonally and sold passes (hunting licenses) to residents within their states. Some states sold higher-fee non-resident licenses.

All of these efforts to limit operations in the Mallard Mine were statutory nods to sport-hunting traditions. As long as market hunters hunted like sportsmen (like European sportsmen) and harvested like (European) sportsmen, they could, during harvest seasons, sell their harvest.

Such gatekeeping didn’t hamper the sportsmen. Sport and leisure hunters only binged intermittently, anyway. Adjusting their schedules around close seasons wasn’t too painful, and observing close seasons supported sportsmen’s claims to a sporting tradition. Seasonal abstinence equated to preserving wildlife, along with the traditions of sport hunting, for future generations.

Zoom photograph of a Mallard hen and duckling. Focused tight on the hen's profile, the photo captured her after she surfaced from dabbling underwater. A large droplet of water had just fallen from the tip of her beak. One of her downy ducklings was peering toward the camera from just behind her, framed by the silhouette of her neck and beak.
Photo from the Mallard archive, 2025. Waterfowl conservation, in the US, was started by sport hunters and was/is shaped by sport priorities.

On the market side of things, this statutory gatekeeping might have triggered immediate and massive change. Might have, but didn’t. Market resilience was intrinsic to the system. Professional hunters had already adapted to travel, to following game. As wildlife fled from progress, hunters flocked into states with undeveloped landscapes. And as states bore down on the market, hunters fled to states with looser (or non-existent) game laws. Enabled, of course, by shipping and storage infrastructure.

Meat and feathers kept flowing. As did profits. For a few more decades, anyway.

An aside about perspective: Triangulating time

Among my immediate family, the people, climates, and landscapes of the decades between 1880 and 1940 are lost to time. All of the living witnesses have passed, leaving only ephemera.

Ephemeral clutter fragments my perspective. Each inherited photo and letter, every generational trinket and token glitters with potential. They are facets of memory chipped from the massive face of the past. They are happy and sad, simple and fraught, heart-full and lonely. They are not the impulse behind these Mallard posts, but they’ve gotten involved. (It’s not their fault.)

Scanned image of a four page, handwritten letter, including the envelope. The pages are yellowed with time, but the neat cursive writing is still legible. The tiny envelope is simply addressed, "Mrs. Charles Linton/Calamus, Iowa" tilted across the center, with "Clinton County" written upside down and tilted in the opposite direction. A two-cent stamp is in one corner.
Four-page letter, dated May 31, 1892. (Full text in footnote4). On page two, the letter reads: “Say Ellen I will tell you something but don’t you breathe it to no one will you. I intend to be married in December. …Now Ellen I told you because you told me and you won’t tell any one will you?”

Initially, I intended to resist the urge to supplement these posts with family ephemera. As that resolve weakened, I decided to dip only into the anonymous portion of the archive. The nameless photos.

Now, all of my fences are down. I’m over a century deep in a family archive that is haunted by forgotten names and places, reaching out to known family.

Tinted photo postcard, c. approximately 1900. Text on the image reads "Union Depot, Corinth, Miss." The image shows a train depot situated at intersecting tracks. The two-story depot features a round turret-like construction on the front, and the tile roof of the turret is tinted red. Two tall poles on either side of the turret support wires from power poles that line the streets to either side of the intersection. Several men are standing in front of the depot, and houses are visible along the streets.
Postcard from the decades around 1910. I wanted to use this image to illustrate one of the passages about trains and shipping, but I couldn’t bear to separate it from the text on the back: “Dear Birdie, I received your card O.K. was glad to hear from you and to know you are well and having a good time. I’ll be glad when you come back to work. We are getting along fine at the mill but miss you so much. My little brother Ernest was drowned in Lake Como last Sunday evening and was buried here at the City Cemetery Tuesday. It was extremely sad to have to give him up. Answer soon. Your Friend Gertrude Brady.”

I’m not comfortable, this deep in history. Family history. US history. Mallard history.

I am, after all, a science and nature nerd. I like my histories either so far back that only science can illuminate them (cosmology and paleontology) or immediate enough to see for myself.

Prior to all of this Mallard reading, my journeys into history as a knowledge discipline have been forced marches through coursework and curiosity tours through museums. Anecdotes and specimens. All trees and no forest. Not even trees, really. More like twigs and leaves.

What’s more, my lens for near-distance history is warped. Warped by experiences that are both universal and intensely, unspeakably private. By decades spent in folklore, fiction, and dreams. For much of my life, I’ve been more comfortable in mythologies and multiverses than my own existence. I’ve had little interest in, or use for, actual history.

Now, I appreciate how much near-distance history matters. Or should matter. Especially to a science and nature nerd.

History has become part of my purpose, in these Mallard posts. Historical context. And, given my objective and subjective weakness as a history student, I need personal anchors for context. Even if the anchors are ephemeral.

Sepia-toned image from the family archive. A chicken shed and early-model car are in the background, behind a garden that is either winter-weary or spring-immature. A blonde toddler in white clothes is sitting on the ground at the edge of the garden. A white kitten is standing beside the child. The kitten's body language makes me think it was probably being petted in the moments before the photo was snapped.
Photo from the family archive, c. 1910(?). This image has many recognizable elements—a chicken coop, a vintage car, a garden plot, and a toddler with a kitten—and yet is completely anonymous. All of the tensions between familiar and familial move through this photo, just like they move through the rest of the archive.

Taking the game to court

Pennsylvania field to Massachusetts table

On July 15, 1879, in Boston, Massachusetts, George C. Hall and an unnamed partner served a woodcock5 dinner to a paying guest.

At the time of the meal, woodcock season was closed in Massachusetts. Woodcock hunting season, as well as selling, buying, or possessing season. All seasons closed.

Statutorily, this particular close season was an impenetrable umbrella of protection staked out over Massachusetts’s woodcock.

Pennsylvania woodcock, though, were literal fair game. So Hall and his partner served Pennsylvania woodcock to their paying guests in Massachusetts. Loophole exception, unlocked.

Litigation ensued. And, in 1880, the woodcock-dinner tussle landed in front of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.

“The question presented by the case at bar is whether, in the absence of…explicit manifestation of the intent of the Legislature, the words ‘any of said birds’ are to be construed in the larger sense, as meaning any woodcock, partridge or quail whatever; or in the more restricted sense, as meaning any woodcock, partridge or quail taken or killed in this Commonwealth within the times mentioned” (Commonwealth v. Hall, 1880, p. 411).

The Court bootstrapped a series of logics, in their written opinion. Here’s a sample paragraph, quoted in clause-laden length:

“The object of the statute is to protect these birds during the breeding season, and for such a reasonable portion of the year as may prevent them from being exterminated or their numbers diminished in this Commonwealth. The mode in which the statute seeks to attain this object is by punishing the taking or killing of such birds in this Commonwealth during the times specified, or the buying, selling, offering for sale or having in possession in this Commonwealth, during those times, of birds so taken or killed; and by enacting that the possession in this Commonwealth at such times of any birds of the kinds specified shall be prima facie evidence to convict; leaving it for the defendant to prove, if he can, that the birds found in his possession were not taken or killed in this Commonwealth at a prohibited time. So construed, the statute is reasonably adapted to carry out its object, and is free from all constitutional difficulty” (Commonwealth v. Hall, 1880, pp. 412–413).

Sepia-toned studio-style photograph of a toddler. The child is dressed in an elaborately knitted outfit (perhaps an early version of the onesie?), complete with a tasseled hat and shoe-cover leggings. They are standing in a wooden chair posed against a cloudy background. I suspect there is a treat clutched in one or both hands, as the photo appears to have been snapped mid-snack. The child is peering just above and to one side of the camera with an expression that strikes me as mild confusion mixed with a touch of reluctant obedience. As if someone has told them to "stand right there and don't move a muscle" (as I was often instructed, for school photos), but the instructions were confusing because standing is chairs is typically discouraged and how can you stand still without moving a muscle but also enjoy the treat you've been bribed with? (I obviously read too much into these photos...)
Photo from the family archive, c. 1900(?). I hope this anonymous child grew up happy and healthy, with plenty of patience for difficult reading.

Ouch, says every writer who ever wrote. And every reader who ever read. Anyone committed to understanding what was actually said, in that paragraph, will have to read it more than once.

After reading it more than once, some powerful implications live within and between those lines.

First, the Court acknowledged the reality of human-driven species extinctions, accepted the benefits of species protection, and approved statutory intervention as a preventative measure against exterminating game birds. That’s a notable set of statements, history-wise.

Next, the Court positioned legislative interference in the game market as a non-issue. The statute outlawed selling and buying Massachusetts’s woodcock during close season, and the statute was “free from all constitutional difficulty”.

Finally, the Court placed burdens on proof on offenders. Not the other way around. Officials empowered to enforce this amendment didn’t need to prove the intrastate provenance of woodcock. Instead, anyone caught with a woodcock, during close season, had to prove that they had sourced the bird out-of-state.

Which, in this particular case, was stipulated by both the prosecution and the defendants. The woodcock cooked and served in Boston, in 1879, was a Pennsylvania bird.

Without further ado, the court ruled that Hall had not violated the statute. The law applied only to Massachusetts’s woodcock, so Hall and company had served a legal meal to their paying guest.

Aside: I am “…unversed in the mysteries of the subject…”

I’m old enough to remember spinning a dial, to change TV and radio channels. Static, music, static, voice, staticstaticstatic, voices and music.

Blurry photo of a contact-paper covered nightstand/bookshelf. The stand was, at this point, being used to display some of my horse collection, a few houseplants, and books. The room was painted yellow with yellow gingham curtains. On the floor beside the stand, my radio/cassette player was a large-ish gray box with a long antenna, thick buttons, and a dial-type radio.
Photo from my personal archive, c. 1985. This is a blurry glimpse into my childhood bedroom, including the earliest of my horse collection, some of my favorite books (the Black Stallion series and the Dune series are prominent in this image), a few houseplants, the baseboard heater that was never ever ever to be turned on lest the house burn down, and my first radio/cassette player. Static music static.

That’s how these court opinions read, to me. Noise, signal, noise.

“The objection of a want of power in the legislature to pass the act…. …the prohibitory liquor law…was in violation of that provision…which declares that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property…. The legislature may pass many laws…to impair or even destroy the right of property. Private interest must yield to the public advantage. …The protection and preservation of game has been secured…and may be justified on many grounds, one of which is…food. …Some of the provisions…might seem, to one unversed in the mysteries of the subject, to be unnecessarily stringent and severe…. …there are many powers conferred upon Congress which, until exercised by it, are regarded as dormant and may be exercised by the States within their limits, among which is the power to regulate commerce” (Phelps v. Racey, 1875, paras. 3–4).

Over a century later, I’m an eavesdropper. I’ve attached a science bug to the fence around the legal sphere, and I’m listening in. Unversed.

Noise. Signal. Noise.

Photo of a large living-room entertainment center loaded with Christmas decorations, a console-type TV with rabbit-ears antenna, photo albums, and vinyl records. A kerosene heater, unlit, is on the floor in front of the stand, and a large wrapped gift is visible to one side.
Photo from my personal archive, Christmas 1992. Our living room TV was a dials-and-rabbit-ears affair. It had some 15 possible VHF channel settings, and, in good weather, picked up four stations. The kerosene heater on the floor was only lit for company and special television events.

Some of what reaches me as noise is, in fact, noise. Ornate phrases and stacked clauses that a diligent editor, in 2026, would simplify or delete. In-text citations that establish credibility, for doubters who wish to backtrack and verify.

And some of what reaches me as noise is jargon.

Jargon is a loaded word. Laden with negative connotations, the word “jargon” criticizes and accuses disciplinary texts. Except, all disciplines create unique lexicons—terminologies and core allusions common to the field and readily interpreted by readers within the field.6 These lexicons facilitate disciplinary communication. Within the field. Which means that readers outside the field often encounter disciplinary writing as encrypted communication.

I’m an old science major. I spent many long academic years programming the science decrypt key into my firmware, and I’ve downloaded most of the updates. I know the terminologies and catch the allusions. I’m versed.

But I haven’t invested my time or resources into acquiring other decryption keys. I can download the outsider patch and install the eavesdropper update, for these court opinions, but I won’t become versed.

As always, caveat lector.

Photo of four downy Mallard ducklings, with the Mallard hen that hatched them exiting the frame to the right. The ducklings have their backs to the camera, and one has been captured mid-air as it hopped down from a stone that makes up part of the border of our backyard dragonfly pond. The mid-air duckling's webbed feet are visible in silhouette against the yard's mown grass.
Photo from the Mallard archive. Here four ducklings are following their mother as she prepares to take a stroll around the yard. One of the ducklings was captured mid-hop, jumping down from the stone border of the dragonfly pond.

A benchmark precedent: “The judgment of the General Term must be affirmed.”

Commonwealth v. Hall cited a number of precedents. One particular precedent is common to many of the era’s game cases: Phelps v. Racey (1875). That heavily ellipted quotation, in the above aside, was taken from the New York Court of Appeals’s review of Phelps v. Racey.

I made an initial decision to leave out this particular precedent. Not because the case wasn’t important, in my context, but because I was thoroughly baffled. All I had were two surnames, a date, and a six-paragraph appellate opinion.

The opinion is both dense and thin. Dense with legal logic, but thin on details. Very little who, what, where, and when. Phelps and Racey, quail and penalties, New York, 1870s. That’s it. Which was, apparently, all the judges needed. “The judgment of the General Term must be affirmed” (Phelps v. Racey, 1875, para. 6).

As I accessed other court opinions, researching my Mallard obsession, I followed the first several Phelps v. Racey citations to the online case record. I read and re-read the opinion. Baffled. The next several citations? Re-follow, re-find, re-read. Still baffled.

Pale-tinted photo of me somewhere in my age-counted-as-months era. In this studio-type photo, I'm gazing vaguely in the direction of the camera, wide-eyed and open-mouthed and, apparently, confused. Mother had dressed me in what was likely a stiff and itchy blue shirt with puffed sleeves and ruffles and tucks and lace (eww).
Photo from the family archive. This is me as a baffled baby.

Repeat, ad nauseam.

Until I reached my nauseam tipping point. In typical OCD fashion, my investment of time tipped from intermittent bafflement to days-long fixation. In the end, I decrypted Phelps v. Racey with a little help from online newspaper archives.

On May 5, 1874, the New York Daily Herald published a short note: “The suit of Royal Phelps vs. J. H. Racey came up yesterday in General Term, Supreme Court. Defendant was prosecuted for violation of the game laws, in having quail and pinnated grouse in his possession during the close season. Defendant put in as answer that the birds were killed before the close season, and preserved by a patent process” (Court of Common Pleas, p. 3).

Did you catch it?

What I had initially accessed—the opinion cited in all of those subsequent cases—was the appellate review dated February 2, 1875.

But the actual case, the one with all the details, was heard on May 4, 1874.

Phelps v. Racey (1874): “…I am wholly at a loss…”

J. H. Racey was a New York city merchant who sold game through a market on Centre Street. On March 15, 1873, during close season, his stock included six quail. On March 19, he added two pinnated grouse and another 100 quail. The birds had been purchased in December of 1872, from Minnesota and Illinois, and preserved with a “patent process”. (I searched in vain for details about the process, which most likely was some form of cold storage.)

Royal Phelps, who was the president of the New York Association for the Protection of Game, got involved, and the local court fined Racey for possession of six quail and two pinnated grouse. Each bird carried a $25 fine, which would have left Racey owing some $200. (Equivalent to roughly $6,000 of spending money, in 2026.)

As I couldn’t find this initial ruling online, I can’t say why the judge imposed fines for only eight birds. But, given that the judge didn’t include the 100 quail Racey had in his possession on March 19, $200 seems a tap on the wrist.

Tap or slap, Racey appealed the ruling.

As did Phelps, who wanted Racey fined for all 108 of the birds.

These competing appeals landed before Judge Daly, of the New York Court of Common Pleas, on May 15, 1874. Daly’s opinion includes the following:

“[The statute] has allowed game, killed before the 1st of January, or in states where the killing of it was at the time lawful, to be sold or kept in possession between the 1st of January and the 1st of March, and that is all. Beyond that, the prohibition is positive, that no person shall have any of the game specified, in his or her possession, and I am wholly at a loss to see upon what ground it can be said that the possession which existed in this case was not the kind of possession which the statute meant. It may be that when the law was enacted, that no such thing was contemplated as that game, killed in the autumn of one year, could be preserved, as in this case, so as to be sold a year afterwards within the permitted period. But we cannot say so as a matter of law, for for all that we know, or for all that appears in this answer, this apparatus may have been known and in use when this law was enacted” (Phelps v. Racey, 1874, p. 238).

Daly’s ruling, later upheld in that widely cited 1875 appeal, bumped Racey’s fine to $2700. A penalty of $2,700, in 1874, equates to about $80,000 worth of spending money in today’s (2026) economy.

While I would love to report further on this case, my journey with Phelps and Racey ends here. I don’t know if, how, or when Racey paid his punishing fine, nor do I know if Phelps targeted other game merchants. (Please comment, if you know more of the story.)

Thin ice: Haggerty v. St. Louis Ice Manufacturing and Storage Company, 1897

In 1892, Missouri statutes included restrictions against possession of game during close season. Starting in 1892 and continuing through 1893, a group of game merchants (lumped in the record as Haggerty et al) tested a cold storage loophole. 

According to the court record, the St. Louis Ice Manufacturing and Storage Company crafted a per-pound storage contract with Haggerty et al. The ice company would store game during the close season months of 1893, keeping the meat in good condition until the following open season in November. Then the merchants would retrieve their 1892 overstock and get back to business. (pp. 241–242)

Between November 15 and December 26, 1892, merchants deposited enough game to rack up a massive storage bill. When the bill came due, on November 18, 1893, the merchants paid as contracted and proceeded to withdraw their game. Which had rotted. (pp. 241–242)

The ice hadn’t been icy enough.

Haggerty et al demanded compensation. St. Louis Ice company refused. And on January 9, 1894, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat published the following note: “John E. Haggerty & Sons filed suit against the St. Louis Ice Manufacturing and Storage Company for $11,842.89 damages for game spoiled in the defendant’s cold storage warehouse between January 1, 1893 and November 1, 1893” (Yesterday’s new suits, p. 12).

Such a precise invoice, $11,842.89, deserves precise comparison. Measuring Worth carves out the following 2026 US dollar values:

  1. if spent on a purchase, $448,472.05
  2. if received as compensation, $3,414,261.32
  3. if held as wealth, $4,628,686.25
  4. if spent on a project, $23,677,759.95
Sepia-toned studio-style photo of an very young (perhaps early toddler-aged) child seated on a draped chair. The child's blond hair is styled in short ringlets. Button-up boots and a lacy white dress, along with a dainty necklace, complete the look. The child is looking to one side with an unsmiling expression.
Photo from the family archive, c. 1900(?), Mt. Vernon, Ohio. Photos were luxuriously expensive, but not $11,842.89 expensive.

When the case arrived in front of the Missouri Supreme Court, the merchants’ had downsized their ask to $7,000. (Some $250,000 worth of spending money, today.) Downsized, but still sizable.

In the end, Haggerty et al lost. They lost their money, their game, and the appeal. They lost because the entire scheme was a misdemeanor, according to state law, which meant the contract was illegal.

Judge Sherwood, who wrote the opinion, was fond of emphatic italics. “The offense prohibited by section 3902 is a misdemeanor, and in such case the intention of the misdemeanor cuts no figure in the case, since in that class of crimes intention constitutes no element of the offense. It is the act done and that alone which violates the law, and the motive which prompts the violation is altogether dehors the crime committed” (p. 246).

Precedents and italics and all, Sherwood lays out a seven-page explanation, tinged with exasperation in the final paragraphs. “Recurring to the petition, it shows on its face that plaintiffs contracted with the defendant corporation for the commission of a misdemeanor. …The law will not stultify itself by promoting on the one hand what it prohibits on the other, and will for this reason leave the parties to this suit where it finds them, unsanctioned by its favor and unaided by its process” (pp. 247–248).

Haggerty et al would receive no satisfaction from Sherwood’s court. Neither, really, would St. Louis Ice Manufacturing and Storage Company, who won their case by proving that their contract was illegal.

Standing firm on thin ice: “Warrants for Game Dealers”

Haggerty & Sons, with John E. Haggerty at its head, had been a fixture in St. Louis since 1845 (Extensive game depot, 1877, September 28, p 4). Haggerty was a fixture of his own, serving as the market master for Union Market (Mayor Wells’ selections, 1903, April 25, p. 2) and circulating through local politics.

A series of solicitations aimed at market hunters, placed in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat in November and December of 1882, hint at the scale of Haggerty’s business. In order to fill Thanksgiving orders, Haggerty needed 10,000 turkeys, 5,000 dozen (60,000) quail, 1,000 wild turkeys, 1,000 dozen (12,000) grouse, and 500 saddles of venison (Wanted,November 15, p. 5). Christmas orders exceeded Thanksgiving—25,000 turkeys, 10,000 dozen (120,000) quail, 5,000 dozen (60,000) grouse, 1,000 wild turkeys, and 500 saddles of venison (Wanted, December 6, p. 7).

Given the vastness of his enterprise, Haggerty and the game laws were destined for conflict. But an 1882 case against Haggerty and his brother went nowhere: “The cases against the Haggerty’s are virtually dismissed by being continued generally” (Court of Correction notes, 1882, March 31, p. 4).7

Nowhere, again, went an 1897 case against Haggerty, his son, and four other game merchants.

On Tuesday, February 9, 1897, Missouri’s game wardens targeted six St. Louis game dealers: the Haggertys, in their 944 North Broad Street address; Benjamin Kaufmann and Samuel Kaufmann, of stand 1, French Market; Frederick Becktane, stands 9 and 10, Union Market; and Eugene Deane, 1017 North Third Street (Warrants for game dealers, 1897, February 9, p. 12).

“Attorney J. R. Claiborne, who has been retained by [Deputy State Game Warden] Capt. Bull to represent the state, said yesterday that warrants would be issued from day to day against violators of the law, if the six defendants against whom the warrants were issued yesterday were found guilty. The six cases, he said, were merely test ones” (Warrants for game dealers, 1897, February 9, p. 12).

Six test cases, representing less than 1% of the 700 game dealers and caterers that Missouri’s game wardens wanted to prosecute (Warrants for game dealers, 1897, February 9, p. 12).

When the 1897 cases against the Haggertys, the Kaufmanns, and Becktane reached trial, Judge Murphy dismissed them. Murphy based his dismissal on updated statutes—the state’s charges cited violations of 1889 statutes, but those laws had been repealed and replaced by 1891 statutes. (Game dealers not guilty, 1897, March 7, p. 24)

As of 1898, Haggerty was still in business, and still in the newspapers. A May 2 report highlights his efforts to organize North Third Street’s merchants, who had been experiencing a series of robberies. Haggerty wanted the group to demand better police protection for their businesses, which included a saloon, a hotel, and a liquor store. (Will catch burglars, p. 3)

Pale sepia-toned portrait of a mischievous-looking couple. Posed close together with hairstyles and dress that code man and woman, they are leaning against each other with relaxed informality. The man is apparently seated, leaning back against the woman, while she is leaning forward a bit, chin almost resting on his head and her hands on his shoulders. Both are holding cigars in their mouths. The short-haired man is unsmiling, cigar dangling from the corner of his lips, and is dressed in a dark jacket and tie over a starched-looking white shirt. The woman is smiling, cigar clenched between her teeth, and her hair is styled in a loose updo. She's wearing a high-necked white blouse with short ruffles around the collar and down the front. The blouse is fastened with a brooch at the neck. She has a band-like ring on her left middle finger.
Photo from the family archive, c. 1910(?). I don’t know who they are, but I want to hang out with them. I expect they caused mostly lower-case mischief, but I wouldn’t be too surprised to hear of the occasional upper-case Mischief, somewhere in a district of game markets, saloons, hotels, and liquor stores.

Preview: Parts IX and X, etc.

Enter the era of game smuggling, the Lacey Act of 1900, and the Migratory Bird Treaty of 1918. The game markets collapse, wild duck populations continue to decline, and a hunting-centered North American approach to wildlife conservation takes root.

Notes

1. In what appears to be a true coincidence, Venn’s paper “On the Diagrammatic and Mechanical Representation of Propositions and Reasonings” appeared in The London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science in July of 1880. Using “Eulerian circles” as building blocks, Venn employed circles, ellipses, and other closed shapes to illustrate Boolean logic. “Of course any closed figure will do as well as a circle, since all that we demand of it, in order that it shall adequately represent the contents of a class, is that it shall have an inside and an outside, so as to indicate what does and what does not belong to the class. There is nothing to prevent us from going on for ever thus drawing successive figures, doubling the consequent number of subdivision. The only objection is, that since diagrams are primarily meant to assist the eye and the mind by the intuitive nature of their evidence, any excessive complication entirely frustrates their main object” (pp. 6-7). (Click here to return to your regularly scheduled paragraph.)

2. I wish that I had the time and resources to write the cross-purposes story, the one about agriculture. During this same era, during this half-century timeframe between 1870 and 1920, US agriculture was growing and organizing and lobbying. There’s a signal, in all of this history noise, that ties to a household question: what were Americans eating, between 1870 and 1920? What was the ratio of wildlife-to-livestock animal protein, in the American diet, before and after lawmakers regulated the game market into collapse? When did wild protein give way to farmed protein? To beef from Texas. To other hoofstock and poultry, from other epicenters of organized livestock production. As livestock production scaled up, to fill grocers’ shelves after the game markets closed, the rapidly expanding US Department of Agriculture arrived on scene. Regulatory upgrade, unlocked. (Click here to return to your regularly scheduled paragraph.)

3. The 1923 edition of William Mershon’s Recollections of My Fifty Years Hunting and Fishing includes an article by Hon. Riley L. Crane about a pair of market hunters who gained so much local fame that the marshes they hunted were named after them. In “The DuPraw Marsh in Kochville Township”, Crane states: “The largest number of ducks shot upon this marsh by a single charge were nineteen blue winged teal shot on the fly by Jacques DuPraw with a single barrel, muzzle-loading shotgun. The greatest number of ducks killed there in a single day by two men was two hundred and seventy-two birds, about 1876, Mr. Louis DuPraw getting one hundred and sixty-two with a 10-gauge breech-loading shot gun and Mr. Jacques DuPraw one hundred and ten with a 12-gauge, double-barrel, muzzle-loading gun” (pp. 70–71). (Click here to return to your regularly scheduled paragraph.)

4. Full text of letter: “Greenville Iowa / May 31, 1892 / Mrs. Ellen Linton / Calamus Ia. / Dear Coz. / I will now try to ans. your most welcome letter and was indeed glad to hear you are getting along so nicely and do sincerely hope you good luck for years. / It is to bad about Nora isant it. I am so glad that Rose is getting along without raising a family and she is all right yet I know for Sunday I was home and I asked her. Say Ellen I will tell you something but dont you breathe it to no one will you. I intend to be married in December. But we may not be until next Spring it is owing as to whether our plans work out all right. Now Ellen I told you because you told me and you wont tell any one will you? He is a darling. Well to tell the honest truth of the business he is just the sweetest boy that ever lived. His name is Harry Dodd his father is sheriff of Clay Co so you see I will have to toe the scratch ha, ha, ha. / It doesn’t seem possiable that Glen S.– is married [illegible] got a “Kid” does it. Well I have been in the store ten months the 17th of this month and I am tired and am going home to stay a while so direct your next letter to William Creek. I like it in the store ever so much and I dont suppose I will be contented out. So I think very likely I will be back in a week or two. / Ellen I am so glad you have got a good husband it is so nice when a person is happily married. But so wretched when they are not. Tell him I think he might as must as behave to his new Coz any way. / Well I must stop for the propriator is needing me. / Write soon [illegible] all the news. / Oh yes / Rosa Holdriedge is going to catipillar after while or rather Rose Cook / Bye Bye / from Lily”. (Click here to return to your regularly scheduled text.)

5. Burdened with the common (and adolescently pun-worthy) name of “woodcock”, these oddly charismatic little birds, are also known as timberdoodles and night twisters (among other names). They weigh in around a half-pound or less and merit full membership in the Ministry of Silly Walks. (If you want to watch the Monty Python skit, which is next-level physical comedy, it’s readily available online. If you want to see a woodcock’s silly walk, follow this link and scroll down to the “Behavior” section for a great video.)

According to some articles online, French chef Augusta Escoffier declared woodcock to be the “king of game birds” in the 1921 classic Le Guide Culinaire (which sounds significantly less highbrow in translation: A guide to modern cookery). Fact-check sidequest, unlocked! In the online edition at Project Gutenberg, Escoffier’s text actually reads, “If grouse, which can only be thoroughly appreciated in its native country, were extinct, woodcock would be the leading feathered game. But the latter have this advantage over the former, namely: that their fumet is not so fugitive, and that they may be kept much longer. Woodcock does not yield its full quality unless it be moderately high” (p. 592). Have mercy. Fugitive fumets and high game sound like precursors to gastrointestinal distress. Some side-quests lead straight to queasiness. (Click here to return to your regularly scheduled paragraph.)

6. Note that my acceptance of jargon runs somewhat counter to my earlier criticism of euphemisms. A hazy line separates the two, in my thought processes. The line is so vague, and so apt to change from moment to moment (and subject to subject), that it defies explanation. As is the case for so many of my thought processes, I regret my own lack of clarity. (Click here to return to your regularly scheduled paragraph.)

7. Later that year, the court passed down a perjury indictment against the private detective, one Reginald M. Russell, who had filed warrant against the Haggerty’s (Four court notes, 1882, December 5, p.2). The newspapers of the time published a flurry of articles about Russell, detailing a number of accusations and arrests. Despite the tingling of my tangent-antennae, I never found the time or resources to follow his story in enough detail to report it accurately. (Click here to return to your regularly scheduled paragraph.)

Bonus methods note: The State Historical Society of Missouri (SHSMO) hosts a free, searchable online newspaper archive. I encountered difficulties, though, in linking to the newspaper articles that I found there. Active links uniformly led to a default “unauthorized access page”. I apologize for the inconvenience. If anyone wishes to retrace my steps, for articles cited in my references section but lacking hyperlinks, I recommend starting here. Click the “search digital newspapers” button to get started. I first narrowed my searches to St. Louis, Missouri. Then I searched for 1. “John E. Haggerty” (the quotation marks help further narrow the results), 2. “John Haggerty”, and 3. “Reginald M. Russell”. In each case, I used the date selection boxes to limit results to the 1880s, then a second run for the 1890s, and a final run for the 1900s. Following these steps should led to a results list that includes all of the articles and ads I’ve cited in this post, along with a handful of hits that weren’t pertinent to my work. And, for future reference, the SHSMO archive is a lovely, and free, resource worth bookmarking.

References

Commonwealth v. Hall, 128 Mass. 410 (1880). https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/6546160/commonwealth-v-hall/

Court of Common Pleas—General Term. Important decision with regard to the game laws. (1874, May 5). New York Daily Herald, 3. https://www.newspapers.com/image/329567764/?match=1&terms=%22royal%20phelps%22%20racey%20game%20quail

Court of Correction notes. (1882, March 31). St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 4.

Crane, R. L. (1923). “The DuPraw Marsh in Kochville Township.” In Mershon, W. S., Recollections of My Fifty Years Hunting and Fishing (68–72). The Stratford Co. https://archive.org/details/recollectionsofm00mers_0/page/68/mode/2up

Extensive game depot. (1877, September 28). St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 4.

Four court notes. (1882, December 5). St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 2.

Game dealers not guilty. (1897, March 7). St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 24.

Haggerty et al v. St. Louis Ice Manufacturing and Storage Company, 143 Mo. 238 (1897). https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/8055683/haggerty-v-st-louis-ice-manufacturing-storage-co/pdf/

Mayor Wells’ selections. (1903, April 25). St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 2.

Phelps v. Racey, 5 Daly 235 (1874). https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/6272458/phelps-v-racey/pdf/

Phelps v. Racey, 60 N. Y. 10 (1875). https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/3606645/phelps-v-racey/#pdf

Venn, J. (1880). “I. On the diagrammatic and mechanical representation of propositions and reasonings.” Philosophical Magazine, Series 5 (9)59. pp. 1–18. https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bhusnur4/cit592_fall2014/venn%20diagrams.pdf

Wanted. (1882, November 15). St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 5.

Wanted. (1882, December 6). St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 7.

Warrants for game dealers. (1897, February 9). St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 12.

Will catch burglars: Third Street merchants organizing to protect themselves. (1898, May 2). St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 3.

Yesterday’s new suits. (1894, January 9). St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 12.

Focusing on Mallards Part VII: Game informants, game police, and the end of the game market

Rae SpencerLeave a comment

“Be it further enacted by the Authority aforesaid, That the several Towns in the Province shall have Power, and they are hereby directed…to chose and appoint two meet Persons whose Care and Duty it shall be to inform of all Breaches of this Act, and to take Care that the Violaters thereof be duly prosecuted and punished…” (Massachusetts General Court, 1739, p. 688).

Content Warning: This multi-part blog post contains references to hunting, agriculture, and research practices of killing birds and other wildlife. If you decide not to read on, I respect and admire your choice.

Photograph of a Mallard hen standing beside a small backyard pond. She is standing on one of the large, smooth river stones that border the pond. Her eleven ducklings (they're difficult to count, in this photo) had not yet mastered climbing on the stones. Two ducklings have reached a resting point, but the other nine are jammed together, scrambling for purchase, knocking each other aside, and climbing on top of each other as they struggle for footholds.
Photo from the Mallard archive. In this photo, a Mallard hen waits on the stone border of our dragonfly pond as her days-old ducklings scramble out of the water.

[This post picks up where the last left off. For recaps and links to the rest of the series, please visit my Mallard page.]

Dibs on the Deer

Game legislation, in the pre-revolutionary colonies, started with deer.

With deer in Massachusetts. In 1739.

As wave after wave of European immigrants divvied up the Atlantic coast of North America, the political and social habits of aristocracy proved difficult to shake. Colonists may have envisioned a democratic continental future, in which the people (the invading people, that is) owned the continent’s resources, but pre-revolutionary lawmakers hoarded up resources according to Europe’s aristocratic precedent.

In Massachusetts, in 1739, that meant hoarding up the deer.

Photograph of a young white-tailed deer standing under a set of wind chimes that were hanging in a small live-oak tree in our privacy-fenced back yard. The deer was photographed through the browning blooms of Joe Pye Weed, which appear as vague clouds and patches obscuring the foreground. The brown-furred deer has long skinny legs with long black hooves. His small antlers are slightly curved, each antler is a single tine approximately 6–8 inches long, and each antler has a single visible bump along the shaft (bumps that would, in an older stag, branch off into secondary tines). He has prominent white markings around his dark nose, and the fur around his eyes and under his chin is paler than the rest of his body. Here, his stance is tense. He has one back foot raised off the ground; his large ears are angled, one forward and one backward, for situational awareness; and his eyes are opened wide. His white sclera, (the "whites of his eyes") are not visible, but the rings of lighter fur around his eyes mimic scleral flashes, making his expression appear anxious. A pair of plastic pink yard flamingos are leaning against the tree's trunk, and, in the background, a dense stand of ginger lilies are beginning to droop as their blooming season comes to a close. The yard is mown short, and the grass is patchy with weeds.
A few years ago, this spike-antlered white-tailed deer trapped himself in our cul-de-sac during rut season. I blogged about him here. Today, nearly three centuries after Massachusetts’s 1739 legislation, white-tailed deer in the US are monitored year-round and harvest limits are fine-tuned, in some states, on a herd-by-herd basis.

The wordily convoluted law quoted as an opening epigraph, above, was filed as “An act in addition to an act entitled, An act for the better preservation and increase of deer within this Province”.1 The new-and-improved 1739 edition aimed to halt the decline of deer populations by reinforcing seasonal hunting restrictions: “Whereas the penalties already provided in and by an act pass’d in the tenth year of the reign of King William the Third…have proved ineffectual to answer the good ends in said Act proposed…” (Massachusetts General Court, 1739, p. 687).

Starting on December 10th of 1739, deer were off the hunting menu. Deer season would reopen on August 1st, 1740, and the schedule would repeat indefinitely. From August 2nd to December 9th, annually, the citizens of Massachusetts could enjoy late autumn/early winter’s open season on deer. But during the rest of the year, deer meat and deer hides were forbidden harvests. Anyone caught with fresh meat or hides (or said to be in possession of such, by any two informants) would be prosecuted.

To enforce this seasonal hunting ban, the revised act required each town to appoint two official informants to monitor and prosecute (persecute?) deer hunters, with expansion of the informant network written into the statute: “…appoint one or two meet persons in every such new plantation wherein ten or more families are settled, to inform against and prosecute the Violaters of this Act” (p. 688).

Should any of the appointed informants decline the position, and/or decline to swear the informant’s oath, anyone could sue them for the sum of £5 (p. 688). (According to an online conversion calculator, that’s a fine roughly equivalent to $1500, in 2026 US dollars.) As the statute does not specify a one-time fine, I envision a line of friends and coworkers demanding payment from some poor soul who slept through the meeting, didn’t know they had been nominated and elected, and couldn’t bring themselves to sign on as an informant.

Oaths aside, informants generated their own wages. Anyone convicted2 of killing the king’s province’s deer owed £10 per deer, divided between the informant and “His Majesty for the Support of this Government” (p. 687). When a convicted hunter couldn’t pay the fine, they faced jail for 30 days or forced labor for two months.

All of this means that Massachusetts’s 1739 deer informants had the statutory power to persecute (prosecute) deer hunters. To drive the colony’s deer hunters first into poverty and then into slavery.

Aside: The Robin Hood Perspective

I grew up on a steady diet of Robin Hood.3 As a fan of the trope, all of this 1739 fuss about the king’s deer resonates.

Photograph of a white-tailed deer that has just crossed a well-tended path in Back Bay Wildlife Refuge, in Virginia Beach, VA. The deer's coat is reddish-brown, lightening to pale tan under her abdomen and chin. (I assume she is a doe, as she has no antlers. Such assumptions are not always correct.) Her body language— erect tail, backward focused ears, and quick stride—indicate alertness. The photo's foreground and background are the deep brown and orange tones of winter dormancy, thick with tall grasses (including seagrasses) and winter-bare shrubs.
As a side-effect of spending most of my years in the southeastern US, my memory-file for “deer” is filled with white-tailed deer. So is my memory-montage of all the various Sherwood Forests I visited, in my childhood reading. Actual deer, in Sherwood Forest, are both larger and smaller than North America’s white-tailed deer.

I have lingering nostalgia for Robin McKinley’s reluctant hero in The Outlaws of Sherwood:

There had been outlaws around Nottingham and in Sherwood before, but this sounded like something new—outlaws who believed in king and country, and good English law; who merely rebelled against the heavy hand of tyranny (1988, Chapter Four, para. 15).

And for Peter Beagle’s gruff anti-Marian in The Last Unicorn:

Close by a familiar voice said, ‘Leaving us so early, magician? The men will be sorry they missed you.’ He turned and saw Molly Grue leaning against a tree. Dress and dirty hair tattered alike, bare feet bleeding and beslimed, she gave him a bat’s grin. ‘Surprise,’ she said. ‘It’s Maid Marian.’ (1968, p. 82)

Awash in Robin Hood, I’m pre-disposed to favor pure-hearted bandits living in the woods. To expect corruption among government officials charged with imprisoning and enslaving the pure-hearted bandits. Reverse tropes, in which bandits are greedy and officials pure-hearted, simply don’t resonate. I can’t recall any among my best-loved childhood books.

Robin Hood taught me skepticism for a system in which police generate their own salaries through imposing fines and confiscating property. Especially when the system polices those who have less power, less security, and less food.4

My skepticism will be apparent throughout this installment. It’s likely apparent in everything I write and everything I do.

This is the strength of fairy tales and myths and legends. Here in my middle years, all these many Robin Hoods float on the surface of my memories, jostling and reinforcing each other. Resonating.

As with my previous installment, caveat lector.

Photograph showing five downy Mallard ducklings swimming in our small dragonfly pond in the spring of 2024. One duckling has its head tipped sideways, one eye turned to the sky in response to an alarm call from its mother (who was standing just to one side, out-of-frame, when this photo was taken).
At what stage do Mallards become aware that humans are their most voracious predators? Looking skyward, for airborne predators, was an early lesson for this particular brood of ducklings. But they trusted me enough to allow these photos.

Policing the Hunt in the 1800s

Skipping ahead to the post-revolutionary colonies, game legislations gained popularity and momentum throughout the 1800s.5 As game legislation ballooned into a regulatory industry, bureaucratic vacuum energy organized into committees, commissions, and agencies. Various departments staked claims in wildlife as a regulated resource: game and fisheries departments, of course, but also agriculture, public lands, education, and commerce.

Wrangling with ways to police and enforce game laws, legislatures were forced to wrangle, also, with funding. So many interests. So much legislation.

A faded black-and-white photograph of a group of children gathered in an outdoor setting front of what appears to be a tent. A chaperone in a long skirt and pale blouse stands with the children. The eight children are wearing clothes of various functional styles, including knee-length skirts, pants of full-length and knee-length, and shirts with full-length sleeves. Many are wearing coats and all are wearing work-style boots. One child, in the front row, has a more formal-appearing outfit, including a white shirt with dark pants and a dark coat fastened at a single point across the torso. The bare ground and thin evergreen trees (background), with a smudge of what appears to be winter-bare trees in the farthest background, suggests cold weather. The photo is torn in places, with yellow-tinged tape marks across the tears and along the edges.
How do any of us learn about the world, about dangers above and ahead? I’ve imagined a story in which this poorly-preserved photo from the family archive shows a school group in front of a makeshift tent-classroom, and in which these children have been freed from their chores for a few hours. I’ve imagined a background of poverty, or something much like it, for these children and their families. Perhaps I’ve imagined too much? Or too little? The nearest certainties I have are the setting (most likely somewhere between Ohio and Nebraska) and the timeframe (c. 1880—1900).

“In many States it has been found well-nigh impossible to secure legislation providing for the appropriation of money, no matter how little, for the preservation of game. The sentiment to which this condition is due still prevails in a large part of this country, particularly in the South. The creation of new offices, with salaries attached, is regarded with great jealousy and disfavor”6 (Williams, 1907, p. 34).

A grainy, blurred, and very faded black-and-white image of a pair of houses in a snowy setting. The houses are situation far back from the camera across a snowy field. They are encircled by a split-rail fence and winter-bare trees with snow-laden branches. The closest house appears to be somewhere between two and four rooms, with a prominent chimney in the center of the steeply peaked roof. The background house looks to have more rooms, with perhaps an addition-style room on one side. With written histories back to the 1860s, we know that the family lived as a multi-generational unit: a Civil War veteran patriarch (volunteer Ohio cavalry), his son and daughter-in-law, and their eventual six children (the youngest of which was my grandmother).
Photo from the family archive. This is one of the ancestral homes, photographed in 1892. The record isn’t clear about this property, whether it was in Ohio, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, or some other state less prominent in the family lore. Wherever it was, it looks fairly idyllic for a young husband and wife starting a family. Even so, it didn’t last long. By 1901, they were settled in Limestone County, Alabama, where they would live out the rest of their years.

Non-random examples: Incentivizing informants on both coasts

In funding game police, early statutes in California and Virginia resorted to borrowing (unknowingly?) from Massachusetts’s 1739 system. They legislated kickbacks for informants.7

In 1841, Virginia paid informants a half-share of fines collected from non-residents caught hunting waterfowl below the head of the tidewater (General Assembly of Virginia, 1841, pp. 88–89). As each fine was $100, informers could expect a payout of $50 per prosecution—a purchasing power of somewhere around $2000 in today’s (2026) economy.

Motion-blurred photograph of a small Bufflehead duck flying along a narrow channel of water. The duck is captured mid-flap, wing tips nearly touching the water. The water is murky green, mid-channel, and reflects winter-pale stands of grasses along the edge.
Virginia’s rich waterways, particularly below the tidewater (technically, the farthest extent of waters that change height and/or volume as the tide moves in and out), are havens for waterfowl.

About a decade later, in 1852, California informants were eligible for half-shares of fines. California fines were lower ($50) but were not limited to prosecuting non-residents (California Legislature, 1852, p. 134). The 1852 statute protected quail, mallards, and wood ducks and shut down the game markets for these birds during closed seasons. This statute put market hunters and market peddlers under extra surveillance. Informants didn’t need to slog out into the wild, to catch hunters in the act of shooting or collecting birds. They could simply stay in town and wait for sellers to open shop.

Who could resist the lure of an informant payday equivalent to $1000 or $2000, in today’s money?

My faith in humanity feels that almost everyone would resist such a lure, if their starving neighbors resorted to shooting mallards. My skepticism argues otherwise.

Sepia-toned photo series from the family archive, probably dating to the late 1910s or early 1920s. The photographer cleverly overlapped four images onto a single print. Each of the four images shows three men posing with a horse-drawn buggy. In two images, the men are seated in the buggy. In one image, the men are lounging in a row beside the buggy and one man has thrown his leg across the legs of the other two. In the final image, the men are standing together, two holding and pointing to the man in the middle, as if accosting him, and all three are laughing. In each image, one man is wearing a full suit of some middle-tone color, including a tie, vest, and jacket, over a white shirt; one man is wearing mid-toned pants, a white shirt, and suspenders; and the third man is wearing mid-toned pants, a white shirt, and a tie. The buggy has four delicate-looking long-spoked wheels, tufted upholstery, and a folded-back convertible cover. The horse is tall and rangy and is standing still in its harness and bridle. (The bridle looks tight, to me, and the horse's elevated head posture suggests the presence of a tight check rein.)
The leisure apparent in this quadruple-exposure image from the family archive (c. 1920?), along with the camaraderie, puts me in a familiar double-bind. I’m grateful that the image exists, and I’m aware of the flawed power distributions (past and present) that went into its creation and preservation. Would these men have chosen to profit from informing on their neighbors? Or would they have fed their neighbors? Whatever choices they made, over the courses of their lives, I expect they justified those choices from the various rhetorics of their various times. It’s the entire ongoing problem, over and over again.

Aside: About those debtors’ prisons

“The only punishment authorized under many of the older game statutes was a fine, and if the defendant was impecunious he escaped punishment altogether. A very considerable portion of offenders against the game laws are of this class, and experience has demonstrated that to secure obedience the alternative corrective, imprisonment, must be allowed; otherwise many violations go unpunished” (Williams, 1907, p. 74).

That quotation comes from a 1907 bulletin written by a member of the US Department of Agriculture’s Biologic Survey. My current self sees the cruelty in this logic—the cruelty and wickedness of debtors’ prisons. But as a young adult, despite all my Robin Hood reading and my own family’s orbital decay, I lacked such perspective. Young-adult-me would have nodded her agreement on the question of punishment.

On matters of the carrot vs. the stick, I had been raised by the stick and believed in the effectiveness of sticks. I had no personal experience with carrots.

Scanned image of a color slide from the family archive. Shown here, a group of domestic white ducks are climbing a fenced wooden switch-back ramp up the side of a wooden building. The ramp leads to a blue plastic slide that drops into a pond. One duck has just come off the slide, wings extended, and is splashing into the pond.
The ducks-on-a-slide show at Opryland was one of my favorite spectacles, during our annual summertime pilgrimages. While I want to claim that the ducks didn’t mind the slide, the hesitant traffic on the ramp argues otherwise.

Which cycles back, again, to resonances. In all of this reading through legislative and legal literatures from the late 1800s and early 1900s, I keep finding echoes of my own youthful voice. Perhaps such resonance is part of my perseveration.

Perhaps I keep reading because the resonance keeps ringing, calling me deeper and further into this particular branch of the Mallard Mine.

Perhaps I’m hoping that the metaphor will hold up. That the legislative and legal literatures of the US will grow to understand, as I have, the wisdom of carrots and the anxious futility of sticks. Perhaps I’m hoping that US policy will mature into a reality in which feeding hungry Mallard hunters is more productive than jailing them. In which feeding hungry families is preferable, on every level, to fining them, confiscating their belongings, and selling off their property for the enrichment of government-appointed police.

Which brings me to Maryland’s Board of Special Police, legislated into existence in 1880 for the express purpose of protecting waterfowl.

The Ducking Police

“The said Board of Special Police and its deputies shall have power to arrest, with or without warrant, upon their own view, or upon credible information, all persons violating any provisions of said original act, or any of its supplements, and to carry such person or persons before any justice of the peace…”. (Maryland General Assembly, 1880, p. 159)

The said Board of Special Police, later dubbed the Ducking Police, protected waterfowl on the Susquehanna Flats and on the waters of the Chesapeake Bay north of the Turkey Point lighthouse. (North, also, of a vaguely defined point 1/2 mile north of Spesutia Island.)

Maryland placed a notable statutory check on members of the Ducking Police—each appointee was required to register a bond with the clerk of their respective Circuit Court. The Ducking Police swore to be faithful to their duties, under threat of a $1000 penalty. (This penalty would run somewhere in the range of $30,000 worth of purchasing power, in today’s economy.) The statute required appointees to provide proof, to the clerks of their Court, that they could pay such a penalty (Maryland General Assembly, 1880, p. 160). Written as a rein on corruption, the most immediate effect of this requirement was to limit the recruitment pool to hunters wealthy enough, already, to post such a bond.

In payment for their faithful service, members of the Ducking Police shared an end-of-the-year jackpot made up of license fees collected from residents registering to hunt in Cecil and Harford counties, including boat licensing fees, and of fines collected from prosecutions.

Photo from the Mallard archive, 2025. Shown here, a female Mallard perches on the stone border of our small backyard dragonfly pond. Her eleven ducklings have climbed out of the water behind her. Most of the ducklings are searching for a resting spot on the rocks, while some have already settled in and are grooming their down in preparation for an after-swim nap.
What are the chances that Mallards were a species of emphasis, for the Ducking Police? Logic argues they must have been, given their prominence in North American waterfowl hunting, but numerous other species were and are common on the Susquehanna flats.

In 1880, the fledgling Ducking Police had a single assignment: arrest anyone caught with ducks in their possession during the close season (April 1–October 31). Being caught with a duck during close season was “prima facie” evidence of a violation (Maryland General Assembly, 1880, p. 160). Courts were given wide discretion regarding fines, which could range anywhere between $5 and $100, and the collected fines went straight into the Ducking Police jackpot.

What are the chances that this system was immune to corruption?

The jackpot grew sweeter over time. By 1888, fines of $50–100 could be imposed for hunting at night, hunting during close season (April 1–October 31), shooting from a boat within 1/4 mile of shore, using a “big gun” (one that couldn’t be fired from the shoulder), or hunting from an unlicensed sneak boat or sink box (these $50–100 fines for unlicensed watercraft functioned as instant kickbacks, and collected fines were immediately distributed: 1/2 to the arresting officer and 1/2 to the attesting informers) (Maryland General Assembly, 1888, pp. 1382–1384).

Even bigger bonuses came with catching harvest thieves, who were subject to confiscation of their hunting equipment. Pick up some other hunter’s bird, lose your boat and guns and ammo to the Ducking Police. All proceeds from the sale of confiscated equipment went to the arresting officer. (Maryland General Assembly, 1888, pp. 1382–1384)

By 1916, fines had grown to $100–500, and new revenue streams came from regulations around engine exhausts and noise. Confiscations increased, as well, with property seizure rolled into almost every arrest. Proceeds from sales of confiscated equipment were divided between the informers and the arresting officers, though 1/2 of the proceeds from a small subset of these sales went into the county school funds. (Maryland General Assembly, 1916, pp. 1525–1536)

Sepia-toned photograph of a toddler in a delicately stitched white dress, standing next to an alert, mid-sized dog. The toddler's short hair is combed to one side, and their white-stockinged feet are clad in very fluffy white-furred shoes. A thick-woven rug or tapestry is draped over a support, which the toddler is leaning against, and runs across the floor. The dog is lying down, head up and looking at the camera. The dog has button ears and short-ish legs, a thick medium-length coat, and enough gray around the muzzle to suggest aging. I would guess the dog's lineage to be a terrier-type mixed with a herding-type.
One of the few children in the family archive with a name: Steele Hamilton. I don’t know how or why this child, with such furry shoes and such an appealing dog, landed in the family archive. I hope those shoes and that good dog indicate a happy childhood and well-funded schools.

Maryland’s 1916 legislations coincided with an era of federal takeover, as far as migratory waterfowl were concerned. While this federal intervention may have had little or no bearing on changes within the Board of Ducking Police, there’s notable timeline overlap. By 1920, the federal takeover was all-but complete, and by 1927 the Ducking Police jackpot had dwindled to a fixed stipend of $400 per hunting season (Maryland General Assembly, 1927, p. 612).

Finally, in 1941, Maryland dissolved the Board of Ducking Police (Maryland General Assembly, 1941, p. 326).

No more game informants

I can’t pinpoint an accurate timeframe for the end of regulatory informant-policing of game. Nonetheless, the practice did end. At least, statutorily.

But the eventual demise of informant-policing (of game) in the US is a mixed-bag sort of win:

“It was never a success in this country, most men preferring to see the laws violated rather than appear as prosecuting witnesses against their fellow-citizens. Aside from sentiment, such a course was often hazardous to the property and even the life of an informer” (Williams, 1907, p. 75).

So informing was both ethically objectionable and potentially hazardous.

I wanted to spend at least one paragraph unpacking my thoughts, here, but each attempt circled and contradicted and wheezed off into a muddy muddle. Which is a fairly accurate depiction of my self-growth process. I circle and contradict and wheeze around in the mud for unpredictable periods of time, searching for clarity. Sometimes I write poems in the mud. (Poetry is a blurry lens, anyway.) Given the depth of the mud, in this particular pond, I’ll be here a while.

Dabbling.

Photograph of a pair of Mallards on a wind-rumpled pond. The female Mallard is almost fully upright in the water, stretching her wings, while the male Mallard is partly submerged, captured as he surfaced from a down-turned bit of dabbling.
Mallards are dabblers, not divers. They muddle about in shallow waters, foraging in sediments without ever committing to a fully submerged dive for food. The distinction is literal, among ducks, and conveniently metaphorical for poets and writers.

In the meantime, I’ll circle back to the 1880s. Where court cases document the final years of the meat-and-feathers markets.

Driving the markets underground: One toe over the (commerce) line

The subtext of game legislations, in the mid- and late-1800s, was the ongoing power struggle between market hunters and sport hunters. (See the previous post, Part VI, for an overview of the market vs. sport dynamic.) From the start, sport hunters held a decisive advantage—access to legislative power.

Sepia-toned studio photograph of a man and woman, photographed in Nashville, TN, probably during the decades around 1900. The man is seated on something resembling a church pew, and the woman is standing behind him. Both have stern, unsmiling expressions. Both appear to be middle-aged: the man's thick eyebrows are fading to gray and the woman's face is slightly lined. The man is wearing a dark suit over a white shirt, with a prominently visible pocket watch chain. The woman is wearing a mid-toned full-length dress with velvet-appearing cuffs and buttons. She has a shiny neckpiece that covers her entire neck, chin to collar, as well as a tall, heavy-seeming hat that matches the velvet-type trim on her dress. The belt of her dress is cinched tight, suggesting a corset underneath. The background/backdrop is a mixture of wood with carved, inset panels and a woven tapestry-type curtain.
This stern duo, photographed in Nashville, TN, live in an ambiguous place in the family archive. I don’t know who they are, or how they were connected to my ancestors, or even the exact branch of ancestry. All I know is that they look intimidating. I expect they had access to the levers of power.

Often men of wealth and leisure, sport hunters in and around state legislatures lobbied for game regulations that hindered market hunters. Folding their arguments into early frameworks for wildlife conservation, sport hunters pointed to rapid species declines that were evident across the North American continent.

Rapid declines in game species affected market hunters, too, forcing them farther and farther afield to practice their profession. Farther, in this case, meant across state lines. Which meant interstate commerce. Which proved to be the decisive legislative lever.

These quail aren’t in Kansas anymore: Chicago, 1880

On January 14, 1880, a Chicago merchant named James Magner purchased a box of quail (144 birds) from a seller on South Water Street. Magner ran a game market at 76 Adams Street and had at least two more boxes of quail already in stock, including birds imported from Kansas in December and purchased direct (in Leavenworth, Kansas) on January 10th.

On January 15th, Magner sold at least one unopened box (144 birds) and somewhere between 60 and 100 birds out of his opened-box stock. (I had trouble following the totals, because math, but the totals weren’t the crime. The date was the crime.)

After a court in Cook County convicted Magner of close-season quail possession, he appealed to the circuit court. And, after the circuit court upheld the conviction, Magner appealed to the Illinois State Supreme Court, which is where the record is most visible today: James Magner v. The People of the State of Illinois. Filed at Ottawa February 3, 1881.

Illinois’s updated game statutes (1879) set a January 1–October 1 close season for quail and grouse. Close season for hunting; close season for buying and selling. In other words, in 1879, Illinois shut down quail markets—from January to October, no one could buy or sell quail in Illinois. No one could have quail in their possession.

Magner and other game merchants would have felt the financial sting, set to lose about $200,000 per year if the game market closed altogether (p. 326). (Keeping up my habit of translating these numbers into today’s money, that’s more than $6 million ($6M) in 2026 purchasing power.)

Magner’s state-level appeal, destined for failure, rested on two arguments:

  1. “It seems absurd to hold that the inhibition against the purchase and sale of game imported from the State of New York or Kansas is a protection to the game of this State” (Magner v. The People, 1881, p. 326), and
  2. the act “…is in violation of that provision of the constitution of the United States which confers upon Congress the power to regulate commerce among the several States” (Magner v. The People, 1881, p. 327).

In ruling for the State, the court countered Magner’s first argument with prevention logic: “…we think it obvious that the prohibition of all possession and sales of such wild fowls or birds during the prohibited seasons would tend to their protection, in excluding the opportunity for the evasion of such law by clandestinely taking them, when secretly killed or captured here, beyond the State and afterwards bringing them into the State for sale, or by other subterfuges and evasions” (Magner v. The People, 1881, p. 331).

The court’s counter for Magner’s interstate commerce argument followed a complex legal thread anchored in England. The thread starts with a reference to Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England and winds through precedents in Massachusetts, Indiana, New York, and Vermont, to establish a foundation of State ownership of game (pp. 333–334):

“Stated in other language, to hunt and kill game, is a boon or privilege granted, either expressly or impliedly, by the sovereign authority—not a right inhering in each individual; and, consequently, nothing is taken away from the individual when he is denied the privilege, at stated seasons, of hunting and killing game. It is, perhaps, accurate to say that the ownership of the sovereign authority is in trust for all the people of the State, and hence, by implication, it is the duty of the legislature to enact such laws as will best preserve the subject of the trust and secure its beneficial use, in the future, to the people of the State. But in any view, the question of individual enjoyment is one of public policy, and not of private right” (p. 334).

From there the court’s thready argument knots tight on Welton v. State of Missouri, an 1876 U.S. Supreme Court case about license taxes for vendors in Missouri, which noted, “The fact that Congress has not seen fit to prescribe any specific rules to govern inter-State commerce does not affect the question. Its inaction on this subject, when considered with reference to its legislation with respect to foreign commerce, is equivalent to a declaration that inter-State commerce shall be free and untrammelled” (p. 282). In other words, the federal government might have constitutional authority over interstate commerce, but, since Congress had never acted on that authority, the default status of non-regulated interstate commerce applied.

The thread spools on, turning new knots at case law involving steamboats, fuel mixtures, and suppression of liquor markets. Hitched, at last, to this handful of unstable rulings, the opinion in Magner v. The People states, “There can not be a constitutional right to transport property which can not legally be brought into existence” (p. 336).

Mic drop? No such thing, in legal literature…

The smoldering net (these quail were most likely netted, so there aren’t any smoking guns) was stashed in Kansas law. Magner’s quail weren’t legally harvested, in the first place. As products of illegal hunting, they never fit the definition of “commerce”. They were illegal goods in Kansas, shipped and transported illegally into Illinois.

After citing all that case law, the entire thread of logic was irrelevant. None of the stickier arguments around commerce even applied, because the birds weren’t commerce.

What they actually were, if they weren’t commerce, isn’t specified. This becomes important in later case law, though, for the case at hand, the important point was settled. The quail weren’t commerce, the interstate commerce clause wasn’t relevant, and Magner needed to pay his fines.

Chicago’s game markets had been put on notice. So had all of the other game markets, in all of the other states.

Photograph from spring, 2025, of a female Mallard with her brood of days-old ducklings. Here, the female is standing on the stone border of our dragonfly pond, preening her feathers. Five of her ducklings are visible in this photo, four gathered on the stones in front of her, getting ready to sleep, and one hunkered close to her, also ready to sleep.
These Mallards, photographed in 2025, know nothing of game hunters and game markets. Even so, that doesn’t equate to safety. The hours they spent in our little dragonfly pond were likely the safest hours of their lives.

To be continued…

The next post (or two or three) will get deeper into the final era of game markets, complete with game smugglers. Also, federal interventions and the beginnings of the North American model of wildlife conservation.

Notes

1. In quoting this act, I edited for readability. If you follow the link to the online copy of the text, you’ll find an elaborate collage of fonts and special characters. I tried, initially, a more faithful reproduction, but it made my eyes ache. Here’s an example:

“WHEREAS the Penalties already provided in and by an Act paſs’d in the Tenth Year of the Reign of King WILLIAM the Third, entitled, An Act for the better Preſervation and Increaſe of Deer within this Proviǹce, have proved ineffectual to anſwer the good Ends in ſaid Act propoſed…”.

My eyes, not to mention my OCD brain, doth protest.

Mostly italics, salted with capitals, peppered with the archaic long s (that’s the one that looks like an f: “ſ”), and spiced with an un-reproducible (with my limited tech skills) c–t ligature—it’s just too much.

Even so, I felt a twinge of regret, reducing the recipe to blog blandness. And a tiny urge to write a time-travel story about an 18th century typesetter who finds fame, in 2025, as a font programmer. Because my OCD, which was part of my reason for editing in the first place, is still fuming that I couldn’t find a way to include that dratted c–t ligature in this footnote. (Click here to return to your regularly scheduled paragraph.)

2. Acceptable proof of guilt included being caught with deer, with meat from deer, or with fresh hides. For offenders who off-loaded carcasses and hides before getting caught, testimony from two credible witnesses regarding two separate events within the last two months would suffice. All of these pairings, in this statute, make my OCD itch—two informants per town or settlement, two witnesses testifying to two infractions over a two month period…it’s at least two twos too many. (Click here to return to your regularly scheduled paragraph.)

3. Robin Hood tropes breach the barriers between history and fiction. Between the reference section and the fantasy shelves. That’s part of why I indulge in this kind of aside. When these entities come into conversation with each other, the result is often chaos. But sometimes, every so often, radiant patterns emerge. A signal in the blog noise that makes writing and reading blogs worthwhile. (Click here to return to your regularly scheduled paragraph.)

4. My personal definition of power, of privilege, is the ability to live in predictably benign surroundings. To wake, most mornings, expecting another ordinary day. Another ordinary meal. Another set of ordinary tasks. Living in predictably benign surroundings equates to impact resistance. To rotational inertia. To a daily expectation that the world will spin on, benignly. Even under stress conditions, the world spins on. Benignly. The force required to perturb the system into non-benign behavior is roughly proportional to the power and privilege at hand. (Click here to return to your regularly scheduled paragraph.)

5. My excavations in the various state literatures reveal a tempting timeline pattern. During this period of time, game legislations spread in rates reminiscent of epidemiology. Almost as if certain pieces of legislation, such as outlawing punt guns or requiring non-resident hunters to pay for licenses, were a kind of contagion. This epidemic characteristic of legislations in the unsettled era of pre- and post-civil war times has likely been noted and thoroughly explored by scholars of law. (?) Or maybe my education gave me an epidemiology hammer, so every nuance I observe takes the shape of a nail. (Click here to return to your regularly scheduled paragraph.)

6. I want to acknowledge a glaring omission in my Mallard timeline—the entirety of the US Civil War. The Mallard story passes through the Civil War, of course, but I am not the right person to tell that part of history. I am not equipped to avoid all of the pitfalls and wrong turns in the Confederate branches of the Mallard mine. To be a reliable narrator surrounded by unreliable texts. Instead, I’m taking a coward’s deliberate leap over those years. Even so, lingering divisions between northern and southern states rise up throughout the legislative literatures of post-Civil War years. Such as in the excerpt that prompted this footnote. I’m including some of the indicators of ongoing division, in this series, in case some better-suited writer should wish to pick up those threads and go where I dared not. (Click here to return to your regularly scheduled paragraph.)

7. My aversion to such incentives was not shared by the US Department of Agriculture’s Biological Survey. At least, not in 1907. Thus the following: “In 1858 the example of Maine was followed in New Hampshire by the passage of a law authorizing the selectmen or municipal authorities to appoint fish wardens. The compensation of these officers consisted of one-half of the fines resulting from prosecutions instituted by them, an incentive to vigilance still employed in many states” (Williams, p. 12).

That said, the writer later criticized states that paid officers’ solely through incentives: “The meager compensation resulting from the percentage of fines secured sometimes allowed deputy wardens is hardly sufficient to enlist the services of active men…” (Williams, p. 26).

And even later: “In the early history of the movement for game protection the only provision considered feasible for payment of officers charged with the duty of enforcing game laws was an allowance of whole or part of the fines. A system maintained on such an unsatisfactory and unstable basis, however, accomplished almost nothing, and the advocates of better protection set about to devise a more satisfactory means” (Williams, p. 24). (Click here to return to your regularly scheduled paragraph.)

Bonus Earworm: If you are of a certain generation, you already have a song stuck in your head after reading the final section of this post. If you are younger and haven’t encountered this particular earworm, here’s the YouTube link for Brewer & Shipley’s “One Toke Over the Line”.

References

Beagle, P. S. (1968). The last unicorn. Ballantine Books, Inc.

California Legislature (1852). The Statutes of California, passed at the third session of the Legislature, begun on the fifth day of January, 1852, and ended on the fourth day of May, 1852, at the cities of Vallejo and Sacramento. G. K. Fitch & Co., and V. E. Geiger & Co., State Printers. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b4159816&seq=143&q1=mallard

General Assembly of Virginia (1841). Acts of the General Assembly of Virginia passed at the session commencing 1st December 1840, and ending 22d March 1841, in the sixty-fifth year of the Commonwealth. Samuel Shepherd, Printer to the Commonwealth. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=osu.32437123258960&seq=92&q1=fowl

Magner v. The People, 97 Ill. 320 (1881). https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/7057357/magner-v-people/pdf/

Maryland General Assembly (1880). Laws of the state of Maryland made and passed at a session of the General Assembly begun and held at the city of Annapolis on the seventh day of January, 1880, and ended on the sixth day of April, 1880. Wm. T. Inglehart & Co., State Printers. https://msa.maryland.gov/megafile/msa/speccol/sc2900/sc2908/000001/000395/html/am395–1.html

Maryland General Assembly (1888). The Maryland Code, Public and local laws: Volume 1. King Bros., Printers and Publishers. https://msa.maryland.gov/megafile/msa/speccol/sc2900/sc2908/000001/000390/html/am390p–1.html

Maryland General Assembly (1916). Laws of the state of Maryland made and passed at the session of the General Assembly made and held at the city of Annapolis of the fifth day of January, 1916, and ended on the third day of April, 1916. King Bros., State Printers. https://msa.maryland.gov/megafile/msa/speccol/sc2900/sc2908/000001/000534/html/am534–1.html

Maryland General Assembly (1927). Laws of the state of Maryland made and passed at the session of the General Assembly made and held at the city of Annapolis on the fifth day of January and ending on the fourth day of April, 1927. King Bros., Inc., State Printers https://msa.maryland.gov/megafile/msa/speccol/sc2900/sc2908/000001/000569/html/am569–1.html

Maryland General Assembly (1941). Laws of the state of Maryland made and passed at the session of the General Assembly begun and held at the city of Annapolis on the first day of January, 1941, and ending on the thirty-first day of March, 1941. King Bros., Inc., State Printers https://msa.maryland.gov/megafile/msa/speccol/sc2900/sc2908/000001/000582/html/am582–1.html

Massachusetts General Court (1739). Acts and laws passed by the Great and General Court of Assembly of His Majesty’s province of the Massachussetts-Bay in New-England, begun and held at Boston, upon Wednesday the thirtieth day of May, 1739. John Draper, Printer to His Excellency the Governour and Council. https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_acts-and-laws-passed-by-_massachusetts_1739_0/page/n1/mode/2up?q=deer

McKinley, R. (1988). The outlaws of Sherwood. [Kindle version]. Open Road Integrated Media. https://www.amazon.com/Outlaws-Sherwood-Robin-McKinley-ebook/dp/B00OGWASB4/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0

Welton v. The State of Missouri, 91 U.S. 275 (1876). https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USREPORTS-91/pdf/USREPORTS-91-275.pdf

Williams, R. W. (1907). Game commissioners and wardens: Their appointment, powers, and duties. Government Printing Office. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=ufl1.ark:/13960/t43r22q5t&seq=15

Focusing on Mallards Part VI: States claim the game

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‘When you have killed all your own birds, Mr. Bingley,’ said her mother, ‘I beg you will come here, and shoot as many as you please on Mr. Bennet’s manor. I am sure he will be vastly happy to oblige you, and will save all the best of the covies for you.’ –from Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Content Warning

This multi-part blog post contains references to hunting, agriculture, and research practices of killing birds. This particular installment references various methods and means of Mallard hunting, past and present. If you decide not to read on, I respect and admire your choice.

Photograph from a recent spring nesting in the yard. In this photo, a Mallard hen is leading her day-old ducklings from their nest in the irises bordering the dragonfly pond. The hen is balanced on a large rock, downy nest-fluff sticking to her feet. The ducklings are following in a huddled flock, clinging together for safety.
Photo from the Mallard archive. Here, a Mallard hen and her ducklings are leaving their nest for a family swim in the dragonfly pond.

Limiting (and limited) expectations

It was easy to position my own context for these posts (see Part IV). But all of my (deleted) attempts to contextualize Mallards in pre-1800s North America have been as flawed as my knowledge.

It’s a given that there are records outside of the Mallard archive, outside of the Mallard mine, that explain how and why North America’s waterfowl maintained flagrant abundance within and around the continent’s early nations. But I don’t have a discourse for these records.

In the end, after all of my reading, I am not equipped to know North America’s pre-colonial Mallards, much less describe them. They are, for me, a personal singularity. An infinite intangible that disturbs my erratic journey.

In other words, I’m only telling one facet of the Mallard story: the part written by and for Europe’s descendants.

Caveat lector.

Sepia-toned photograph of three young adults posing beside a pump-handled well in what appears to be a fenced yard. All are wearing formal-appearing attire—two wearing layered and ruffled dresses and one wearing a suit with a prominent pocket-watch chain. A beribboned hat is on the ground in front of the well.
Photograph from the family archive, Iowa, 1881. The trio in this photo were younger than Iowa (granted statehood in 1846) but not a lifetime younger.

In medias res

When I last left the Mallards, in the opening decades of the 1900s, their populations were collapsing. For the moment, I’m leaving them suspended in free-fall.

This post circles back to the 1800s. Back to an era of unchecked habitat destruction and overhunting. Back to the transition years, when state lawmakers claimed title over wildlife and began to legislatively dismantle game markets.

“Wetland utilization in North America provides a classic case of conflict in resource management. The disadvantages of marshes and ponds for the individual farmer encourage their drainage and conversion to cropland. At the same time, these wetlands provide vital habitat for migratory waterfowl, a principle wildlife resource…” (Pospahala, Anderson, & Henney, 1974, pp. 5–6).

Sepia-toned postcard image of a wetland setting in South Dakota. A smallish body of seemingly stagnant water is bordered by dense brush and shrubs.
Photo postcard from the family archive, South Dakota, c. 1900.

“We, who cannot live without wild ducks, must first of all acknowledge two facts: 1. We are the minority; 2. The majority regards any land which is too wet to plow, but unsuitable for swimming or water boating, as useless” (Anderson, 1953, p. 122).

Sepia-toned image of a large body of water with a distant silhouette of truss bridge. The photo's horizon is slightly tilted, the bridge has six visible segments, and a jointed corner of wood is visible in the upper right corner of the frame.
Photo from the family archive, location unknown, c. 1900. A large body of water with a truss bridge in distant silhouette.

These were never the King’s ducks

After fleeing systems in which wildlife belonged to the aristocracy, the English and French colonists in North America drafted new rules. In the colonies, wildlife would belong to the citizens. To the People. (Not, however, to the People who already lived in North America. Only to those who staked their various flags along eastern coastlines and cascaded westward.1)

“The explorations of these settlers were driven by the incredible wealth of North America’s renewable natural resources—and by an unfettered opportunity to exploit it” (Organ, Mahoney, & Geist, 2010, p. 23).

Photograph of a Mallard hen perched on a stone that is part of the border of our dragonfly pond. One of her days-old ducklings is scrambling up the stone's slope, trying to reach the safe and familiar comfort of her protection. Two other ducklings are in line, waiting to test their own climbing skills.
Photo from the Mallard archive, of a Mallard hen standing on one of the stones that border our dragonfly pond. Here, the hen was taking a break from teaching her ducklings to swim and forage.

Who killed (kills) the People’s birds?

During the glut years of the 1800s, US hunters took to the field in three different pursuits: subsistence hunting, sport hunting, and market hunting.

As subsistence hunters took (take) only what they need for survival, their impact on bird populations was (and still is) minimal. But sport hunters, in the 1800s, tended to binge. Each adventure piled up the carcasses:

“The geese were flying all day, thousands upon thousands of them. We killed 163 that day. We had a farm wagon with extra side boards for carrying eighty bushels of wheat. Our kill nearly filled that wagon box. I know that night when we drove back to Dawson, which I think was eight miles distant, we were cold and wet and we all stuck our legs down in the geese and the warmth of their bodies kept us comfortable” (Mershon, 1923, pp. 117–118).

Sepia-toned photo of a horse harnessed to a cart (carriage? buggy?) driven by a man in a suit and hat, complete with thick gloves that have a star emblem on the wide cuff. A cluster of two-story houses make up the background.
Photo from the family archive, location unknown, c. 1900. Not a wagon, I know, but still a reminder that personal transportation in the 1800s was single-digit horsepower.

After each binge, sport hunters returned to their families and their varied professions.

Unless the binge was their profession.

The Meat and Feathers Market

Between 1820 and 1860, America’s cities blossomed from a thin seeding of only 5% of the population to a significant 20% demographic. “Markets for wildlife arose to feed these urban masses and to festoon a new class of wealthy elites with feathers and fur” (Organ, Mahoney, & Geist, 2010, p. 23).

Market hunters earned a living harvesting the wildlife that lived in unclaimed (or claimed and unsupervised) wild places. The siren song of profit penetrated every field, marsh, and wooded acre, tempting hunters to abandon the traditional and self-imposed restraints that defined hunting as a sport.

“A momentary question goes through your mind. ‘Shall I give them the first barrel on the water?’ It is dismissed almost as soon, for early I have been taught it is not the way of the sportsman. Give the birds a chance is the rule. Yet I can not help hoping they will be well bunched and I can get more than one with the first barrel and hope for another with my second. Well, sometimes it works one way and sometimes another. Either way it’s the life worth living” (Mershon, 1923, p. 76).

Giving the birds a chance, for the market hunter, was a profit gamble.

Sepia-toned portrait of two young adults seated at a table. Both are posed with a hand of cards, as if playing poker. Both are wearing suits, though they have taken off their jackets. Both are wearing hats. One is smoking a pipe. The gambler on the right is showing an ace to the camera, held below the level of the table. Paper money, larger than today's bills, is hanging over the edge of the table.
Photo from the family archive, location unknown, c. 1900. Photographer’s stamp: “W. C. Bryant Artistic.”

It was highly likely that a hunter the next county over would happily shoot all the birds on all the waters, rules be damned.

The market wanted meat and feathers, so meat and feathers the market would have.

Sepia-toned portrait, c. 1900, of two young adults wearing hats decked out in feathers. Their coats have big fancy collars, one of thick fur and the other of feathers.
Photo from the family archive, location unknown, c. 1900. Time has taken their names, but their faces and feathers remain.

Any hunter willing to renounce the title of “sportsman” could cash in.

What would you have done?

Endless demand v. limited supply

Around cities and towns, market hunters drained the wildlife from marshes and woodlands and fields. And as nearby wildlife dwindled, sportsmen were forced further afield for their binges.

Postcard photograph stamped "Photographed by H. J. Linton" and hand-labelled "East Main St., Lexington, O". A small, single-section truss bridge crosses a brook, several two-story houses line the road beyond the bridge, and utility poles break the horizon.
Photo postcard from the family archive; East Main St., Lexington, Ohio; c. 1900. The photographer’s stamp, HJ Linton, suggests the image was snapped by a relative on some distant branch of a grandmother’s family tree.

“Conflict soon arose between market hunters, who gained fortune on dead wildlife, and the new breed of hunters who placed value on live wildlife and the sporting pursuit of it” (Organ, Mahoney, & Geist, 2010, p. 24).

By the late 1800s, some of the birds had been hunted to extinction.

“The first bird I ever killed on the wing was a wild pigeon. They frequented the Saginaw valley in thousands from early spring until after the harvest. I had been taken with my uncle and father pigeon shooting many times to pick up birds. It was no trick for them to get seventy-five or a hundred birds before breakfast, and soon after I was given my 16-gauge double barrel gun I was taken out to shoot pigeons. The flocks were dense, as I now recall, so it was not a difficult feat to bring one down, and at the very first discharge a pigeon from my shot came fluttering to the ground. I grabbed it and admired it and was satisfied for that morning to have it my entire bag, and proudly took it home to show my mother. It was not long before I was going pigeon shooting regularly every morning, for the flight began at daylight and was generally over by seven o’clock. Then I would get my breakfast and be off to school. My pigeon shooting continued every spring until about 1880, when it was gone forever” (Mershon, 1923, p. 3).

Sepia-toned photo of a group of twenty-seven children, teens, young adults, and adults—seemingly assembled for a school photo. All of the children in the front row are barefoot, most are wearing long-sleeved shirts and coveralls or long-sleeved dresses with large ruffled collars. Two children in the front row are holding hats on their lap, one has a hat hooked over one knee, while yet another hat has been tossed to the side and waits, upside down, to be reclaimed. Some of the younger children have neatly parted hair pulled back in (probably) a braid, others have very short hair that is either too short to style or barely long enough to support styling to one side or the other. The teens and young adults with long hair have puffy updos with a few prominent ribbons, while those with short hair have a suggestion of bangs swept to the side. A dog has joined the first row of students.
Photo from the family archive, location unknown, c. 1890(?). I wonder if the author of the previous passage went to school barefoot, with his hound to keep him company?

“No ordinary destruction”

In the sport v. market skirmishes, sport hunters always had the upper hand. Reputation and tradition amplified their voices.

“Furthermore I will prove by sundry reasons in this little prologue, that the life of no man that useth gentle game and disport be less displeasable unto God than the life of a perfect and skillful hunter, or from which more good cometh. …he shall go and drink and lie in his bed in fair fresh clothes, and shall sleep well and steadfastly all the night without any evil thought of any sins, wherefore I say that hunters go into Paradise when they die, and live in this world more joyfully than any other men” (Edward, Second Duke of York, 1406–1413/1909, pp. 4, 11).

“It is stated that in their migrations northward, the waterfowl often reach the lake in the spring, while it is still covered with ice, and that while huddled in great numbers in the mouths of streams and other open places, they are slaughtered indiscriminately, and that while too poor and unfit for eating. It is also represented that they are killed and wounded in great numbers by the swivel or punt gun, which is a small cannon fixed to a boat, and that by these practices they are driven from their usual feeding grounds and places of resort. It is the well known habit of waterfowl to follow the same line and stop at the same points in their migrations, and such a serious disturbance at this great half-way station, may eventually result in their seeking other quarters. To prevent this it is asked that the killing of waterfowl in the spring be prohibited altogether in certain counties, and that the use of the punt gun be absolutely forbidden. The petitions upon this subject have been so numerous, and the petitioners so respectable, that there evidently must exist good cause for complaint, and their request should be granted. The use of the punt gun along the sea board has been made illegal for like reason, and if it is necessary there, it is still more so here” (Collins, 1860, p. 388).

“The ‘game hog’ is an animal on two legs that is disappearing. May he soon become extinct! The ‘game hog’ formerly had himself photographed surrounded by the fruits of a day’s ‘sport,’ and regarded the photograph as imperfect unless he had a hundred dead ducks, grouse, or geese around him. To-day a true sportsman would be ashamed to be pictured in connection with a larger number of fowls than a decent share for an American gunner, having due regard to the preservation of game for the future” (Lacey, 1900, pp. 4871–4872).

Grainy and faded grayscale portrait of a toddler. The child is standing on an upholstered footrest and is wearing knee breeches, a short jacket with long sleeves, a rounded hat with a small rolled brim, and rumpled boots. One arm rests on a curtain-draped prop. Another heavy drape hangs in the background. Time has robbed the image of most facial features, leaving only the child's dark eyes staring into the lens.
Photo from the family archive; unnamed child (likely surname Linton); Elmore, Ohio; c. 1890. In my internal filing system, this image lives in the “haunted children” file.

Haunted by pigeons

A single piece of market-favorable legislation murmurs from the archival cacophony: an 1848 Massachusetts statute that prohibited anyone from frightening passenger pigeons out of netting-beds, under threat of a $10 fine and compensation for damages (General Court of Massachusetts, 1848, p. 650).

It should be no surprise that this particular law is audible to search engines. After all, passenger pigeon extinction is a holotype cautionary tale that should linger.

A faded, folded, and foxed photo from February 1, 1887. The child's image has almost completely faded. Loose curly hair, a long-sleeved jacket buttoned at the neck, and what might be a pleated waistline for a dress. Hands folded in lap. Serious eyes peer out over the photo's broken fold.
Photo from the family archive; unnamed child (likely surname Craig); Columbia, TN; February 1, 1887. Another haunted child.

Ohio bids farewell to their big game, but assumes the pigeons will never die

In 1857, as the Ohio legislature sought to revise their “Act to Prevent the killing of Birds and other Game” (Ohio General Assembly, 1857, pp. 107–108), legislators requested assistance from the state’s Board of Agriculture.

The resulting work, published as a select committee report in 1860, wrote off Ohio’s big game as a lost cause: “Ohio has no waste land. It is all useful for agricultural purposes—if not for tillage, at least for pasturage. It has no sterile wastes, marshes, or mountain ranges where the larger game can find permanent security. The deer, the bear, the wolf, and such like animals will soon be gone, and laws that relate to them a dead letter” (Collins, p. 382).

Sepia-toned photo of taken from inside a fenced field that looks recently cut to stubble. In the background three massive, multi-story, wood buildings with steeply framed roofs are surrounded by a field so flat and uniform that it looks like water. A very distant treeline marks the horizon.
Photo from the family archive; The Steele Farm; Cedar Rapids, Iowa; c. 1900.

Wild turkeys, prairie hens, and pheasants were in the same sunken boat. Excepting a few isolated flocks in isolated localities, no protections could save them. Even so, sportsmen wanted the legislature to regulate hunting, so hunting should be regulated. Ohio’s lingering populations of deer, turkey, prairie hens, and pheasants should be granted undisturbed breeding seasons (Collins, 1860, p. 384).

Seasonal protections were recommended for game birds that could adapt to progress—quail, meadow-larks2, kill-deer, doves, flickers, woodcock, and wood ducks (Collins, 1860, pp. 385-387)—as well as for waterfowl around Sandusky Bay (Collins, 1860, p. 389).

The multitudes of warblers, finches, and flycatchers were safe without protection. At least, being small, shy, and drab, they were safe enough. The food-and-feathers market didn’t covet such birds. Besides, providing bird-by-bird protections would require parsing dozens of common and scientific names (Collins, 1860, pp. 383-384).

Sepia-toned portrait, c. 1900, of a young man wearing what looks to me like a scratchy wool suit. His dark hat is garnished with a stiff sail of white primary feathers.
Photo from the family archive, location unknown, c. 1900. The photo was in my great aunt’s album, but was addressed to my grandmother.

Woodpeckers, blue jays, and blackbirds, the kind of birds that damaged agriculture when they ate crops but protected agriculture when they ate insects, could be left to the chances and whims of circumstance (Collins, 1860, p. 384).

The report singled out two game species as immune from overhunting (in Ohio) and in need of no protection: the snipe and the passenger pigeon.

Snipe were mere passers-through, fleeting visitors so well-camouflaged and difficult to flush from wet spring landscapes that only “practiced” sportsmen could hope for success (Collins, 1860, p. 387). During brief April sojourns, snipe were “good sport and a choice morsel for the table”, but “yearly numbers cannot be materially lessened by the gun” (Collins, 1860, p. 387).

Sepia-toned photograph of a steam crane and six workers in a field in Iowa, c. 1900. The field has been cut to stubble. The steam crane is belching smoke, and the crane's body looks like a wooden building on a massive wood platform. Mounds of bare dirt are visible in the background. The workers are lined up in front of the crane, posing for the photo. A few bare trees are on the horizon, suggesting a winter setting.
Photo from the family archive, Iowa, c. 1900. I don’t know what kind of progress was underway, with this steam crane, but I doubt it involved wetland restoration.

And passenger pigeons?

“The passenger pigeon needs no protection. Wonderfully prolific, having the vast forests of the North as its breeding grounds, traveling hundreds of miles in search of food, it is here to-day and elsewhere to-morrow, and no ordinary destruction can lessen them, or be missed from the myriads that are yearly produced” (Collins, 1860, p. 387).

Forty years later, passenger pigeons were extinct in Ohio3 and functionally extinct everywhere else. It was, indeed, no ordinary destruction.

“Property of the State”

“Section I. That all the game and fish, except fish in private ponds, found in the limits of this State, be and the same is hereby declared to be the property of the State, and the hunting, killing, and catching of same is declared to be a privilege” (Arkansas General Assembly, 1889, p. 173).

Photograph of a female Mallard threatening a squirrel that had ventured too close to her brood of days-old ducklings. The hen is standing over her brood, all gathered on the stone border of our dragonfly pond. The hen's stance is tense, head low and neck coiled, ready to strike at the squirrel should it venture closer. The squirrel's back is turned to the ducks, seemingly unaware that it has disturbed the scene.
Photo from the Mallard archive, of a female Mallard threatening a squirrel that had ventured too close to her brood of days-old ducklings. Mallard hens usually ignore the antics of squirrels in the yard, but new mothers are a different story.

“Section 4650, Wisconsin statutes of 1898 is hereby amended to read as follows: The ownership of and the title to all fish and game in the State of Wisconsin is hereby declared to be in the state, and no fish or game shall be caught, taken or killed in any manner or at any time, or had in possession except the person so catching, taking, killing, or having in possession shall consent that the title to said fish and game shall be and remain in the State of Wisconsin for the purpose of regulating and controlling the use and disposition of the same after such catching, taking or killing. The catching, taking, killing or having in possession of fish or game at any time, or in any manner, or by any person, shall be deemed a consent of said person that the title of the state shall be and remain in the state for said purpose of regulating the use and disposition of the same, and said possession shall be consent to such title in the state whether said fish or game were taken within or without this state” (Wisconsin General Assembly, 1899, pp. 576–577).

Sepia-toned photo of a young woman wearing a pale dress with a fur collar. Her dark hat is tipped to a jaunty angle and is decorated with (maybe?) feathers, flowers, or ribbon. (The decoration fades into the background, so it is difficult to say exactly what has been attached to the hat.) The woman's head is slightly tipped, she is looking off to the side, and her lips are not quite smiling.
Photo from the family archive, location unknown, c. 1900. Her expression captures my bemusement, on trying to follow Wisconsin’s the “shall be and remain” syntax.

Such legislative grabs by Arkansas and Wisconsin, asserted during the closing years of the 1800s, didn’t materialize out of thin air.

State legislatures had been controlling the game within their borders since the 1820s, and courts had upheld a variety of statutes.

Let the alewives migrate

One of the earliest challenges to game laws came in Maine, after members of a town’s fish committee destroyed a dam on private property. On May 3, 1839, the fish committee took action on behalf of alewives, a type of herring.

Charles Peables had maintained a dam on his portion of Alewive Brook, in Cape Elizabeth, for some 12 previous years, diverting the water to power his mill. In May of 1839, local Fish Committee members Hannaford and Davis demanded that Peables open his dam and let the alewives pass.

When Peables declined, the Fish Committee disabled the dam in question. Litigation followed, and the Supreme Judicial Court of Maine eventually ruled for Peables, citing a technicality: Hannaford and Davis had acted early.

As the statute required the brook to be open May 5–June 5, Peables should have been able to run his mill straight up to the stroke of midnight on May 5. As long as the alewives could migrate upstream on May 6, Peables was not in violation of the statute (Peables v. Hannaford, 1841, 106).

Had Hannaford and Davis waited until May 6, they could have destroyed the dam at their leisure, and Peables could not have stopped them.

Peables v. Hannaford set a precedent, at state levels, for the states’ authority (embodied in local officers) to regulate game on private property.

Sepia-toned photo of a house and barn at the foot of a hill, surrounded by a large empty field. The house is set within a cluster of trees, while the field has been cleared for (probably) pasture usage. A line of large rocks and boulders runs along the hill's lower slope, and a thick tree line obscures the top of the hill. A utility pole and utility lines run through the field in front of the house, and a single strand of barbed wire stretches between the camera and the farm.
Photo from the family archive, unknown location, c. 1920(?). The barbed wire running across the foreground would be a distinct “no trespassing” indicator, in the rural area of my childhood.

“We see nothing unconstitutional in the Act”

On July 8, 1874, David S. Randolph served two dressed and cooked prairie chickens to diners in his St. Louis restaurant. According to a Missouri statute, these were the wrong birds in the wrong season.

Even though Randolph could prove that he had purchased the birds in Kansas, where July hunting was legal, he was cited and fined $9. Which would be about $250, today. Randolph appealed, but the Missouri Court of Appeals upheld the fines:

“We see nothing unconstitutional in the act. The game law would be nugatory if, during the prohibited season, game could be imported from the neighboring States. It would be impossible to show, in most instances, where the game was caught. The State of Missouri has as much right to preserve its game as it has to preserve the health of its citizens, and may prohibit the exhibition for sale, within the State, of provisions out of season, without any violation of the Constitution of the United States. So far as we know, this right has never been disputed, and its exercise by the absolute prohibition of the having in possession, or sale, of game within the State limits, during certain period of the year, is no more an illegal attempt to regulate commerce between the States than would be a city ordinance against selling oysters in July” (Missouri v. Randolph, 1876, p. 15).

Did you catch it?

Sepia-toned postcard photo of my great-aunt Birdie as a toddler. She is standing up, one hand balanced on a blanket-draped prop. Her ankle-length dress is a dark material with heavy-looking gathers at the collar and a bright band of (probably embroidered) zig-zags around the hem and cuff. Her eyes are very wide as she looks at a spot just to one side of the lens. Under her image, print on the card reads "The Park Gallery, Chas. Eberhardt, Artist, 20th Street, Rock Island, Ill." Handwritten on the back of the card was "To GrandMa from Birdie Dec 7 1894".
Photo from the family archive; my great-aunt Birdie; Rock Island, Illinois; December 7, 1894.

In knotting up the import loophole, Missouri had stepped ever so softly on the interstate commerce boundary. And the appeals court didn’t mind.

Sepia-toned photo taken inside a hat store, probably in the 1920s. The long narrow room has shelving, tables, and glass-front cupboards that were probably display cases. A table in the middle of the frame is stocked with a variety of hats, decorated mostly with ribbons. A group of adults are posed together, two wearing formal-appearing suits, one wearing a dark ankle-length skirt and white long-sleeved shirt, one wearing a dark ankle-length dress, and one wearing a calf-length skirt, pale shirt, a long coat, and calf-high (at least) boots. I suspect, but am far from certain, that the one wearing the daringly short skirt (calf-length) is my great aunt Birdie. In the background, a shopper wearing a pale calf-length dress is browsing.
Photo from the family archive; location unknown, c. 1920(?). Great-aunt Birdie worked in millinery. I suspect (though I am far from certain) that Birdie is on the far left, in this photo.

‘…the congress shall have power to regulate commerce among the several states…’

When a somewhat related case landed before the Kansas judiciary, in 1877, the commerce question heated up.

On November 8, 1876, an agent for the carrier Adams Express Company received a package for transport—a shipment of four prairie chickens that had recently been killed. The agent, C. A. Saunders, delivered the birds to Chicago, and received a $10 fine (plus court costs) for his efforts.

Kansas had recently adopted the kind of boilerplate “no possession, no import, no export” law that was popular at the time. In Kansas, the wording had been adjusted to prohibit all import and export of game or birds, independent of season.

During open season in Kansas, in 1876, it was legal to possess prairie chickens that had been legally killed, as long as they had been killed within the state. During closed season, it was illegal to possess them at all. And it was illegal to import or export them, ever.

No matter the season, no one could move prairie chickens across the state lines.

Legislatively, this act seemed loophole-free. During open season, prairie chickens were fair game. Hunt them, eat them, sell them anywhere within the state of Kansas. All perfectly legal. But don’t ship them out of state. Don’t buy them out of state and bring them into Kansas. And during closed seasons, prairie chickens were entirely off-limits. Don’t kill them or have them anywhere in your possession.

The single exception written into this law involved shipments of prairie chickens that happened to pass through Kansas on their way to and from other states. Carriers handling such shipments were safe during their journey through the state.

Sepia-toned photo of a wooden train depot. Stairs in the background lead up to a platform protected by an elaborately-braced awning. A set of windows (rather like a bay window) protrude from the building near the foot of the stairs. The five people in the image are wearing suits and dresses. Two are inside, leaning out through the station windows, and three are outside, leaning against the building. The woman on the far left is one of my great grandmothers, Dora. My great grandfather was an engineer on the line that ran through Elora, TN.
Photo from the family archive; L to R (per my mother’s notes) Dora Craig, Edd Strong (Elora Agent), Wilburn Craig, Mrs. Strong, Vint Hamilton; Columbia side depot, Elora, TN; c. 1901. Dora was one of my great grandmothers.

The appellate judges for Saunders’s case glided straight past a series of technicalities regarding the title and wording of the act. They didn’t need to rule on those matters, because a larger issue took precedence:

“Section 8 of article 1 of the federal constitution provides among other things that, ‘the congress shall have power * * * [sic] to regulate commerce with foreign nations, among the several states, and with the Indian tribes.’ Ever since the adoption of this provision, the judges of the supreme court of the United States seem to have been groping their way cautiously, but darkly, in endeavoring to ascertain its exact meaning, and the full scope of its operation. They have many times construed it, but as yet have hardly fixed its boundaries, or its limitations. They have no doubt generally construed it correctly, but some of their decisions with reference thereto seem to be conflicting and contradictory, and scarcely one of such decisions has been made without a dissenting opinion from one or more of the judges. We think however that amidst all their conflicts and wanderings they have finally settled, among other things, that no state can pass a law (whether congress has already acted upon the subject or not,) which will directly interfere with the free transportation, from one state to another, or through a state, of anything which is or may be a subject of inter-state commerce. …For instance, a law which prohibits the catching and killing of prairie chickens, may be valid, although it may indirectly prevent the transportation of such chickens from the state to any other state; but a law which allows prairie chickens to be caught and killed, and thereby to become the subject of traffic and commerce, and at the same time directly [emphasis in original] prohibits their transportation from the state to any other state, is unconstitutional and void” (Kansas v. Saunders, 1877, pp. 129–130).

This means game is commerce, right? And that the Kansas legislature had stepped a little too far over the interstate commerce boundary. Right?

It meant, at any rate, that Saunders didn’t have to pay his fine.

Photo of a Mallard hen trying to get a short rest behind the grass-and-stone border of the dragonfly pond. The hen's eye is wide and her expression is tense, despite her pre-sleep posture of tucked head and neck. They aren't visible at all in the photo, but all eleven of her ducklings were gathered beneath her, as if back in the nest. The ducklings were safe from the hungry eyes of predators, but they weren't comfortable enough to sleep soundly. Their constant fretting and shifting was keeping the hen awake.
Photo from the Mallard archive. Here, the hen has gathered her ducklings beneath her for a nap. The ducklings were squirming and fidgeting, so the hen was having trouble getting comfortable.

Preview of Part VII: More court cases, more decisions, and federal lawmakers patch the interstate commerce bug

The next post dives into game smuggling and game police. If you are starting to wonder if I’ve gotten game laws mixed up with prohibition laws, I haven’t, though there are certainly familiar elements.

Hold on to your feathered hats.

Sepia-toned photo of a young woman wearing a pale, short-sleeved blouse and a dark skirt. (The short sleeves, alone, are remarkable, as long sleeves are far more common in the archive.) She is holding a small bouquet of flowers, and her hat is elaborately decorated with feathers and what looks like a large tiara. She's wearing at least one necklace of beads or gemstones and several rings. Her expression, for me, is a difficult combination of stern eyes with a hint of smile.
Photo from the family archive; location unknown, c. 1890(?). There’s a lot going on with that hat, but, for me, her eyes are the real story. I can’t read that expression, and somehow she makes me feel like I should stop trying to.

Also in the next installment, the courts decide that birds and game aren’t commerce, after all.

A note about previous previews: The schedule has changed, so the previews aren’t accurate

Even the most casual readers will have noted, by now, that this project is constantly expanding. Previews included in previous posts have been preempted and put off, as my reading has taken unexpected turns (I do love a good tangent).

My notes sprawl through four full composition books.

I will likely get to all of the topics introduced in previous previews, but not in order. I’ve given myself permission to keep exploring the Mallard mine, as long as my interest holds, and to keep chasing the tangents. My challenge, now, is to convince readers to keep exploring, as well.

Image of a Mallard hen and her eleven ducklings (which are difficult to count, in this photo) swimming the in a small backyard pond. The pond is bordered by large worn river rocks, with grass and weeds behind and between the rocks. The spout of a pond filter/fountain is visible, and a few reddish-orange water lily leaves float on the surface. (The water lily leaves only turn green after emerging into sunshine.) The ducklings are fluffy with down and have brown and yellow markings. The hen's feathers range from light tan to dark brown with light edging. She is staring into the lens, keeping an eye on me in case I venture too close.
Photo from the Mallard archive. Here, a Mallard hen keeps watch as her ducklings explore the dragonfly pond.

If you’re still with me, Thank You!

Footnotes

1. This particular piece of the Mallard story, part of the pre-1800s history of North America’s colonization, is beyond both my tangent-tolerance (for these blog posts) and my philosophy/history horizon. Even so, an excerpt from a book assigned in a technical writing course resonates:

“Among the many arguments that Locke made in the Two Treatises is one that justifies appropriating lands from indigenous peoples where they are living in a state of nature. According to this argument, settlers who cultivate and improve the land—thereby rendering the ‘greatest conveniences’ from it—will have rights to the property:

“‘God gave the world to man in common; but since he gave it them for their benefit and the greatest conveniences of life they were capable to draw from it, it cannot be supposed he meant it should always remain common and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the industrious and rational—and labour was to be his title to it (Second Treatise 137).’

“…British settlers under Locke’s rationale could claim property rights because they took resources from the land. These resources could be used to create a favorable balance of trade for England, where Board of Trade member Locke saw excessive imports as a source of unstable coinage practices” (Longo, 2000, pp. 51–52).

Mallards were one of the resources that colonists took and took and took. (Click here to return to your regularly scheduled paragraph.)

2. In 1885, while collecting in Canada, Robert Miller Christy wrote a love-note to Meadowlarks:

“I have often thought what a capital thing it would be to introduce the Meadow Lark in to England. So far as plumage and song are concerned, it would rank among our brightest-coloured and most admired songsters; while its hardy nature would allow of its remaining with us the whole year round, as indeed it often does in Ontario and other districts farther south than Manitoba. Perfectly harmless and accustomed to grassy countries, it would quickly become naturalised in our meadows, where it would find an abundance of insect-food, and would doubtless soon increase sufficiently in numbers to serve, if need be, as a game- and food-bird, as it largely does in the United States. No other songster that I ever heard equals this bird in the sweetness and mellowness of its notes” (p. 125). (Click here to return to your regularly scheduled paragraph.)

3. Ironically, Ohio’s deer rebounded. After being sentenced to local extinction, in 1860, deer found ways to survive in Ohio. And then conservation efforts across the 1900s helped deer to flourish. In the 2024–2025 hunting season, Ohio hunters bagged 238,137 white-tailed deer (Ohio Department of Natural Resources, 2025, para. 1). (Click here to return to your regularly scheduled paragraph.)

References

Anderson, J. M. (1953). Duck clubs furnish living space. In J. B. Trefethen (Ed.), Transactions of the eighteenth North American wildlife conference (pp. 122–129). Wildlife Management Institute. https://wildlifemanagement.institute/conference/transactions/1953

Arkansas General Assembly (1889). Acts and resolutions of the General Assembly of the State of Arkansas: passed at the session held at the capital, which began on Monday, January 13th, and adjourned on Wednesday, April 3rd, 1889. Press Printing Co. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433009076492&seq=193

Christy, R. M. (1885). Notes on the birds of Manitoba. In J.E. Harting (Ed.), The Zoologist, 3rd series, Vol. IX. No. 100 (pp. 121-133). John van Voorst, Paternoster Row. https://ia801303.us.archive.org/27/items/Zoologist85lond/zoologist85lond.pdf

Collins, W. O. (1860). Report of Senate Select Committee, upon Senate Bill No. 12, ‘For the protection of birds and game.’ In Fifteenth annual report of the Ohio State Board of Agriculture with an abstract of the proceedings of the county Agricultural Societies to the General Assembly of Ohio for the year 1860 (pp. 381-390). Richard Nevins, State Printer. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015038792258&seq=549

Edward, Second Duke of York (1909). The master of game: The oldest English book on hunting. (W. A. Baillie-Grohman & F. Baillie-Grohman, Eds.). Duffield and Company. https://archive.org/details/TheMasterOfGame/page/n7/mode/2up (Original work published 1406–1413).

General Court of Massachusetts (1848). Acts and resolves passed by the General Court of Massachusetts in the years 1846, 1847, 1848; Together with the rolls and messages. Dutton & Wentworth, Printers to the Commonwealth. https://archive.org/details/actsresolvespass184648mass/page/n5/mode/2up

Kansas v. Saunders, 19 Kan. 127 (1877). https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/7934084/state-v-saunders/pdf/

Lacey, J. (1900). Enlarging the powers of the Department of Agriculture. In Congressional Record, House of Representatives, Monday, April 30, 1900 (pp. 4858–4980). The Government Printing Office. https://www.congress.gov/bound-congressional-record/1900/04/30/33/house-section/article/4858–4980

Longo, B. (2000). Spurious coin: A history of science, management, and technical writing. State University of New York Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.18254358

Mershon, W. B. (1923). Recollections of My Fifty-years Hunting and Fishing. The Stratford Co., Boston. https://archive.org/details/recollectionsofm00mers_0

Missouri v. Randolph, 1 Mo. App. 15 (1876). https://www.plainsite.org/opinions/279xdv9rm/state-v-randolph/

Ohio Department of Natural Resources (February 4, 2025). Ohio’s final 2024–25 deer harvest report. Ohio Department of Natural Resources. https://ohiodnr.gov/discover-and-learn/safety-conservation/about-ODNR/news/ohios-final-2024-25-deer-harvest-report

Ohio General Assembly (1857). Acts of a general nature and local laws and joint resolutions passed by the Fifty-second General Assembly of the State of Ohio: At its second session begun and held in the city of Columbus, January 5, 1857 and in the fifty-fifth year of said state: Volume LIV. Richard Nevins, State Printer. https://books.google.com/books?id=S1lOAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA107#v=onepage&q&f=false

Organ, J. F., Mahoney, S. P., & Geist, V. (2010). Born in the hands of hunters: The North American model of wildlife conservation. The Wildlife Professional, 4(3), 22–27. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267749137_Born_in_the_hands_of_hunters_the_North_American_Model_of_Wildlife_Conservation

Peables v. Hannaford, 18 Me. 106 (1841). https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/5108727/peables-v-hannaford.pdf

Pospahala, R. S., Anderson, D. R., & Henney, C. J. (1974). Resource Publication 115: Population ecology of the Mallard II. Breeding habitat conditions, size of the breeding populations, and production indices. U. S. Department of the Interior, Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife. https://nwrc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p16473coll29/id/10213/rec/1

Wisconsin General Assembly (1899). The laws of Wisconsin, joint resolutions and memorials passed at the biennial session of the Legislature, 1899. Democratic Printing Co., State Printer. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu.89096040076&seq=7

Focusing on Mallards Part V: Hunting by the Numbers

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Content Warning: This multi-part blog post contains references to hunting, agriculture, and research practices of killing birds. This installment contains a photograph of a duck hunter with his kills—a pair of dead Mallards. If you choose not to read on, I respect and admire your choice.

Photograph of a brood of Mallard ducklings huddled for a nap in the sunshine. The downy ducklings are yellow and brown with prominent eye stripes. Their mother is sleeping behind them, beak tucked under her wing feathers. Her feathers are shades of tan and gray, and she also has a prominent eye stripe. All are gathered on the stone border surrounding our dragonfly pond.
Photograph of a huddle of Mallard ducklings resting in the sunshine on the stone border of our dragonfly pond. Their mother is just behind them (right of frame).

Like most of my blog journeys, this long perseveration on Mallards started with questions about a visitor in the yard: What happens to a Mallard hen’s flight muscles while she is nesting? If she spends a flightless month on the nest, then two more flightless months escorting her flightless ducklings, how does she keep her muscles in flying condition?

A Mallard hen stretches her wings after a splashy bath in a small backyard dragonfly pond. She is standing tall in the water, facing the camera, wings extended behind her. Her feathers are mostly speckled and striped shades of brown with bright white coloration on the underside of her wing feathers. A round, floating solar-powered fountain is spending up a small spray of water (left). An array of water plants are growing in the pond, including water lilies. Tall irises and grasses grow around the pond's river-stone border, filling the background with greenery.
Photo of the Mallard hen who inspired this blog series. In this photo, she is standing tall in the dragonfly pond, facing the camera as she flaps vigorously after a splashy bath.

A prolonged literature search produced partial answers. And raised more questions.

In the end, a research paper out of North Dakota (Krapu, 1981) confirmed that wild Mallard hens lose significant body weight during nesting, including most of their fat reserves. But the researchers did not measure or comment on flight muscles.

Beyond that 1981 anchor point, my flight muscle question lies abandoned, waiting for another researcher or reader to pick it up. Until then, I’m content with Part III‘s conclusion: Only the Mallards know.

Photo of a Mallard hen standing in a shallow spot in the dragonfly pond. Her brood of ducklings are gathered beside her. The hen's feathers are shiny and sleek, speckled brown and tan. The ducklings are downy with brown and yellow markings. Both hen and ducklings have the prominent dark eye stripe common to Mallards. In the background, large smooth river stones are stacked loosely around the pond's border. A pair of conch shells are visible, incorporated into the border.
Photo of a different Mallard hen, one who visited in the spring of this year (2025), resting in the dragonfly pond with her ducklings. She was wary of me and my camera and taught her ducklings to be wary as well. This is how wild Mallard ducklings learn to be wild Mallards. Usually. Later in this series I will introduce some exceptions.

Caught in tangles of tangents

I can’t resist tangents. They are how my world expands. And how my mind works, OCD and all. So here I am, more than a year later, still exploring this labyrinthine idea web of Mallards and Mallard literature.

But this particular perseveration, my Mallard fixation, runs deeper than most of my blog ideas. In fact, it runs straight into a mire of social and psychological issues that I am poorly equipped to navigate. So here I remain. Grappling for words and wisdom in the Mallard archives. Because much of what motivates me to care about this world, much of what motivates me to read and write, is also in the Mallard archives.

Sharp black-and-white image scanned from a slide. The image dates to the 1970s, and shows me as a pre-adolescent. I am squatting behind a smallish round wire cage, which has a leather carrying strap. I am holding onto the wires of the cage and peering into the distance. My body language and facial expression suggest that I am misbehaving and trying not to get caught. Inside the cage, a speckled white and gray duck is panting or vocalizing, beak open. The duck is too large for the cramped cage.
Photograph of me in some awkward childhood era, caught coveting a duck at some fair or other event. I was attempting to stay small and inconspicuous behind the big fancy duck, so that Mother wouldn’t catch me coveting.

In all of the decades between the anxious moment captured, above, and my present seat at the blog table, I’ve lived in the tensions between mine and not-mine. Between the coop and the wetlands. Between the self-protective urge to stay small and inconspicuous and the inescapable longing for expansive connections.

I expect most readers live in the same tensions. It’s part of being human. It is, perhaps, part of being Mallard, as well.

Photo of five Mallard ducklings climbing onto the border of the dragonfly pond while their mother watches from the water. Four of the ducklings are immediately visible, center frame, but the fifth is partially hidden behind a clump of short grass. The ducklings are downy with yellow and brown markings. One has tiny water droplets clinging to its head and neck.
Photo of five ducklings climbing out of the dragonfly pond while their mother keeps watch from her position in the water. The fifth duckling is small and inconspicuous, hidden behind a tuft of grass on the right.

Out of my comfort zone

These Mallard posts have turned into foundation work for a policy argument.

(Spoiler alert: I am not crafting an argument against hunting.)

Policy arguments are not my norm and most definitely are not my creative strength. But I’m wading in.

I’m wading in without a map or floatation device, hoping for the kind of synergy that sometimes makes words more wise than their author. Hoping for fewer small and inconspicuous silences.

Photo of a Mallard duckling peering over the stone border of the dragonfly pond. This photo was taken at ground level, so the duckling's head is only partially visible over the stones, concentrating focus on the duckling's eye. A second duckling's rounded back, fluffy with down, appears to the far right of the frame.
Photo of a duckling peeking over the border of the dragonfly pond. The duckling has downy markings of yellow and brown and has the exaggerated forehead and eye proportions of infant cuteness.

I grew up around poultry, both wild and domestic. I also grew up around guns and hunting. Through all my many long years, I have accepted, unquestioning, most of the arguments in favor of hunting as both a sport and a science-backed approach to wildlife management and conservation.

I still accept some of these arguments. But I’m developing deep resistance to others. Resistance based on all of this reading about the history and practices of Mallard hunting and conservation.

(Let me repeat that spoiler: I am not crafting an argument against hunting.)

Blurry sepia-toned photo of a man standing beside two dead Mallards, which are hanging from a string or wire so that they are at head-height. The man is wearing a brimmed hat, a buttoned-up shirt with a rumpled collar, and a padded coat that appears to be made of canvas or similar material. The Mallards are male and female, judging by their plumage, and one of the female's wings hangs in way that suggests the wing was broken when she was shot. The outdoor scene shows trees that have lost their leaves for winter and a very small wooden outbuilding with a tin roof. The outbuilding looks to me like an outhouse or smoke shed.
Photo of an unknown man posing with two dead Mallards. One of the Mallards is in male plumage, the other in female plumage. I found this photo, which likely dates from the 1920s or 30s, in an album belonging to a great aunt. Based on labelling of a companion photo, the man’s name was Harry Kenyon. I don’t know how or why he ended up in Aunt Birdie’s album.

I’m not comfortable arguing policy, which means there will be throat clearing and wandering off-topic. I am, after all, a blogger. Not a lobbyist. A poet, not a lawmaker. I seldom demand rhetorical precision of myself, in my creative work. Which is part of why I enjoy blogging. Rhetorical precision is for the classroom and office, not the blog.

But there are upsides to making this argument in blog form. There’s freedom from structure and stricture. My hybrid interweaving of literature review and memoir is choice, not style guide. More importantly, there’s no peer review. I am my own editor and publisher, so I’m allowed to make overt appeals to emotion. Including photos and videos of ducklings.

These photo and videos are my unsubtle attempt to convince readers that ducks are stakeholders in policy discussions about waterfowl hunting.

Photo of a Mallard hen leading her ducklings out of the dragonfly pond. All are standing on a section of flagstone set level into the yard. In the background are a coiled green hose and an orange, plastic, five-gallon bucket stamped with white lettering reading "Let's do this" in all-caps. The Mallard hen is maybe a foot tall and has mostly brown feathers edged with tan, except for a patch of blue edged with black and white on her wing. The ducklings are maybe three or four inches tall and have downy feathers with yellow and brown markings. There are seven ducklings readily visible, though they are difficult to count due to how they are crowded together. (In all, this hen had eleven ducklings.)
Photo of a Mallard hen and her ducklings exiting the dragonfly pond in spring, 2025. In the background, a bright orange bucket is stamped with the big-box slogan “Let’s do this”.

Sport hunting is a profitable mine, and Mallards are a form of ore

Unlike many of my blog topics, Mallard hunting isn’t a rabbit hole. It’s a multi-level, vastly profitable mine regulated by international treaties and cooperative relationships between state and federal agencies.

Everything in the Mallard mine is complicated by tradition and money and land.

This isn’t about the flight muscles

I introduced a few ideas about the capitalism behind the science curtain in Part II. And where Mallards are concerned, science isn’t the only interested party. Mallard hunting (and farming) is not an independent storefront on the town square. This is big business and big money, so big policy questions come into play.

Who owns wildlife, on public and private lands? Who gets to decide how wildlife is exploited, on public and private lands? When is wildlife no longer wild? (Keep inserting “on public and private lands”, as the questions roll on…) What are the roles and aims of conservation work? Who gets to own and discharge firearms? Why and how are tradition and research guiding individual and community decision making, when it comes to hunting?

This isn’t about flight muscles.

Except, isn’t it?

Mallards are poultry. And once Mallards are defined as poultry, once flight muscles are defined as breast meat, Mallard hunting is only about the flight muscles. Wild Mallards are protein harvested by shotgun.

Photo of a Mallard hen grazing through a helping of wild bird seed that I scattered into the grass (and weeds) just beside the dragonfly pond. Her eleven ducklings are either watching her eat or beginning to wander back toward the pond. They sampled the seed but didn't eat much.
Photo of a Mallard hen eating bird seed. She is surrounded by her eleven ducklings. The ducklings sampled the seed but were unimpressed.

Just how big is this business?

A 2006 survey from the US Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS) found that “…waterfowl hunters represented 10 percent of all hunters, 7 percent of all hunting-related expenditures, and 6 percent of all hunting equipment expenditures” (Carver, 2008, pg. 3).

Here’s the waterfowl hunting numbers for 2006 (derived from Carver, 2008, Table 1, p. 4):

Number of US hunters (ducks)1,147,000
Number of US hunters (geese)700,000
Number of US hunters (all waterfowl)1,306,000
Reported US trip expenditures (waterfowl)$493,987,000
Reported US equipment expenditures (waterfowl)$406,298,000
Total US spending (waterfowl)$900,285,000

Those zeros are not a typo. That’s over nine hundred million dollars spent, in 2006, on hunting ducks, geese, and other waterfowl. While more than half of those dollars went to the travel industry, some four hundred million dollars were non-travel purchases, including “rifles, shotguns, other firearms, ammunition, telescopic sights, decoys, hunting dogs and associated costs. Also included are auxiliary equipment such as camping equipments, binoculars, special hunting clothing, processing and taxidermy costs. Due to small sample sizes, special equipment purchases such as boats, campers, trucks, and cabins are excluded…” (Carver, 2008, Table 1, pg. 4).

The author of this report adjusted the economic impact of waterfowl hunting through input–output modeling, to estimate how this spending radiates through the economy: “The trip expenditures of $494 million by waterfowl hunters generated $1.2 billion in total output while equipment expenditures of $406 million generated $1.1 billion in total output in the United States” (Carver, 2008, pg. 10).

So it’s fair to say that waterfowl hunting is a multi-billion dollar industry, in the US. That’s multi-billion per year. And Mallard hunting is a massive chunk of that industry. “Hunter reports indicate that mallards made up about 43% (5.5 million annually) of the ducks taken before 1960, when mallard regulations were less restrictive; the Duck Wing Survey indicates that mallards have made up 33% of the harvest (3.6 million annually) since 1960″ (Martin & Carney, 1977, p. IX).

Photo of a Mallard hen settling for a rest beside the dragonfly pond. In this phot0, most of her ducklings were hidden beneath her, tucked into the feathers of her chest and abdomen. One duckling has not settled, yet, and is standing just under her neck, looking around. Another duckling is barely visible to the right of frame, mostly hidden by a tuft of short, cut grass.
Photo of a Mallard hen settling for a nap with her ducklings beside the dragonfly pond in spring, 2025. Tucked beneath her chest, one duckling has raised its head to look around.

Given the money spent on hunting ducks, geese, and other waterfowl, it’s not a surprise that “…waterfowl hunting is positively correlated with income. That is, as household income increases, the percentage of waterfowl hunters for each group also increases. Income is also positively correlated with the participation rate of all hunters. However, all hunters do not tend to be as affluent as waterfowl hunters” (Carver, 2008, pg. 6).

This is not subsistence hunting. For the majority of duck hunters in the US, suspension of duck season would not equate to food insecurity. Yes, many hunters eat the ducks they kill. But they would still be able to eat, even if they killed no ducks.

How many Mallards are there, anyway?

Efforts to count the continent’s ducks began as early as the 1940s, when researchers tramped out into the marshes for hand counts. Then pilots joined the work, providing population estimates (and species distributions) for flocks spotted during aerial flyovers. Hunter surveys, requesting that hunters report how many and what kinds of ducks have been killed in the season, add a final dimension of data. At the confluence of these ongoing data streams, USFWS calculates Mallard “abundance”, which isn’t exactly a population count but is close enough for my purposes.

As of 1974, “The estimated size of the continental mallard population in May has ranged from a high of 14.4 million in 1958 to a low of 7.1 million in 1965. Generally, the mallard population began to decline after the 1958 peak until 1962, and remained below 10 million birds until 1970. The decline and consequent low level of the mallard population between 1959 and 1969 generally coincides with a period of poor habitat conditions on the major breeding grounds” (Pospahala, Anderson, & Henney, p. 49).

Over more recent decades (from 1992–2024) the “mid-continent” stock of US Mallards has ranged between 6.2 million and 11.9 million (USFWS, 2024, p. 12). (There are management purposes at work, in this focus on “mid-continent” Mallards, which I will get to later.)

Photo of a Mallard hen standing in a shallow place in the dragonfly pond. Her ducklings are gathered in the water, beside her. Her head is tipped slightly to her left, right eye angled toward the sky in search of aerial predators. Anthropomorphized, her head angle and expression look questioning.
Photo of a Mallard hen and her ducklings in the dragonfly pond, taking a brief break from their wanderings in the spring of 2025.

In 2024, Mallard abundance in the US registered some 6.6 million. In 2023, about 6.1 million (USFWS, 2024, p. iii).

With recent numbers hovering near the low end of the 1992–2024 Mallard abundance range, and below the lowest 1960s numbers, it seems that the Mallard glass is currently half-empty. But if accounts from the late 1800s and early 1900s are accurate, the North American Mallard glass has been half-empty for over a century. (Drop a pin in this claim. There will be evidence later.)

Where do North American Mallards come from, and where do they go?

Continental Mallard production can vary wildly over a very short span of years. For example, 1957 produced a count of 22.1 million Mallard “young”, but 1961 saw only 5.9 million (Anderson, 1975, p. 33). Granted, it’s difficult to count Mallard young, but there was undoubtedly a major decline between 1957 and 1961.

By the 1970s, it was clear that Mallard production was related to the number of ponds in Mallards’ breeding grounds. (Here is where that focus on mid-continent Mallards starts to become important, as the largest and most productive breeding grounds are in the north and central portions of North America, in “prairie pothole” country.) And, prior to 1960, the number of ponds steadily declined everywhere. But habitat was never the only factor.

Nesting season and shooting season

The existence of a “long-term average” population number for Mallards, of around 7.9 million (USFWS, 2024, p. iii), flattens into stasis a seasonally dynamic population. Spring and summer are boom and winnow seasons. Some 75% of Mallard mortality occurs in first-year ducks, either in the nest or during the weeks immediately after hatching, before young birds learn to fly (Anderson, 1975, p. IX). Then fall and winter bring the hunter’s guns.

“…it may be predicted that about 60 out of every 100 mallards flying south along the Mississippi Flyway will be hit by shot” (Bellrose, 1953, p. 358-359).

Photo of a Mallard hen just stepping up onto the stone border of the dragonfly pond. In the background, splashes and sprays of water fill the air, churned up by her recent splashy bath and the excited actions of her ducklings.
Photo of a Mallard hen getting ready to climb out of the dragonfly pond. Behind her, ducklings are splashing and playing in the water.

After Mallards survive their first summer, death by shotgun accounts for a significant percentage of overall Mallard mortality. Of the adult males that die each year, about 50% die by shotgun (Anderson, 1975, p. 24). The percentages are slightly lower for females (40%) and first-year Mallards (45%) (Anderson, 1975, p. 24).

Given all these shotguns, and all of the other Mallard hazards out there, the majority of Mallards that survive their first summer do not live more than two adult winters (Anderson, 1975, p. IX). That doesn’t mean that a three-year-old Mallard is an old Mallard, only that it is a lucky Mallard. Even luckier Mallards have lived as long as 13 years in the wild (a few female Mallards), and one particularly charmed male Mallard survived 18 years (Anderson, 1975, p. 26).

Harvest by shotgun

In the US, prior to 1960 hunters bagged some 5.5 million Mallards every year (Martin & Carney, 1977, p. IX). It’s worth repeating that number: 5.5 million Mallards. Every year.

After hunting regulations were tightened in 1960, the Mallard kill dropped to about 3.6 million per year (Martin & Carney, 1977, p. IX). Such numbers fluctuate, of course, and have dropped somewhat further since the 1970s. But hunting still claims millions of Mallards, each year. USFWS estimated a Mallard harvest of 2,042,668 birds, in 2022 (USFWS, 2023, Table 1E, p. 25).

Up through the 1970s, close to a quarter of the entire North American Mallard population was killed by hunters, every year (Anderson & Burnham, 1976, p. 40).

Based on the numbers previously cited for 2022 (2,042,668 Mallards killed by hunters) and 2023 (estimated population of 6.1 million), it seems that perhaps one-third of the US Mallard population continues to die by shotgun every year.

Overkill?

Only a few paragraphs ago, the USFWS estimated a 2024 Mallard population of 6.6 million. In 2024, a pre-1960 harvest (during years when harvests averaged 5.5 million ducks per year) would have obliterated the US population of Mallards.

In fact, the pre-1960s binges, on top of widespread habitat destruction, dealt multiple near-obliteration blows to North American Mallards. Starting early in the 1900s, hunters and researchers agreed that something needed to be done to save the Mallards. At least, they agreed that something needed to be done to save Mallard hunting.

The first (documented) North American Mallard bottleneck, circa 1920

Prior to the 1900s, hunters spoke of North America’s duck populations in awe-tinged phrases.

“It is about the finest country you could imagine in the wildest flights of fancy; Ducks getting up under your feet at every yard; Hawks, Goatsuckers, Prairie Chickens, and small birds in all directions… I shot a Teal and a splendid Shoveller drake for the pot. I can fancy I hear you exclaiming against the barbarism of eating such a bird; but I am getting daily accustomed to birds which are considered rare in England, and regard them now from a more utilitarian point of view” (Wood, 1885, p. 225).

“During this autumnal movement the number of ducks frequenting the lakes and ponds throughout Manitoba is prodigious. I shall not soon forget the hundreds I saw on the innumerable ponds between Rapid City and the Oak River, whilst on an excursion towards Fort Ellice, in the middle of October, 1883. Yet those I saw must have been as nothing compared with the abundance to be seen in some other places. A friend who had several days’ shooting at Totogon, near the south end of Lake Manitoba, about the end of September, describes the ducks as being so numerous that only the terms ‘acres’ and ‘millions’ could adequately express their abundance. The majority were Mallards, Anas boscas…” (Christy, 1885, p. 133).

By the 1920s, Mallards populations had declined to a notable low:

“The duck marshes on the Saginaw River no longer teem with water fowl. In early September and before the first frost the cackle of the Carolina rail is on every hand. These little birds—the Sora, seem as plentiful as ever, so I have not given up the marshes of the Saginaw entirely, but once or twice in the early part of September I get out the old canoe and with Alphonse to paddle or push, I take the trip through several miles of the Cheboyganning rice beds and usually get what the law allows of rail shooting, but in making all of this distance through acres and acres of rice, one or two ducks is all I see in place of the thousands of old” (Mershon, 1923, p. 73).

And this is where I leave the Mallards, for now. A poor remnant of a once thriving species, scarce and growing scarcer into the 1920s. In the next post, help arrives.

Photo of a Mallard hen and her ducklings in the dragonfly pond. Taken along ground level, the photo shows the hen's head and neck and back, with a blurred foreground of stone blocking the rest of her. Framed under the arch of her neck and chin, one of her ducklings is in sharp focus, facing the camera.
Photo of a Mallard hen and her ducklings exploring the dragonfly pond in spring, 2025. Here the hen is in the foreground and one of her ducklings is framed by her silhouette.

A housekeeping note (or, rather, a territory-keeping note)

Throughout this post, I’ve switched back and forth between talking about North American Mallards and US Mallards without much fanfare. Doesn’t it sound presumptuous? It’s almost as if I have forgotten that there are other countries on the continent. (Doesn’t it sound familiar?)

But from here on out, I’ll need to take more care. Because, starting in the early 1900s, lawmakers and researchers divvied up North America’s Mallards. There were, and still are, jurisdictions and flyways. More importantly, genetic work has identified two discreet and rarely-intermixing populations of Mallards, an eastern gene group and a western gene group (Lavretsky, Janzen, & McCracken, 2019). And my particular policy argument involves eastern Mallards, alone.

Preview of Part VI: The US judicial branch decides who owns the Mallards that visit US lands, and funding arrives for conservation

As long as there were plenty of Mallards, everywhere, distinctions between North American and US Mallards were moot. But as Mallard populations dwindled, hunters came into conflict over who got to shoot the Mallards that remained. And with increasing scarcity came increasing value, along with politicians to squabble over resource ownership.

The problem was (and still is, to a certain extent) that Mallards have always migrated according to their own maps, which existed long before humans decided that land could be owned. Given that the North American Mallard mine spans three (or more) countries, including most of the states in each country, and that Mallards are valuable ore, who owns the profit? Who gets to harvest this particular protein, and how should they be allowed to market it?

North American Mallards as a species have continued breeding and migrating, and US Mallards as a resource have continued falling into hunters’ bags, but the species and resource exist on two seemingly separate planes.

Oliver Wendell Holmes summed it up succinctly, in a landmark case that upheld the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty: “The whole foundation of the State’s rights is the presence within their jurisdiction of birds that yesterday had not arrived, tomorrow may be in another State and in a week a thousand miles away” (Missouri v. Holland, 1920, para. 6).

Photo of a Mallard hen drifting off to sleep while still standing. She is perched on the sunlit, stony border of our dragonfly pond. Her brood of ducklings are scattered under and in front of her, most in different sleep poses. One duckling is still awake, though visibly drowsy with half-closed eyes. Another duckling is barely balanced on the edge of a rounded, smooth stone, and appears on the verge of falling off backwards. Yet another duckling has nodded off with its neck bent and the tip of its beak just touching the sun-warmed rock.
Photo of a Mallard hen resting (asleep while standing up) on the stone border of the dragonfly pond in spring, 2025. Her ducklings are napping in a loose cuddle-heap, sprawled from just under her chest to almost a foot away. Some of the ducklings are slumped awkwardly in sleep, exhausted from their first hours off the nest, while others are fidgeting for a more comfortable position.

References

Anderson, D.R. (1975). Population ecology of the Mallard: V. Temporal and geographic estimates of survival, recovery, and harvest rates. Resource Publication 125. U.S. Department of the Interior, Fish and Wildlife Service. https://nwrc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p16473coll29/id/4786

Anderson, D. R., & Burnham, K. P. (1976). Population ecology of the Mallard. VI: The effect of exploitation on survival. Resource Publication 128. U. S. Department of Interior, Fish and Wildlife Service. https://nwrc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p16473coll29/id/4899

Bellrose, F. C. (1953). A preliminary evaluation of cripple losses in waterfowl. In James B. Trefethen (Ed.) Transactions of the Eighteenth North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference (pp. 337-360). The Wildlife Management Institute. https://wildlifemanagement.institute/conference/transactions/1953

Carver, E. (2008). Economic impact of waterfowl hunting in the United States: Addendum to the 2006 national survey of fishing, hunting, and wildlife-associated recreation. U. S. Fish and Wildlife Services. https://www.fws.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2024-04/1153.pdf

Christy, R. M. (1885). Notes on the birds of Manitoba. The Zoologist: A Monthly Journal of Natural History, 3rd Series, IX(100). https://ia801303.us.archive.org/27/items/zoologist85lond/zoologist85lond.pdf

Gillham, C. E. (1947). Wildfowling can be saved. In Ethel M. Quee (Ed.), Transactions of the Twelfth North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference (pp. 47-52). The Wildlife Management Institute. https://wildlifemanagement.institute/conference/transactions/1947

Krapu, G. L. (1981) The role of nutrient reserves in Mallard reproduction. The Auk 98, 29-38. doi: 10.1093/auk/98.1.29

Lavretsky, P., Janzen, T., & McCracken, K. G. (2019). Identifying hybrids and the genomics of hybridization: Mallards and American Black Ducks of Eastern North America. Ecology and Evolution (9), 3470–3490. DOI: 10.1002/ece3.4981 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ece3.4981

Martin, E.M., & Carney, S.M. (1977). Population ecology of the Mallard: IV. A review of duck hunting regulations, activity, and success with special reference to the Mallard. Resource Publication 130. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. https://pubs.usgs.gov/unnumbered/5230112/report.pdf

Mershon, W. B. (1923). Recollections of My Fifty Years Hunting and Fishing. The Stratford Company. https://archive.org/details/recollectionsofm00mers_0

Missouri v. Holland, 252 U.S. 416. (1920). https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/252/416

Organ, J. F., Mahoney, S. P., & Geist, V. (2010). Born in the hands of hunters: The North American model of wildlife conservation. The Wildlife Professional 4(3), 22-27. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267749137_Born_in_the_hands_of_hunters_the_North_American_Model_of_Wildlife_Conservation

Pospahala, R. S., Anderson, D. R., & Henney, C. J. (1974). Population ecology of the mallard. II: Breeding and habitat conditions, size of the breeding populations, and production indices. Resource Publication 115. U.S. Department of Interior, Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife. https://nwrc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p16473coll29/id/10213/rec/1

USFWS (2023). Migratory Bird Hunting Activity and Harvest during the 2021–2022 and 2022–2023 Hunting Seasons. USFWS. https://www.fws.gov/sites/default/files/documents/migratory-bird-hunting-activity-and-harvest-report-2021-to-2022-and-2022-to-2023.pdf

USFWS (2024). Waterfowl Population Status, 2024. US Department of the Interior. https://www.fws.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2024-08/waterfowl-population-status-report-2024.pdf

Wood, T. B. (1885). Notes on the zoology of Manitoba. The Zoologist: A Monthly Journal of Natural History, 3rd Series, IX(100). https://ia801303.us.archive.org/27/items/zoologist85lond/zoologist85lond.pdf

Focusing on Mallards Part IV: Positioning My Perspective(s)

Rae SpencerLeave a comment

Content warning

This multi-part blog post contains references to the hunting, agriculture, and research practices of killing birds. This particular installment contains references to hunting other prey and killing chickens from a backyard flock. If you decide not to read on, I respect and admire your choice.

Photograph of five Mallard ducklings resting on the stone border of our dragonfly pond after a tiring swim. Four of the ducklings are settled in and nodding off, while the fifth is still standing and fidgeting. The ducklings are fluffy with down (immature feathers), have yellow and brown markings, and each still has a visible remnant of egg tooth at the beak tip. They were less than 24 hours old when this photo was taken.
Photograph of five Mallard ducklings resting on the stone border of our dragonfly pond. Four of the ducklings are settled in and nodding off, while the fifth is still standing and fidgeting.

Livestock are living stock. And sometimes pets.

Until they are not.

Growing up in rural Tennessee, I had daily exposure to food chain realities. Our freezers (we had two) were stocked with meat from assorted livestock we raised. Livestock we loved. Chickens and cows, during my memory years, with vague early memories of pigs.

A 1970s-era photo, scanned from our family archive, of four fancy chickens roaming free in our yard. Two of the chickens have dark feathers with reddish highlights, one with additional iridescent green highlights on its wing feathers. A third chicken has almost all light reddish-brown feathers. The fourth's feathers are black over its head and neck, reddish tan across its chest, and gray over its wings, back, abdomen, and tail. The gray feathers on its back and abdomen are fluffier and downier than regular feathers. All four chickens have topknots of varying fluffiness and fanciness. All four are notably dainty.
A 1970s-era photo of four “banties” (bantams), dainty chickens with variously fancy topknots, roaming free in our yard.
A 1970s-era photograph scanned from our family archive. Three young cows are standing near a fence line, pasture and woods in most of the background, with one wall of a weathered wooden shed visible. The cows are browsing through a scatter of trampled hay. The cows' coat colors indicate their mixed heritage. The cow closest to the camera strongly favors a Brown Swiss milk cow: its body is mostly dark brown with lighter shading on its legs and ears and a very pale muzzle with a dark nose. The middle cow likely has some Charolais beef breeding: its coloration is a patchy mix of pale tans and white. The cow furthest from the lens has markings typical of Hereford beef cattle: primarily reddish coloration with white legs, a white stripe down its back, and a white face.
A 1970s-era photograph of three young cows standing near a fence line with pasture and woods in the background.
Another 1970s-era photo, scanned from the family archive. In this photo, three red pigs are grazing in a dry, clean patch of short pasture grass. The pigs are likely of Duroc descent, given their red coloration and the widespread popularity of the Duroc breed.
A 1970s-era photo of three red pigs grazing a patch of short pasture grass.

Our chickens and cows and pigs had individual names and individual personalities. We raised them and cared for them and loved them. But food chain reality means that livestock exists to be eaten. No matter how cherished. No matter how tame.

In this 1970s-era photograph, a red-and-white Hereford cow stands over her very young and very sleepy calf. The calf is red and white, like its mother, and its coat is thick and curly and damp in places. Just behind this cow and calf, a small cluster of black cows have gathered. These background cows would be of Angus breeding. All of the cows are standing in a patch of scattered straw and hay. The ground under the straw and hay would probably have been a trampled mire of mud. The bare-limbs tree line, just visible, indicates a winter setting.
Yet another 1970s-era photograph from the family archive. Here, a red-and-white Hereford cow stands over her very young calf. The calf is curled up on the ground, sleepy eyes and ears drooping.

Off to slaughter

Our cows and pigs were slaughtered and processed by local-ish butchers, but Mother slaughtered our chickens with a hatchet. Then she cleaned and portioned their carcasses while I collected and bagged bloody feathers.

In this 1970s-era photograph, Mother is feeding a flock of some 15 chickens, along with 3 white ducks, from a repurposed coffee can filled with whatever mix of feed and corn was on the day's menu. The chickens are mostly gray-and-white speckled Dominiques (we called them "domineckers"), with a single white leghorn rooster and a few Rhode Island red hens. In the background, our white station wagon is parked under a pole shed, along with several bicycles. The photo is poorly focused with faded colors.
In this 1970s-era photograph, Mother is feeding our small flock of chickens and ducks. At the moment this photo was snapped, Mother was bent over, using her free hand to enforce order. If photos came with sound, you would hear her scolding the greedy birds and coaxing the shy ones.1

In reviewing family archives for this post, I was struck by how similar the above scene is to a photo from the early 1900s, found in our maternal grandmother’s album. There was clearly something generational going on at our table.

Scanned image of an early 1900s photograph from my grandmother's photo album. The sepia-toned black-and-white image shows a flock of large chickens foraging in a tight bunch, probably having just been given feed. Some of the chickens have dark feathers and some have light feathers. The background is bare-limbed trees (winter), a large flat field, a post-and-wire fence with a closer fence having its lower section blocked off by tin. There is also a small outbuilding with an open door, with what appears to be a tractor parked in front.
Early 1900s-era photograph of some twenty chickens foraging in a bare yard with farm equipment, fences, and an outbuilding in the background.

Wildlife can also be living stock, to a hunter

Small and sundry prey

In addition to eating chicken, beef, and pork raised on our property, we sometimes ate squirrels and rabbits shot by my father and brothers. It’s possible that our beagles sometimes helped on these hunts. (It’s more likely that our beagles hindered these hunts.)

A small square photograph of three beagles, motion-blurred, play-fighting on top of a wooden doghouse. Shadows of fencing are visible on the doghouse. I believe these three beagles are Daisy, Fella, and Little Bit, though we also had a fourth beagle named Dan.
A 1970s-era photo of three naughty beagles play-fighting on top of a doghouse.

I helped skin and clean the squirrels and rabbits, and I remember being fascinated by their soft fur. I also remember Mother muttering and tsking while she cooked squirrel and rabbit meals. She breaded and fried the meat, and served barely edible, extremely tough portions with open disdain.

I developed a lasting case of meat snobbery, rooted in Mother’s disdain. Squirrels and rabbits were in the lowest edibility tier. Nothing lower was served. No frog legs. No snake, turtle, or alligator meat. No opossums.

Something generational was going on at our table there, too, but in the opposite sense of backyard flocks. Mother preserved her family’s tradition of raising chickens for slaughter, but put a permanent end to the family tradition of opossum hunting. (Scroll quickly if you don’t care to see a sepia-toned group of early 1900s ancestors showing off a bunch of dead, dying, or faking-death opossums, along with the dogs that facilitated the hunt.)

Scanned image of a photograph from my grandmother's photo album. In the album, the hand-printed caption read "The morning after our great Opposum hunt. 'We won't forget.'" This deep-sepia-toned black-and-white photo, circa early 1900s, shows five people standing in a row with a fourth person kneeling in front. Posing outdoors in a yard, the people are holding at least three opossums. The opossums are either dead, dying, or faking death. The woman to the far left is holding a smallish black-and-white dog, while the man kneeling in front is restraining two hounds. Probable (possible?) identifications include standing L to R: Sarah Harrison, Georgia Linton, Charlie Linton, Bill Linton, and an unknown girl; kneeling in front: Buck Linton.
In my grandmother’s album, this photo is labelled “The morning after our great Opposum hunt. ‘We won’t forget’.”

That’s my grandmother, second from the left, one hand behind her back and the other hand dangling an opossum for the camera. This particular hunt (it wasn’t the only time the family hunted and ate opossums) was special because one of the cousins (Sarah Harrison, standing on the far left) had come to visit.

Scanned image of a sepia-toned black-and-white photograph in my great aunt's photo album. In the album, the hand-printed caption reads "Sarah Harrison / Popman's cousin / 'the Possum hunt'". The outdoor photo shows a woman wearing a plaid dress with intricately pieced trim and pockets, white stockings, and white shoes. The woman is holding two dead, dying, or faking-death opossums, one opossum in each hand. The woman's dark hair is pinned up, and she is looking at the camera but not smiling. Beside her is a smallish black-and-white dog with a bobbed tail and half-pricked ears. The dog is looking up, attention fixed on the woman and opossums.
This photo was in a great aunt’s album. The photo is labelled: “Sarah Harrison / Popman’s cousin / ‘the Possum hunt’ “2

I should add that Mother’s disdain was not coherently taxonomic. Reptiles, amphibians, and insects were off the menu, but so were ducks, geese, and goats. Which meant some of our livestock were exempt from slaughter. What’s more, “dairy” came from cows and cows exclusively. There’s no logic here, only family and cultural tradition.

Cue any stand-up comic mocking a southern drawl. For that matter, cue any bully standing in their own tradition, mocking other traditions.

Photograph from 2021 of a white-tailed deer trotting beside a paved path at Back Bay Wildlife Refuge in Virginia Beach, VA. The background and foreground are winter-toned in oranges and browns of dormant shrubs and grasses, with occasional greens of live oaks and wax myrtles typical of coastal Virginia. The deer's head and tail are up, ears angled to listen behind her, in a body language that suggests alertness verging on alarm but not panic. Moments after I snapped this photo, the deer vanished into the tall seagrass.
Photograph of a white-tailed deer trotting beside a paved path at Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge. In my southern-Tennessee lexicon, “venison” very specifically refers to deer meat. I only learned in my middle-age that the word “venison” has different and wider definitions in different cultures.

In my late teen and early adult years, my oldest sister’s boyfriend often gifted us venison. I was particularly fond of what I called “Bambi roast” and “Bambi spaghetti”. Bambi, it seems, ranked high in my edible-mammal hierarchy. A bit below pet chickens and cows, but certainly above squirrels and rabbits. Which were at least on the list. Unlike opossums.

Here in my middle years, my childhood memories of skinning squirrels and rabbits seem dreamlike. As if those skinny arms and small hands weren’t my own. After all, any brief stroll through my blog history will find some tender post about squirrel and rabbit nests. I cringe, extra, thinking about any of the yard’s visitors heading into a hunter’s sights, then into a frying pan or stew pot.

Photograph from the spring of 2024. Five Mallard ducklings, less than two days old, are floating in a cluster in our dragonfly pond. Two of the ducklings have their heads cocked, one eye looking skyward. They are responding to an alarm call from their mother, who had spotted a hawk wheeling overhead.
Yes, Mallard babies. I’m talking about you. I’m aching to protect you.

But I didn’t always equate animals, my own pets and livestock in particular, with the meat on my table.

Further aside… so many eggs

Gathering the eggs

On mornings when my oldest sister was too tired or busy or sick to tend the chickens, I was roused and sent in her place. I remember egg gathering as sleepy, smelly, spidery work. Early morning work. (I’ve never been an early morning kind of girl.)

Egg gathering meant wrestling the chicken pen latch, which grew tighter each year as the posts and gate warped. Then I had to put down my bucket—to unclip the rusty chicken house latch and heave the rickety door over hills of weeds, dirt, and dung—and usually had two or three hens perched in my hair and on my shoulders by the time I bent to retrieve the bucket. Finally, I would stumble over the plank sill into the warm, dimly lit interior.

(Yes, I always stumbled. My severe astigmatism couldn’t navigate the sudden change from light to dark, and the hens dashed in and out through the door in frenzied delight.)

Our chicken house was closer in size to a closet than a house. I don’t have any chicken pen/chicken house photos to share, but almost any wire pen around almost any vine-covered tin-roof-and-plank outbuilding would be an accurate visual.

Veils of cobweb hung from the low rafters. Snakes, flies, wasps, spiders, and light entered and exited through gaps in the walls and roof. A short row of nest boxes lined one wall. The floor was dirt, feathers, dung, and broken shells. The chicken house smelled strongly of chickens and dust, but also of cat urine (from our army of yard cats) and dog feces (from the adjoining dog pen) and, every so often, of predators.3

Shooing hens from their nests, or reaching beneath those who refused to be shooed, I gathered eggs by touch more than sight. (It’s not as easy as it sounds. Our hens didn’t give up their eggs willingly, especially to the tentative little sister of their usual egg-gatherer. Wing slaps left bruises, and claws and beaks drew blood.)

The warm, sticky, tough-shelled eggs that I gathered didn’t feel like they held nascent chicks and ducklings. 

A 1980s-era photograph of a red hen and her brood of variously yellow, tan, or striped chicks, all safely enclosed in one of our wood-and-chicken-wire coops. The stocky hen shows strong Rhode Island Red characteristics, but the chicks' mixed genetics were more typical of our flock.
A 1980s-era photograph of a red hen and her brood of eleven(ish) striped chicks, all safely enclosed in one of our wood-and-chicken-wire coops.

Breaking the eggs

Our father began leaving during my pre-teen years. He sold the cows, let the fences lay where they fell, and stopped shoring up the barn and sheds. After he finished leaving, neglect cascaded into decay. Vines pulled down the chicken house and the gate fell off the pen.

Both pre- and post-chicken house era, egg gathering mistakes were inevitable. In the chaos of the crowded, rickety henhouse, broody laying hens stole eggs from the adjacent nests of setting hens. Predators and predator alarms rolled and bounced eggs between nest boxes. An egg laid by a setter a week or more ago, carefully incubated since, might end up alone in a layer’s nest. An egg laid by a layer last night might end up in a two-weeks-along setter’s nest.

After our flocks were entirely free-roaming, they hid their nests so well that eggs were often days old before being found. Eventually, increasing incidences of “bad eggs”, coupled with decreasing egg demand as siblings moved out, halted all egg collecting.

Late 1980s-era photograph of five large white eggs in a rough nest on the ground. The flat nest is made only of trampled grass and dry, dead weeds. The nest is positioned beneath an unused steel livestock gate that is leaning against the wall of a post-and-panel shed.
Photograph of five eggs, probably duck eggs, in a nest on the ground. This nest was tucked between an unused livestock gate and the outer corner of a shed.

The term “bad eggs” most obviously referred to rotting or rotten eggs. The kind that burst on their own or floated in water. But “bad eggs” also encompassed fertilized eggs that were mistakenly collected mid-incubation.

When an incomplete carcass, some mid-development stage of a chick or duckling, spilled from an egg I had cracked, I writhed with regret. It happened often enough, in my early years, that I still crack eggs into a separate bowl when cooking.

After our egg-collecting years ended, our increasingly feral flock was left to hatch and raise what young they could in whatever nests they chose.

Late 1980s-era photograph of a gray-and-tan feathered game hen with black tail feathers. The hen is setting on a nest that she made in a deep pile of straw left in the bottom of a large wooden box that once held bales of straw. The colors in this photograph are over-bright due to using a flashbulb on the camera, and the image is somewhat blurry.
A late 1980s photo of a game hen (conveniently named “Game Hen”) sitting a nest of eggs in a straw-lined box.
Late 1980s-era photograph of the inside of an ancient out-of-service livestock trailer that served as a shed for storing straw, hay, and feed. The trailer's flooring is wooden planks laid between steel bars. A massive, open-topped wooden crate/box is positioned in the middle of the trailer, an overturned tin can is on the floor in front of the box, and a large weathered 50-gallon oil drum is to the right. Game Hen is perched at the entryway, looking out. A reddish hen is perched on the edge of the large box, and another hen (mostly in shadow) is perched on the oil drum's closed lid. In the far background, shadows and reflections show equipment, bottles, and boxes stored (and long forgotten) on a shelf. The massive box once held bales of straw, but by this time held only a deep bed of leftover straw which was used by the cats and chickens for warm bedding. The oil drum held bags of feed. We kept the trailer doors closed, most of the time, but there were plenty of holes through the sides and bottom that the chickens, cats, rats, and opossums used for entry- and exit-ways.
A late 1980s view inside the “trailer” (a dilapidated, out-of-service livestock trailer that we treated as a bonus shed for feed storage). The massive wooden open-topped box/crate (center frame) once held bales of straw, so it was lined with broken bales. Inside this box, in the right back corner, was Game Hen’s nest.
Late 1980s-era photograph of 11 white eggs and 7 brown eggs in a nest made of straw. This was Game Hen's nest to sit, though the eggs were likely provided by multiple hens. The nest was in the far back-right corner of a massive open-topped wooden crate/box the sat in the middle of the ancient out-of-service livestock trailer we used for straw, hay, and feed storage.
The same late 1980s nest, photographed after bribing Game Hen with feed. Heaped in the nest are 11 white eggs and 7 brown eggs. The hens literally shared prime nesting spots.
Late 1980s-era photograph of a golden-eyed black-and-white cat (Mischief) nursing a newborn litter of kittens. All are settled in a deep, warm nest of straw, loosely lined with an old blue shirt. There are five kittens, three tortoiseshell and two solid white (destined to develop silver-and-gray "points" typical of siamese, but with the much longer hair typical of ragdoll cats). This litter of kittens was delivered and nursed in the massive wooden open-topped crate/box that we used to store straw in the ancient out-of-service livestock trailer that served as our feed shed.
Another late 1980s-era photograph, taken in the exact same spot in the trailer’s box of straw as the above nest photos. This is my cat Mischief nursing a newborn litter of five beautiful kittens. Two of these kittens will reappear later in this post, in a photo taken after they were grown.

Growing up in rural Tennessee, eating the animals and dissociating

While my egg-mistake memories are mostly visual, wetly curled bodies in a puddle of albumin, my memories of chicken, squirrel, and rabbit carcasses are sticky with remorse and smell like blood, grease, and guilt left out in the sun.

But expressing regret, remorse, or guilt at the table was forbidden. So was refusing to eat what was served. I don’t remember being told these rules, nor do I remember hearing these rules explained to my siblings. For that matter, I don’t remember learning these rules.

It is this lack of learning, this full memory cache with no record of creation, that warrants using the word “dissociated”. As a girl growing up in rural Tennessee, I dissociated from the eggs and meat on our table.

I coped with my forbidden regret, remorse, and guilt by inventing a private delusion, by defining eggs and meat as a different form of matter than living animals.

Mid-to-late-1980s-era photograph of our back yard, taken in late winter/early spring (indicated by the budding saplings in the background). Our small mixed flock of chickens, ranging in color from red-and-black to solid white, are resting, foraging, and roaming around the trunks and roots of a massive maple tree. An ancient out-of-service aluminum-sided livestock trailer is parked to the left, our wire-and-chain-link dog pen is in the left background, and a weathered old doghouse is in the middle background (used by cats, chickens, and yard dogs for warmth).
Mid-1980s photograph of our mostly free-roaming flock. We wouldn’t have eaten many of their eggs, in their later years, and their tough old carcasses would have been among the last added to the freezer. The trailer is visible to the left, with the dog pen behind it. The derelict chicken pen is hidden in the far center background, behind the row of saplings and shrub-like weeds.

Depression on top of dissociation

The photo immediately below is more metaphor than image. The worn paint and sagging shingles on our house and concrete-block wellhouse, the decaying barn-remnants to the far right, the unkempt pasture and yard, and the overgrowth marking downed fences. All of these illustrate the state of our dysfunctional household during my teen and young adult years.

A late-1980s or early-1990s-era photograph of our back yard. The edge of the house is just in view to the left, with worn paint on the wooden siding and facia boards. The concrete-block wellhouse, with its wide concrete stoop, sits just behind the house. Here, the wellhouse's roof is in bad disrepair, sagging with rot. Two cats and a hen are perched on the wellhouse, waiting to be fed. The yard is patchy, with some areas of dead grass and some areas of overgrown grass. The crumbled and rotting remains of a sloped loading chute and our barn are visible to the far right, and a heap of discarded debris (the remains of a fallen pole shed roof, the old pig pen fence, the old pig shed, and one wall of the barn) is thinly hidden behind a tall (>6 foot) curtain of dead brush. The woods in the far background are winter-bare.
A late 1980s- or early 1990s-era photo taken in the back yard. Perched atop our concrete block wellhouse, two cats and a red hen are waiting to be fed. The cats, Annie (right, tortoiseshell colored) and Gizmo (left, ragdoll marked) grew up out of the exact trailer-straw litter pictured above. The hen, whose name I’ve lost to time, was one of Game Hen’s daughters.

The hungry cats and hen on the wellhouse roof, waiting for a meal of table scraps and cheap kibble, are confusion, sorrow, and loneliness. This was the era of boyfriend venison and day-old bread. Of freezers stocked from clearance ads. Of oldest sister tending the garden in the dark of too-early mornings and too-late evenings because she was working three jobs while going to college.

We no longer ate the livestock we raised and loved, but clearance-case chicken and ground beef added a new facet to my dissociation. Grocery eggs and meat were always cold and bloodless, had never been embodied in the yard. And I had learned what it meant to be hungry.

Re-associating, for health reasons

Or, “Thanks for the genes, Dad”

My father died of heart disease at the age of 52. I was mid-teens, and he seemed so old. But he wasn’t old. I am, currently, older than 52.

I don’t feel so old.

I like being me, and I would like to continue being me for some good long number of years past 52.

Perseverating on 52

One of the ways I’ve packaged and carried grief is a fixation on 52nd birthdays. As each of my four older siblings passed 52, I breathed a bit easier. Long before I reached 52, I began researching and planning. Partly because of the grief fixation, but also because my cholesterol levels have been alarming physicians since I was a teen.

Note to father: Next time, maybe try leaving us money, instead.

Statins and exercise are no match for my father’s genes. My last resort for living past 52 was a complete overhaul of my diet. (I should have started there, but I’m a silly human with silly human habits.)

Call it plant based. Call it vegetarian. Call it desperation.

An unexpected side-effect of my diet overhaul has been re-associating with animal protein. My health ambitions were easier to realize when I reminded myself that pork is slaughtered pigs. That beef is slaughtered cows. That chicken is slaughtered chickens. That grocery eggs come from hens housed in industry conditions, not back yards.

Without my dad’s cholesterol, I would probably still perceive meat and living stock as unrelated forms of matter.

Enter the Mallards

Timing is everything, and my various perspectives and journeys are not random. If you are still reading, you might be starting to see a signal. Or not.

What looks like signal to me likely looks like noise to others.

Perhaps in a later post I’ll explain how a literature search through the history of prion testing catalyzed an ongoing reaction between a brood of suburban ducklings, a fetish-level case of nostalgia, a dysfunctional family history, and a stubborn set of lipid genes, resulting in this multi-part Mallard post.

Photo from the spring of 2024, of a Mallard hen and her brood of ducklings swimming in the dragonfly pond. Here the hen is reaching up, tugging seeds from a long grass seedhead that had sagged over the pond's edge. One of her ducklings is reaching up, sampling the grassy seeds, while the others are milling around, watching.
In this photo from the spring of 2024, a female Mallard duck shows her brood how to eat grass seeds from a seedhead dangling over the dragonfly pond.

For the present, I’m a recovering carnivore lured to herbivory by a longing to live past 52. I grew up in a rural environment where the animal protein on our table came from our own yard, pasture, and woods. And I’ve known what it is to be hungry.

These perspectives matter, though it’s not entirely up to me to decide how they matter.

In the next episode…

Mallard hunting is big business.

Image scanned from my great aunt's photo album. This black-and-white photo, vaguely sepia-toned, shows a man in thick winter garb—newsboy(?) hat, hunting jacket (lots of pockets), bulky pants, and worn boots—holding a long gun and two dead Mallard ducks. In the album, a hand-printed caption on an adjoining photo identified this man as Harry Kenyon.
Early 1900s photograph of a duck hunter holding a gun and two dead Mallards. This photograph was scanned from a great aunt’s photo album. The hunter’s name was Harry Kenyon. I do not know who he was or how his image landed in my great aunt’s photo album.

2. While I’m perfectly awful at recognizing genetic and cultural heritages based on peoples’ features and clothes, I recognize that this distant cousin doesn’t look or dress like my grandmother’s family. I would love to know more about her. (Click here to return to your regularly scheduled photo caption.)

3. My parents believed weasels were the chickens’ craftiest predators, blaming almost all egg, chick, and hen losses on an invisible and trackless family of mustelid carnivores, traceable only by scent. Years later, I realized that the scent I was taught to identify as “weasel” covered everything from the musk of a water snake to fox scat to mouse urine. (Click here to return to your regularly scheduled paragraph.)