It was around 1957, and I was a shirttail kid tagging along with my father on an Arkansas flooded-timber duck hunt. Two autumn-colored creatures, drake and hen, came zipping through a sort of accidental corridor in the forest deep within the flooded White River bottoms, their afterburners lit and the hen's woo-e-ee-eeeek siren going full blast. They passed 15 yards overhead as Dad and I were wading through the woods, headed for some hotspot duck hole he knew about.

Dad saw them first, punched me on the arm and pointed. I looked up just in time to see them flash through a patch of golden, early-morning sunlight. They spied our upturned white faces and flared out through the treetops, framed for an instant against a sky so blue it made your eyes hurt.

I'm sure Dad had time to shoot; green-timber duck hunters are often forced to shoot by instinct, and my father was an experienced green-timber hunter as well as an athlete with lightning-quick reflexes and excellent hand-eye coordination. But he just stood and watched them with me, his shotgun still held comfortably over his shoulder.

"Why didn't you shoot?" I asked, after they were gone.

"They were wood ducks," he said. "There aren't many of them around any more, and the season's closed on 'em. They're almost too pretty to shoot, anyway."

I don't remember how many mallards we shot that day, but more than four decades between then and now have failed to dull my memory of that moment. Those two wood ducks are long gone, but in my mind's eye they'll last as long as I do, framed against that morning's cobalt sky and flashing their colors like the flag team in a high-school homecoming parade.

Roller-Coaster Ride
When Dad and I crossed paths with the high-flying wood ducks, their numbers had already experienced some serious ups and downs. Things hadn't gone as badly for the wood duck as some other species of birds, but they were in a serious slump nonetheless. Those two birds we saw that day were definitely survivors.

Before the Migratory Bird Treaty Act in 1918, duck seasons were liberal and long--usually from September to April, with either nonexistent bag limits or limits so large it took two men to carry one hunter's birds. Limits were meaningless, anyway, since game law enforcement was practically nonexistent and market hunting was common. In my home state of Arkansas, for example, there were only nine game wardens in the early days. The fledgling Arkansas Game & Fish Commission, established in 1915, had almost no operating capital, and the nine wardens were poorly equipped and even more poorly financed. They even had to use their own vehicles, with no plan for reimbursement. In other states, wildlife agencies were in similar financial straits.

Since wood ducks are more southerly oriented than most ducks, they took a harder hit than most from those long, liberal, poorly enforced hunting seasons. They were hunted all summer in the Midwest and the North, and year-round in the South.