Martin J. Smith - The Wild Duck Chase: Inside the Strange and Wonderful World of the Federal Duck Stamp Contest

Oops: 20 Life Lessons from the Fiascoes That Shaped America,
with coauthor Patrick J. Kiger
Poplorica: A Popular History of the Fads, Mavericks, Inventions,
and Lore That Shaped Modern America,
with coauthor Patrick J. Kiger
Straw Men (2002 Edgar Award nominee)
Shadow Image
Time Release (1998 Anthony Award nominee)

Inside the Strange and Wonderful World of
the Federal Duck Stamp Contest

Martin J. Smith

Copyright 2012 by Martin J. Smith

This electronic edition published in September 2012

Published by Walker Publishing Company, Inc., New York
A Division of Bloomsbury Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced
in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the
publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical
articles or reviews.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA HAS BEEN APPLIED FOR.

ISBN: 978-0-8027-7954-0 (e-book)

First U.S. edition 2012

Visit Walker & Companys website at
www.walkerbooks.com

To Judy

The beautiful creature, like the mountain, is therethe bird to be painted, the mountain climbed. The birds beauty must be acknowledged, understood, captured. I am the one to capture it, says the bird-artist: I shall do the best I can.

ORNITHOLOGIST AND LEGENDARY WILDLIFE ARTIST GEORGE MIKSCH SUTTON, FROM HIS 1962 ESSAY IS BIRD-ART ART?

I gotta get it out of there. She really doesnt like it.

TWO-TIME FEDERAL DUCK STAMP ARTIST ROBERT HAUTMAN, ON HIS WIFES MISGIVINGS ABOUT THE SPREAD-EAGLED PHEASANT IN HIS SEARS KENMORE FREEZER, ALONG WITH FOURTEEN OTHER DEAD BIRDS, APRIL 24, 2010

Nothing at the corner of North Fairfax Drive and Vermont Street in Arlington, Virginia, suggests that the nondescript building at 4401 North Fairfax houses anything extraordinary, much less the three-office suite of one of the best ideas Americas federal government has ever had. Even after a four-floor elevator ride, its tricky to find the headquarters of the Federal Duck Stamp Program in the small labyrinth occupied by the Division of Bird Habitat Conservation, which itself is a thirty-employee subnode of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which is part of the Department of the Interior.

Duck Stamp Program chief Patricia Fishers guided tour takes all of two minutes.

If you pause during that tour, though, youll notice clues to a story that, told in full, might restore your faith in the often ineffective and inefficient U.S. government. The walls are hung with framed prints of painted ducks, including past winners of the Federal Duck Stamp Contest, the centerpiece of the programs peculiar magic. You also might notice a placard between the offices of Duck Stamp stalwarts Elizabeth Jackson and Laurie Shaffer that reads, Well-behaved women rarely make history, and, on Shaffers office wall, a framed stencil of a floating duck accompanied by the words Behave like a duck. Stay calm on the surface but paddle like crazy underneath.

Those three women run the $852,000-a-year program, which in 2010 generated about $24 million in revenue

And yet, by the summer of 2010, Fisher was worried, and not just because the recent Deepwater Horizon rig explosion and subsequent, ongoing BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico were temporarily consuming the attention and resources of the Fish and Wildlife Service, of which her program is a very small part. Her concern was a more chronic condition.

Since assuming leadership of the program in 2005, Fisher had been scrambling to educate the largely unaware American public about the value of the Federal Duck Stamp Program, and to remind Congress, which controls its funding, not only that the program is effective but also that it even exists. The program operates so efficiently and so far off the federal bureaucratic radar that a Freedom of Information Act request for any audits, white papers, or similar assessment reports on the programs efficacy triggers a kind of confounded head-scratching among Washington officialdom.

In April 2010, Fisher went to St. Paul, Minnesota, to oversee the final judging of the Junior Duck Stamp Contest, a smaller-scale federal art competition designed to introduce the program to a nation of children these days primarily focused on iPods and Facebook rather than wild waterfowl and acrylic paints. She has the look and demeanor of a stern high school teacher, which, with her masters degree in history, she could have been. Maybe it was her natural reverence for the past, or maybe she was just exhausted after the conclusion of the contest judging that evening, but she clearly was grappling with questions about the programs future.

The Duck Stamp Program is a relic from a different era, she said. How to make it modern? Thats the challenge. Thats what keeps me up at night: doing the best we can to treasure our program and making sure other people appreciate it for what it is, how special it is.

The program was started by environmental visionaries in the middle of the Dust Bowl era and the Great Depression, when the need to conserve resources for waterfowl seemed a frivolous pursuit in a nation desperate to simply feed itself. With real and raw emotion in her voice, Fisher added, I just really respect those people at the creation [of the program] and honor their memories. What they did was amazing to me. Everything worked. It was a tragic time for people, and wildlife. But some amazing things came out of that. Not only the Duck Stamp Program but the federal Work Projects Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps, things like that. We have really historic roots, and it all came out of this tragic time.

Fisher paused, then peered over the top edge of her rimless eyeglasses. I dont want all that to go. It would be a terrible thing to lose.

At nine a.m. on October 15, 2010, when the doors of the David Brower Centerthe self-proclaimed greenest building in Berkeley [California]officially open to the public for the days event, theres no hint of trouble. Four months earlier, the San Francisco Chronicle previewed the upcoming 2010 Federal Duck Stamp Contest on its website with a story whose headline predicted, somewhat darkly, that Berkeley, the American epicenter of dissent and protest, was the place most likely to get its plumage in a bunch over a gathering primarily made up of people who consider shooting waterfowl to be a sport. The Chronicle piece made clear that the eventa dramatic two-day process involving three scheduled elimination roundswas likely to offend local sensibilities.

To be sure, all the necessary ingredients for a culture clash are in place. Just two years earlier, an epic struggle for conservation played out in Berkeley, where any perceived assault on nature is a reason to break out the protest signs. The contest site is located a few hundred yards away from that of the longest urban tree-sit in American history, which pitted a small band of conservationists against the University of California, Berkeley.

Now, inside the Brower Centera temple to environmental activism named after one of the twentieth centurys greatest conservation pioneers and located directly across Oxford Street from the UC Berkeley campusthe 180-seat auditorium is beginning to fill. To the local tree-sitters and the eco-warriors who supported them, it must seem like the barbarians are at the gates.