Your Responsibility
As an individual reader of this booklet, you have a part to play in the essential partnership between agencies and waterfowlers. Your part may be small and may take various forms, depending on the circumstances, but certainly it is there. Perhaps, having sent in one or two waterfowl bands in the past and having experienced the initial novelty of hearing where your birds came from, you now forget to report them. The next time you have this choice between reporting or forgetting a band, remember that its prompt recovery, with full data, might be the clue to some missing fact to improve your future gunning.
Hunter bag checks indicate crippling losses in the Central Flyway run to an average of about one quarter of the total kill. In certain marshes, early in the season, crippling can greatly exceed the one quarter loss. Shooting at birds on the fringe of effective killing range is a crippling practice and, moreover, as you probably know from observation is contagious. The usual effect of one “sky shooter” in a marsh is to force other gunners nearby to attempt impossible shots which increase crippling losses and soon ruin shooting for everybody. Controlling such practices lies solely in the hands of individual gunners. With large-gauge guns of modified bore, the shot-pattern that will produce kills should be consistent up to forty yards, a distance well within capabilities of the average gunner to hold and compute necessary lead. Successful duck shooting is a matter of good judgment. To avoid errors in judgment drive stakes in front of your blind at distances of thirty and forty yards to indicate safe killing range. Hold your fire until the feet of an incoming duck can be seen distinctly, for only then will the bird be in range. Good sportsmanship in duck blinds and marshes is equally as important as remaining friendly with your home neighbors. Train a good retrieving dog, and add to your day’s pleasure by watching him at work on downed birds.
Above all, remember that the future of waterfowling is partly in your hands—that your good sportsmanship and cooperation are as necessary to the work of the Central Flyway Council and its member agencies as their activities are to you.