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There's a group of people who wake up before dawn on this.

Phone.

They read the land and the weather like a book.

For months.

And they prepare.

They teach their children, train their dogs.

And often spend a small fortune in all of this.

To quietly watch the earth come to life.

And hopefully shoot a duck.

There's so much more to it than actual shooting of the birds.

You're noticing how the marsh wakes up, how it breathes, how the earth breathes.

There's nothing quite like it being out here during the sunrise.

Every time.

It's just breathtaking.

Having a cup of coffee on a cool morning.

Watching birds early before shooting time like till whizzing by.

That is just sad.

Gets my blood pressure.

I don't know what it is.

Right?

Just watching a group of birds fall into a hole in here in the wing.

When they come over your head.

It's like nothing else.

And I like going out in the pirogue.

All the wildlife.

Just a beautiful, tranquil place to be.

Touched my heart so much.

And duck and shoot the duck is a plus.

But the environment is the real, the passion.

It.

I do it because it's been, like, instilled in us forever.

I mean, my dad did it, my grandfather did it.

My great grandfather did it.

We still do it because we enjoy eating up and cooking home.

I enjoy watching my dog work.

Oh, here comes that group by the camp.

Here they come.

And they just leave.

They come right here and.

We're shooting birds that were in North Dakota yesterday.

And they just fly so far, so fast and get here.

And all it takes is like preparation.

Yeah.

You know, preparing the habitat for them and then overnight.

Yeah.

You can go from having nothing to having thousands of birds in the air.

All because of hard work.

People think we're going out just to kill, kill, kill, kill.

But they don't see the in process.

They don't see that duck in the gumbo pot.

They don't see that duck in the oven.

They don't see all of that Hunter hunt for the meat, the thrill of the chase.

And they hunt for the sport, you know.

So.

And they, they hunt for the way of life.

I don't know what it is.

It's just something of like, I'm bringing food back to home.

God put that duck there.

We go out and we harvest so many, we take them back and we feed our family with it.

And it's just the thrill of saying, this is part of my culture, this is who I am.

We're not just going to a market and buying it from a big chain.

To me, how is that any different?

In fact, well, we're still honoring our roots and our heritage by hunting and by putting the meat on the table that we've gotten ourselves.

One of the things that's so attractive about hunting is you're not in control.

So I think the fact that we can't control everything that surrounding hunting is just what makes it exciting.

I'm an outsider looking in on this wild landscape, and it's rich tradition.

Pretty cool.

I moved to Louisiana to study environmental science, and I was drawn to this beauty.

And if you'd have asked me about duck hunting a few years ago, I wouldn't have much to say.

I had nothing against hunting.

I just hadn't been exposed to it.

But I've spent time with waterfowl experts, hunting guides and decoy carvers and car makers, and at least 50 early mornings in duck blinds across Louisiana.

And a lot has changed since then.

I realized the story of Louisiana duck hunters.

Their value, their culture is one that needs to be told.

So I set out to make this documentary and to tell their story.

I want to share what I've learned and what has become a part of me.

Most of all, I can tell you if you don't understand the role hunters play in our environment, you're not getting the full picture.

The duck hunting.

when I was a child, compared to the duck hunting today is almost as different as night and day.

These environmental conditions are not like they were 50 years ago.

I don't think hunters today are like ostriches and have their head in the sand.

We've lost a third of our coastal wetlands, one of the most important habitats for wintering ducks in the United States, not just the Mississippi Flyway.

It's a very impressive place, and it would be devastating if this place was lost today.

Rapid environmental changes threaten this entire ecosystem.

The waterfowl and a way of life.

And to understand how they're so intricately linked, you need to start way in the past with the great Mississippi River.

Of course, you know the Mississippi Flyway is one of four flyways, basically the highways in the sky down the continent that waterfowl used to migrate.

And the Mississippi Flyway is really the most important.

And that's where most of the birds come, because it covers most of the key breeding areas and the largest amount of wintering grounds, which are here on the well.

And this country in Louisiana, on the Gulf Coast.

If you understand the geology of this area and that we're we're on a delta, we're on land that are only 7 to 10,000 years old when everybody else is sitting on lands that are hundreds of millions of years old, just the fact of this creation, makes it a tremendous and Bountiful resources.

And to see the millions of ducks in world class recreational and commercial fishing, and to be able to partake in that and be part of it, I think gives this a appreciation of, you know, the the place that you live in and makes make you love it.

This bounty of resources drew people who lived off the land and the water.

Native Americans and settlers from all over the world mingled, fuzed and flourished in geographic isolation.

Carving a life out of the prairies, bayous, and coastal wetlands of Louisiana and making the most of resources around them.

And they evolved into some incredible food.

You know, there is something with the culture.

Food here is based on what grows here.

And it not just crops, you know, it's it's the fish and the wildlife and the waterfowl.

You know, Cajun cuisine is other than Native American cuisine, the only cuisine that's indigenous or was developed here in this country.

And it depended on these natural resources.

And so we'd love to cook and we love to eat.

But I think it's that connection back to the land, these traditions.

How do you think people 100 years ago, eight, 200, a thousand hunting was the way you lived only until recently.

In addition to the cuisine, a rich culture of folk practices formed around harvesting waterfowl as hunters did what they could to improve the chances of bringing home food for the table.

I'll chop it down, and I try to use mostly hand tools.

And like I said, I try to do on the way to Vietnam 150 200 years ago.

tradition.

I'm a traditional carver.

You know, Louisiana decoys are rare because they don't, terrain, because there are storms.

A lot of the storms start to decoys away.

And then, when it came out with the decoys, a lot of people started using plastic decoys.

But, Louisiana decoys, it's got a style all its own.

The history of decoy carving runs back over 2000 years.

So for Native Americans, it was small pieces.

You would find a, cypress root on a rib, a badger.

And, what you would do is, put it in your pirogue.

And if you can see it right here, this is the way most of the people carry their decoys.

They would they would pocket them in like this, you know, and and Louisiana decoys now.

So you could maybe fit a dozen, almost a dozen in a bushel basket like this.

And it was easy, easy to carry.

I mean, also, cypress root was really light.

Light like wood.

So, it wouldn't be real heavy to, to drag around the swamp, the marsh.

You know, doc, because he started off as a necessity.

I mean, I saw people, got their food, to put on a table.

Eventually it turned into, an art form of folk art.

You know, I call it a working man's all.

You know, it was nice looking.

And, people recognize it as folk, but now it's really taken on a more realistic look to, some of the decoys nowadays are really elaborate, but they're not used to be hunted.

But this is, a record.

This used to be hunted with hunters, learned other skills related to hunting.

They built boats by hand of all sizes and shapes, like hollowed out cypress logs called pea rogues.

They disguised themselves and built blinds to lure ducks in, and they even learned to mimic the language.

for early settlers to Louisiana, there was no shortage of birds and waterfowl.

World famous bird painter John James Audubon himself described Louisiana as a Paradise of birds.

For hunters, it was a sportsman's Paradise.

In the beginning, there were literally clouds of ducks.

Just this whole environment is different, and that's part of the charm of it.

Hunters lived off these skills and bounty of resources, market hunting in this region and across the country exploded in the market hunting era.

There were no bag limits, and they would go out with these pot guns and would light in the evening in an early morning and literally kill thousands and thousands of ducks.

They were harvesting waterfowl like a crop, and instead of having it as a sport hunting, they would ship train carloads of ducks, a shot all along the coast by market hunters.

The protein supply here was unbelievable.

And they had the French market in New Orleans, and they were selling approximately 3 million birds.

Anything that would fly.

I was surprised to learn that even before the 20th century, it was hunters, the group depleting this resource, who ignited the modern conservation movement in America.

Duck hunters were the first ones to realize that if you have the habitat, the ducks will return.

They set aside huge tracts of land that were managed for waterfowl back then and to this day, those same those same duck hunting clubs and properties are still in existence.

Wealthy sportsmen moved to buy up land and enhance it, to create a refuge from migrating waterfowl and bird populations.

One of the most notable was E.A.

McIlhenny, heir of the famous Tabasco pepper sauce fortune.

Every winter brings the flooding of many wings to every island.

Wild ducks by the tens of thousands fleeing the full force of the north, have pointed their beaks southward, dropping off at every item for food and rest, and with different partners like the family of John D Rockefeller, founder of Standard Oil, and Paul Jay Rainey, heir to a coal fortune.

McIlhenny worked to acquire a total of 175,000 acres in coastal Louisiana in his lifetime, and much of this land remains protected to this day.

His dream was to have a waterfowl hunting area surrounded by protected lands to have waterfowl hunting in perpetuity.

That was his dream and he just about accomplished it.

It was listed in a deed, a donation, that the property must be maintained and is basically maintained with the inside primarily towards waterfowl management and so forth to enhance the property.

for waterfowl.

Other wealthy sportsmen established prominent exclusive hunting clubs on their land in Louisiana is dotted with, famous hunting clubs, the Bayou Club, over south of Abbeville and next to Avery Island is It has a very, very colorful a wonderful history behind it, the Pine Island Lodge, Lake Arthur Club coming a little farther west than West of that, is like a same.

You have Oak Grove and then a little west of that Sabon Duval and then a little west of that, gross seven, which is the chocolate family.

So yes, there there is a plethora of famous hunting clubs in this area.

When I first walked into the Coastal Club, which was formed in 1923, I could feel the history of this place all around me.

We tried not to make it too slick and too perfect to have it a little rough around the edges, and something that has been here when your forefathers were here is pretty much the same.

And let the the younger generation, know that there's, there's some value in a history we don't live in the moment.

My father, Leo drew on his grandfather was Julian, Julian's do on junior Julian.

And he's the one basically that started the coastal club back probably in the 1800s.

And I had the privilege of working at the Coastal Club whenever I was in high school.

We built duck blinds all summer long.

We just get out there in a mud boat, and we get out there and we start building duck blinds.

They've been part of Fox getting calls and being able to work at the coastal Club, where my great grandfather, to be able to go back and be a part of both of that is kind of like be a part of history.

While hunting flourished at these refuges at the turn of the 20th century, bird populations in America had begun to plummet due to market hunting pressures and some hunted species disappeared completely.

Waterfowl enthusiasts saw this threat and started organizing to protect birds and their habitat.

There was hunters who were kind of sounding alarms and recognizing that they were losing species, and that without protection and regulations on how many were hunted, that we would continue to see species go extinct.

The founders of the environmental movement in this country were all hunters and fishermen, sportsmen basically with the fathers, of the conservation environmental movement here, going back to Teddy Roosevelt, threats of extinction to the snowy egret hunted for ornamental feathers for women's hats, got Roosevelt's attention in Louisiana and led to the creation of one of America's very first national wildlife refuges, the Breton Sound Barrier Islands.

Today, this national system of public land includes more than 550 refuges and 38 wetland management districts, encompassing more than 150 million acres.

Other early conservationists were also working to preserve habitat and educate the public about how hunting and habitat were linked.

Gifford Pinchot created the first U.S. Forest Service, and George Bird Grinnell organized the first National Audubon Society and published the popular magazine Forest and Stream Well, the early magazines of George Bird, Grinnell's magazine Forest and Stream, that that touched every individual in this country, especially one that wanted to venture outside these magazines, field and stream sports, a field and later outdoor life.

That's how, you know, outdoorsmen communicate with each other across the country.

And that's where these first stories, the first, the movement in a newspaper columns as well.

That's how, the message of conservation, of wise use of fair chase reached out to people, to the average hunter, those who couldn't read, and the whole message of conservation, of why it made sense.

And then people these early, back in the 20s and 30s and 40s and 50s, they began writing about their joy of nature, their love of nature, not just killing something and eating it, but their whole joy of nature.

and so, you know, it was, a big leading factor leading to the migratory Bird Treaty.

The Migratory Bird Treaty Act was, the compact between Canada, United States and Mexico to protect migratory birds of all kinds.

For duck hunters, that meant, you know, ducks and geese.

and, there was a, uniform decision to have, you know, limits set on these birds and some birds.

You couldn't shoot at all.

That set the whole idea of seasons and regulations in place and got that rolling.

Things developed obviously after that.

But that was the first big step.

After market hunting was banned in 1918, a renewed ethic of conservation spread and sport hunting took off.

By the mid 20th century, roughly 1 in 4 American men were hunters all around.

The same time, a series of national crises hit the great Mississippi River flood of 1927.

The Great Depression and then the dustbowl led to a spike in illegal market hunting by people desperate to feed their families, and the prolonged drought in the northern plains devastated the breeding grounds for ducks.

Again, conservationists sounded the alarm to rally hunters to protect habitat.

Believe it or not, one of the most influential was a two time Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist named J. Ding darling, the conservation of natural resources had become an obsession.

It was to apply the practical principles of conservation to the wasted lands and water resources of the country.

An advisor to President Franklin Roosevelt, darling was appointed head of what eventually became the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

It was darling who initiated the Federal Duck Stamp Program in 1934, one of the most successful conservation programs in history.

But he wrote a lot of cartoons that were really influential, you know, drained wetlands and, ducks.

At the first duck stamp, the very first duck stamp was his.

He's the one that, then drew it since that time, all hunters over 16 must buy a duck stamp to hunt legally, and a contest is held every year for the design.

Many hunters collect the stamps over their lifetimes.

To date, the program has raised over $950 million and protected 6 million acres for birds and for waterfowl research hunters and fishermen.

The only group effort that said we had to fight, we had actually campaign to get enough congressmen to agree to taxes.

We may be the only group saying, please, please tax me, because we knew that money was dedicated for these purposes.

Another tax that hunters helped put into place is the Pittman Robertson Act, an 11% excise tax on guns and ammunition, which is generated $14 billion since its inception for state wildlife conservation programs.

Other nongovernmental conservation groups also gained popularity around this time, like Delta Waterfowl and Ducks Unlimited, that are still very involved in habitat conservation and research.

So Ducks Unlimited, we were founded by duck hunters, and our membership is composed, greatly of duck hunters.

Right.

But it's also conservationist.

and that is our focus.

Right?

It's on the habitat.

It's not on the ducks, it's on the habitat, which of course, waterfowl need.

Right?

It's an ecosystem that's surviving from the interest of people being involved.

I honestly had no idea hunters fund such a significant portion of conservation in the United States, or that they're the main reason why we have an abundance of public land and wildlife.

Then I began to realize that most people, including hunters, don't exactly understand how this system, based on the North American model of wildlife conservation, really works.

One of the beauties of the North American wildlife management model is that everyone is vested in wildlife resources like ducks.

Everybody owns them.

And what we what that has led to the development of is a is a system where I like to refer to hunting as the engine of conservation.

What we do is we monitor populations.

We allow hunters to take a portion of that population and use the money that hunters provide through license fees, through excise taxes, through the Pittman Robertson Act.

And we channel that back to make sure that the habitat on which those ducks depend, it's enhanced, it's protected.

And by doing that, we can maintain that population in perpetuity forever.

In the.

When I ask hunters what they love most about what they do, they point to the rituals and traditions.

There are also some pretty universal experiences, whether you are at the most exclusive camps or the more rustic.

It starts with the early morning wake up, breakfast and coffee, the departure to the duck blind before sunrise, the patients silence, the flutter of wings, shotgun blast, hopefully celebrations and the return to the camp early on the trail.

Next, really good food and a recap of the morning.

Maybe a nap or reading.

Usually a football game and beer.

More incredible food and drinks, high and low state card games like poker and Blu ray, then bet.

And then it all starts again.

I loved it, it was a whole process, you know?

and, something you did, traditionally there was something happening here.

Look forward to it.

To your beloved.

Start popping.

You know, no matter what, cooking and eating are traditions for every hunter here.

It really is about the meal and the what happens at the table at the end of the day, whether whether you're hunting or fishing.

Here is part of the experience and is a major motivation.

And I think it's not just because it tastes great.

I think it's that whole connection with the land, with the swamp and the marsh.

and it's a community thing to there's also a celebration of this unique culture from the annual Gayton Duck Festival, with its pageant queens and competitions, or a memorial service or duck week to the symbolic duck that didn't make it, or parties with the duck puckers and hunting guides.

Everywhere you look, there's a celebration of these traditions and a desire to pass them on to the next generation.

I can remember when I brought my son down as a child and he killed his first duck.

Yes, that was a major event.

Now I'm bringing my grandchildren.

We have six grandsons and I'm bringing them down.

And I was fortunate enough to be at the blind with them when they killed their first duck.

And it has become part of our family tradition.

All of these little boys, they have their first Duck Mountain hanging over their barn and their bedrooms and, and they talk about it.

They can they can hardly wait for the next season to come around.

this is Fox game calls.

Fox game calls was the world's champion back in 1955.

And my grandfather was Clarence Falck.

really good call.

Excellent call.

This is where the business started.

This is where I grew up.

And this it had became famous.

Basically, when grandpa was in the second grade to quit school, he couldn't read or write.

And then he began making, duck calls at his house.

And he lived in a big pasture.

When he started making the calls, he would learn by listening to the geese and the duck overhead as they would pass at night.

And in the daytime he would make calls.

And he started that from scratch.

He was the world champion.

Goose called.

This is a picture of grandma whenever I had, I've got two limited ducks here.

This is probably the 1970s.

Whenever I bring her that, she would cook duck for four days.

Nothing makes a gumbo like a duck.

This is Uncle Amos fork.

This is Nelson.

Nelson followed by the.

His nickname was Knapp.

He was actually the oldest child of the 11 children.

Somebody says, I never saw somebody go duck hunting in a suit coat.

I said, that was an old, old coat, probably full of holes because they had no camouflage.

There was no such thing as what you had back that, used to work here in 1977.

This is the shop where everybody made things.

It was probably 5 or 6 workers working, and we'd work all year long toward the season whenever the calls would be sold.

But he sell these call he sell the calls worldwide.

Great Britain, New Zealand.

Yeah.

I used to collect the stamps that would come in from the different places that would place the orders.

The thing that makes this still unique until today is that everything in here is handmade.

All the wood comes from different places.

It's all ripped on a table saw.

It's all cut on a bandsaw.

Then there's a drill that goes through it and makes the barrel.

Then there's a lathe that actually cuts it out, and all the pieces and parts, all these little pieces and parts are all very specific, and you can't just get any piece and put it in there.

You got to know what you're doing.

You got to get a file and you got to file it down.

You got to know what you're doing.

Then you got to tune it before you let it go.

Then you got to spray it.

So by the time the call comes in, it comes in maybe in ten different pieces of wood and different things, and it all gets put together.

But it's very unique because it's made from, two men that had, one man had no education at all.

And the other one, Uncle Doug, took it and made it what it is today.

The stories you hear, like when my dad's friends are here and they never hear stories like that anywhere else but at a hunting camp, some of their stories will never be told anywhere else.

You know, and hearing that is what I mean.

That's awesome.

Yeah, that makes it in itself.

That's another thing good about duck hunting.

It brings people together.

It really does in a good way.

Now, about the drinking and the party and all that.

You brings people together just in different ways.

We always have fun together.

You know, he's a fascist and I'm a communist.

So we like to get together and tell each other how wrong we are.

No, you tell me how right I am.

Yeah.

I mean, I've had some screaming political arguments with my duck hunting friends and a duck flying.

but the ducks are coming in, and I come and everything stops, and you're calling and.

Great shot down.

and then, you know, we go up and eat lunch together, and, we're we love each other.

Sportsmen have led the environmental fight in this country, going back to when the environmental movement and consciousness began in the 20s and 30s.

it was sports hunters and fishermen.

Sure, they might have disagreed in other parts of politics, but they looked at the science, they looked at their own experiences.

They could see what was happening.

And they said, this has got nothing to do with whether I'm a Democrat or a Republican, liberal or conservative.

This is about protecting our nest and the same nesting grounds that raised ducks, fish and deer and everything else.

You could try to walk a mile in my boots and they will be my left.

And I'm when I'm through.

And it's good that people can bridge even political divides and duck blinds at cod tables and around the fire, because new challenges for this ecosystem and to these beloved traditions will require working together.

In the past half century, new threats have emerged to Louisiana's coastal habitats and waterfowl populations.

The largest amount of coastal wetlands left in this country are here on the Louisiana coast, and we've lost a half of what we had, and we're still losing it at 16mi² a year.

No wetlands equals no people, and no wetlands equals no docs.

Pretty much.

If we don't have an estuary for the birds, it's going to be over.

There are many factors at play in Louisiana's coastal crisis.

Levees built along the Mississippi River have starved the Delta for natural land building capacity.

Canal cutting and oil and gas extraction have accelerated.

Sinking, known as subsidence, of the coastal marshes.

Hurricanes leave their mark on the Gulf Coast.

And of course, there are the facts and political debates over climate change.

But whatever you believe, sea level is rising.

At the current projections for sea level rise, NOAA says this area will see about five feet of relative sea level rise by the end of the century.

Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge consist of 86,000 acres.

At the present time, we're below 70,000 acres due to the coastal erosion issues that that we're facing, the coastal land loss in Louisiana because it is so drastic, we're dealing with subsidence as well as a sea level rise, and especially in the southeastern portion of the state, where it's a delta ecosystem.

It was entirely dependent on that continued input of sediment to maintain land in that area.

naturally, when we lose that land, when we lose our wetlands and our marshes, so go the wildlife species and waterfowl that depend on them.

So Audubon Louisiana and Ducks Unlimited are natural allies again.

And just our mission to conserve land that these wild bird populations depend on.

And we often strive to find more ways to work as partnerships, because that's the foundation, you know, working with our federal partners with NRCs and U.S.

Fish and Wildlife Service and our state partners.

That's huge.

I mean, that, you know, that that's what makes our system work.

And the conservation work.

And the.

A number of coastal restoration projects are planned underway or have already been completed.

So some of the work we're doing in South Louisiana, our diversions.

So these projects not only build small deltas and enhance that habitat greatly.

Right.

So you take an area of deeper water and start building it.

The way marshes were created originally right from river sediment, great resources for waterfowl.

Phenomenal.

But that also provides hunter access.

Right.

So you take in areas they're essentially marsh and making a little channel for water to flow through.

So that's boat access and more habitat.

So more habitat for ducks, more habitat for hunters to utilize.

You take in areas that have degraded and opened up into open water.

So degraded marshes, subsidence, hurricanes, saltwater intrusion and you build terraces, linear land features that help to reduce that wave action and that erosion and that clarifies the water right?

By calming that system down, clarifies the water and enhances submerged aquatic vegetation or sabb growth, which is great for ducks, great for fish, great for crabs, all of that.

And again, that's how it's tied together.

But major threats to duck hunting in this region extend beyond south Louisiana.

We're far enough from the coast here where, you know, we don't have any land loss issues from I mean, we're 60 miles from the coast right here.

So no, not in that.

But we have different environmental issues here.

I mean, logging and and water control problems and development, like, you know, a little SLU like this and Lafayette Parish could disappear in the blink of an eye.

And that could happen here.

And that's, you know, well, I like having him along out here.

You know, there's things you have to do to make sure this doesn't turn into a bean field or a trailer park or a housing development.

You know, we've also seen changes in the agricultural habitats.

And that may be more negative to waterfowl than even what's happening on the coast, because the rice fields are now clear field varieties.

And that means they can plant the seeds and then completely herbicide the field.

So our rice fields now have nothing in them but rice, no other weeds, no millets, smart weeds, other foods for ducks are no longer in those habitats.

And of course, harvest efficiency is so much higher now that there's less food availability in agricultural fields.

We've seen conversion of rice to sugar cane.

Sugar cane is not waterfowl habitat.

We've seen an expansion of the crawfish industry.

Crawfish ponds are not good waterfowl habitat.

The biggest thing that we're confronting today are these invasive grasses that are being brought in on ships from around the world, and if we just let them have their way, they will put us out of business, that they will destroy, marsh wetlands habitat.

And as a result of that, we have to be aggressive conservationists and to try to combat these grasses.

As vital as our wintering grounds are in Louisiana, the breeding grounds in what is known as the Prairie Pothole Region in the Upper Midwest in Canada, are just as important.

The region's shallow wetlands are critical breeding grounds for 90% of the ducks on this continent, and are at risk of being converted into agricultural fields.

The problems in the prairie pothole is it's also the breadbasket of North America and of course, a form if it if they have potholes on the property, they lose production because the acreage is in pothole instead of being in the grain or whatever crop there.

Right.

So they keep every year they get big, they plow close and close as it to the, to the pothole.

And it reduces the amount of, of acreage available for waterfowl in this all of these pressures are already having an impact on bird migration patterns and populations.

But remarkably, waterfowl populations are relatively stable.

This is a recent state of the birds Live Science document that's out that, you know, we're down like 3 billion birds in the United States over the past 50 years.

And that's disturbing.

And they know that that waterfowl, one of the actually groups of birds, waterfowl and geese that are doing better than they have been, and that's a result of conservation practices and other species as well.

Some of these other wetland dependent species of birds benefit species of fish and crabs.

And all these other things are tied into the work that we do.

So it's very complex scientific research into the health of waterfowl populations is another protection largely funded by hunters.

One successful research tool for studying the birds is a cooperative effort between scientists and hunters to band birds and track their movements.

I learned how critical hunters are to managing bird populations and understanding migration.

Well, we just finished banding about 125 wood ducks.

banding is putting a little aluminum bracelet on their legs.

Each one is serial numbered.

So we know who is who.

we just let them all go, and it's, shortly before sunset.

Here.

That's a wrap for the day.

I was a hunter long before I was a waterfall biologist.

Waterfall sciences, you know, second only to human science.

You know, the research that's been done on a mallard duck.

It's the most studied, second most studied animal in the world.

Next to a mouse.

You know, a lab mouse.

there's more published papers on a mallard than, you know any other animal.

so it's, it's pretty incredible.

You know, the mama research that's been directed towards, you know, things that people hunt, you know, research findings helped determine bag limits, season dates, and where conservation efforts should be focused.

But we have to look at the science.

I mean, that has to be the best thing to focus our dollars on the most important areas.

We have to provide habitat across the flyways for birds during migration, so that they can fill up, get their resources and their need, you know, fill up their fat, get their fat to high content where they can migrate back and ratio again.

That's what we focus on.

And that's how our money is spent, you know, and we we prioritize the best areas for breeding and for wintering.

As hard as people are working to preserve this critical waterfowl habitat, people who live and work in this environment are watching it change before their eyes.

After a duck hunting when I was 11 years old on this on his property here in Carlisle, I was made coastal manager for Plaquemines Parish government.

That's when I really, really got a passion about coastal restoration and the environment saving wetlands.

We need the wetlands and we need to save ourselves.

It's imperative if we don't have an estuary.

The ducks are not coming.

It's just plain and simple.

And I'm seeing it.

I'm seeing it in my lifetime, I see it, it's changing for the worse.

According to the numbers, Louisa and hunters harvest more ducks than most states in the country, even during bad years.

But studies show a decline in ducks migrating to the coast in recent years, especially for mallards and hunters are noticing these changes.

In Louisiana last year we had a bad year, right, because there was a bunch of rainfall in the mid-latitude states, and there's sheet water everywhere, and it was a warm winter.

So like, the ducks just didn't come down because got a ton of habitat and warm weather.

Right.

And what happened in Louisiana, 100 participation was cut in half.

I mean, if you look at the number of 100 days of field from the the Hunter survey that came out in August, participation was cut in half because we had one bad year.

What happened?

We have four bad years, right?

I mean, who's going to hang up their waders for good or sell their boats?

Kids got soccer practice for years.

It was assumed that if the duck population was maintained, that there would always be hunters to shoot them.

But recently, a new trend is emerging.

Even though the number of ducks is holding steady, the number of hunters is in steep decline.

In the United States, we have roughly half the hunters we had in the 1970s.

The older generation is aging out quickly.

I mean, if you were to look at the duck hunting population like a wildlife population, you would say that this this is a population is in trouble.

I mean, this can be toast in ten years, right?

And so it's bridging the gap and bringing new people in.

It starts in the house.

Traditions are kind of being lost.

People are straying away from it.

Today's youth aren't really too into being outdoors and doing physical things.

There's so many video games.

So like they might say, oh, I'll go duck hunting, but it's on a video games.

That definitely has a lot to do with the, the effect on waterfowl hunting.

Kids aren't really wanting to get out there anymore.

Kids change.

True.

You know, I got game classes at the Nation Science Center before Katrina, you know?

And, yeah, everything is speeded up now.

It's hard to keep them interested in anything.

It's really time consuming, though, because the first generation, you know, I know when I pick up the knife and I start carving and and working like that, I forget if you got any.

You forget about all your kids.

You know, you concentrate on that one piece.

I have one piece of art that you working on.

The decoy, whatever it is, painting, drawing or anything like that, you know, it's, it's a different animal, especially in the world today.

Now, especially with computers and everything.

You know that there's anything wrong with computers, and it's working different completely.

But there's something about working with your hands.

It I just, I say it's holy.

Really.

I think they're going to lose out on this great experience of being part of nature.

You know, I always like to tell people don't hunt, but who care about the environment.

Hunters are not spectators.

We're participants in nature.

When you are a participant, that that means that you are going out and you're going to hunt and potentially kill a wild animal, you become a vital part of that wild animals world, and therefore you have to learn what that wild animal, not only about that wild animal and how it uses its world, but you have to learn about the world itself, where the food resources are, you know, where the places they take shelter, what the animal does, and different types of weather and different times of day, different tides.

So it's part of being a participant that makes hunting different than simply birdwatching.

I mean, hunting has increasingly grown to be a moneymaking commercial industry, making it more difficult and expensive to take up.

But what's unique in our country is that if you own a gun, public land is yours to hunt and it's free.

I think people who have private land have it easier because they don't have to fight with others about who needs to get here first.

It makes you appreciate the hunt a lot more.

That back, I guess you can say something you have to work harder for.

And any time you have to work hard for something, you learn to appreciate it more.

So I think people should definitely get out and experience public land hunting and see what we go through.

I think that the the desire to hunt is in some people it's not, and others as simple as that.

And the people who who do love to hunt find it.

There always needs to be a place for an American citizen to go hunt when they want to.

And it doesn't require an expensive hunting lease.

And huge amounts of equipment like you would think by looking in magazines and catalogs.

Yes, you can get plain drab clothing.

It doesn't have to be, a designer camouflage pattern.

You can get plain drab clothing and a shotgun, walk in the woods and hunt, and you can still do that.

And you can hunt squirrels for the 22 rifle, and you can go out and hunt docs with a shotgun.

You don't have to have all that equipment.

And so it is still very much possible to go to public land on a budget and have a great hunt.

If we keep losing hunters nationwide.

The fact that I see on there is our lands being lost completely, because there would be no hunters to defend what we have.

So therefore you know it pretty much be free game to whatever big company wants to buy the area or who what, whatever rich guy wants to buy it.

So I think if the numbers decrease, the chances of us having access to it would definitely decreases.

Well, I think that it's going to keep climbing as long as our public waterways stay open, as long as there's always a place for a kid to go hunting, even kids that don't have parents to take them hunting, you need that public land so that whenever they become of age to drive and they have a place to go and they don't have to have a a 10 or $15,000 lease to go hunting on many hunters in Louisiana.

I don't believe their numbers are shrinking, which makes sense in some places, because hunting on public land is increasing.

Still, losing hunters nationwide remains a threat to funding for the conservation of the land and the species themselves.

You don't have those voice of hunters making a difference.

Then we're in trouble.

And I got to tell you, they're not making much of a difference as I used to, because we're a smaller percentage of the population overall.

So a lot of politicians who really don't care about, protecting these wetlands, I don't have to worry about hunters anymore because they're not a large enough block of voters.

And so what's happened as the number of sportsmen and hunters in particular has declined for all these different reasons, that funding source is also declining.

And eventually what happens is you don't have the support to protect this habitat.

That's important, not just for fish and wildlife, but also for the quality of human life, for clean air and clean water.

Not only are we losing revenue and a funding source for habitat, but we're also potentially losing this great insight that hunters have for land management, but also for what is going on with our waterfowl species.

They're not just going back up to the prairies.

These are a lot of these ducks.

They hear their whole lives.

Without little places like these, we wouldn't have too many of them.

Now, this has been a consistent place since we were kids.

And if you know trip that learn how to take care of it and make sure it's right, then you know, it goes away.

And yeah, I'm teaching them how to manage these places for the rest of their lives.

If you smoke it was the first time you remember going throughout the drought.

You don't remember?

I got my head stuck in a tree.

He did a tree right down there.

Hunting out here is probably 5% of the time trip and I spent on this farm.

You know, next week we will be moving a culvert or replacing a water control structure, coming in here and cutting a few bad trees.

So some of these cypress can grow or, you know, it's not just awning when it comes to to this, there's a lot that has to be done to ensure these ducks have a place to go.

And, a place to live is just one little fun part of it.

Many believe college is a great time to recruit new hunters.

Forestry and wildlife management programs used to be filled with students with practical hunting experience.

Now, programs such as the College Hunt Program and LSU introduce them to the social and economic aspects of hunting.

The College Hunt program.

Last year, we actually had 72 hunts for young people in that class that were graduating wildlife students that had the opportunity to hunt at least once.

it's unique because the students like us, who normally wouldn't be able to get out, because we don't have the means to or our families in high, we'll have the equipment or placed on this matter.

it's a perfect opportunity for us to get out and try right?

Right.

It's been a pretty powerful experience for these students.

There's a seismic shift in their worldview when they reduce a public trust resource.

You know, a duck that could be there for a birdwatcher, for anybody to enjoy when they reduce that public trust resource to private possession, and they take it home for themselves, for them and their family, to eat, they're now part of the food chain.

They're making a moral decision to pull that trigger.

And it's it's a weighty decision.

And a lot of them struggle with it.

Here, Pine Island near White Lake for the college program.

But I'm.

My first time ever duck hunting.

Through.

A lot.

You know, when they come back on the boats like we just did, out of the marsh, they're they're changed.

They understand what it means to have birds circling them at dawn.

and to to shoot and miss.

To shoot and hit a bird.

see the dogs work, understand the guides worldview of being out here every day and the changes they see in the marsh.

It's probably the coolest thing that I get to do as a professor at LSU, and there's not a lot of place in the country where this would be possible to take students hunting.

The college program shows hope for the future of the sport and shows that more women are getting involved.

Today, 1 in 5 hunters are women by far.

We had a shirt that said something about, they interrupt the duck season.

You know, they're gonna interrupt this marriage for for duck season.

That's really true.

I mean, I'm sure it's broken up a bunch of marriages, but now I don't have to, because you can take your wife on unless you just want to get away from just.

Some women won't do it.

But people like me, that was raised independently.

It gives you a sense of independence.

You know, you can't be scared of the environment that you live in.

And, you know, I still remember that.

Sure.

We interrupt this marriage, the duck season.

It's crazy.

No, we unite this marriage because it's duck season.

Because I'm going to bring you duck on, you know, think about it's good for relationships to duck on.

It really is.

Most hunters unaware of their importance and what's happening to their habitat.

They know maybe in their area there are fewer ducks for many of us hunters, they don't see the world beyond their pond, their lease.

They really have to think globally at a major continental league, act locally if they want these traditions to survive.

And maybe you don't like hunting, maybe you don't like guns, maybe you don't think you like hunters, even though you've never tried to do any of it.

But they're important for your clear and water, and once they're gone, you'll have less of it wasted.

I think we can recruit more hunters would be just being that person that's willing to take people.

There are a lot of people who want to go out but have no resources to go.

Like myself, I was born in a great family, great loving family.

But they weren't outdoorsman.

They weren't hunters.

They weren't fishermen.

my dad did what he could.

We went fishing every now and then, get these folks out.

There were teaching, you know, how again, how that's all interconnected, all the work in conservation.

And then they realize how they're tied to that and maybe get them to experience the outdoors and doesn't have to be shooting birds, but just being out there and experiencing nature and and that's what I try and still and, and my daughter and hopefully my grandkids in the future, you know, about that's so important.

No matter what, recruitment is crucial for the survival of the sport.

But there's also a need for hunters to come together as a group and be part of the effort to protect critical habitat.

A lot of people play a lot of the blame game and blame a lot of different conservation groups and conservation efforts, but to me, is the conservation efforts.

What's happened to the waterfowl as a whole?

The National Audubon Society has an extremely vocal advocacy for the protection of the current environmental laws that are in place.

The Migratory Bird Treaty Act is under attack and trying to current administration is trying to pull back some of the regulations that currently protecting waterfowl and all migratory bird species.

The same applies to our Clean Air and Water Acts are Endangered Species Act.

It's going to take a lot of money, probably more money than we have.

If we quit working together, then we've done.

But working together, it's possible you got to have hope, but have that done.

So as a non hunter, you know how culturally it would change.

It still matters to me.

I'm proud to have been born in Louisiana and recognizing that this state is considered the sportsman's Paradise, if we lose that part of our culture, I will I will miss that as well.

I'd like to think that continuing into the next generation and the generation after that, Louisiana is still hosting duck hunters and wild game hunters.

And in supporting that sportsman's Paradise ideal that we have had for so many decades here, being able to experience this culture with so many different people helped me realize that in a world where everyone is being pulled apart for so many reasons, that hunting and cooking and just spending quality time together outside, like we've been doing for generations, can bring us together in ways that we really need.

And I'm grateful for everyone in this community who welcomed me into their world to help tell their story.

And hopefully, there will always be a place for people to experience what I have in the blind to help us.

On the boy deck so you can feel nature moving and you know deep in your heart, even though there's all this other stuff going on in the world at a faster and faster pace.

If you've got cell phones, the internet, everything is hurry, hurry, rush, rush to get out there.

And you realize at least I do, that.

The one power in the world that hasn't changed.

No matter how much we try to change it, this nature, you know, Earth is still turning on its axis, rotating around the sun.

There are forces out there much stronger than we are.

And these migration to are a sign of that.

And it's very peaceful to me.

It's reassuring that, you know, the basis of life still hasn't changed at all, said the voice of Double Decker.

Yep.

Bye.

Let us hear the voice of Double Decker.

Yeah.

Bye bye.

I bet you give us, you my money I love I go up at night and.

I never.

Give.

Up.

Right.

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