Duck Hunting From Flying Machines

These days, smart pilots will do anything to steer clear of flocks of ducks or geese and prevent a bird strike, but that was not always the case. 
In fact, there was a time when it was considered great sport.

The hunting of waterfowl from airplanes in America occupied but a short legal window, from 1910 until 1918, but during those eight years, it was heralded as one of the most thrilling sports of the age. Daredevil flyers and wealthy civilians piloted gravity-defying machines rigged with nets to snare live ducks and geese, or they targeted waterfowl with shotguns from the cockpit. Later, the “sport” of running a plane into flocks with the machine’s propeller gained popularity. Military aviators raised the ante, and although it sounds like fiction today, they began chasing waterfowl with articulating machine guns and aerial bombing. 

The first reference to aerial wingshooting in the U.S. was in a newspaper headline that pronounced the “possibility of utilizing the airplane in duck shooting was demonstrated by experiments in Southern California.” The year was 1910 and the flyer was Hubert Latham, who gets credit for “showing the world how to hunt ducks with a monoplane.” Latham took to the air in an Antoinette monoplane on Dec. 22, 1910, flying from Los Angeles to Bolsa Bay, near Huntington Beach. Members of the nearby Bolsa Chica Hunting Club lined the beach to watch the show. 

Pilot Latham flew low over the Bolsa Bay marsh, driving thousands of frightened ducks out to the Pacific Ocean. He trailed them, his “high-powered repeating shotgun” connecting with a bluebill on the first volley. The birds continued out to sea for two miles before returning shoreward, followed closely by the aviator as his machine twisted and turned over a crowd that cheered wildly at each downed bird. Later, Latham admitted that his shooting was handicapped by a fear of hitting the propellor. 

In 1916, Chicago aviator E. Kenneth Jaquith demonstrated the utility of an early seaplane, called a “hydro-aeroplane,” in hunting waterfowl from the air. With an engineer at the wheel, Jaquith took off from Atlantic City, New Jersey, and headed a mile out over the gray, choppy waters of the Atlantic. He bagged five ducks with a repeating shotgun, making water landings to gather his kill. Jaquith’s feat was not celebrated. Instead, Atlantic City sportsmen complained he caused all the “game birds to desert this locality,” and a local judge fined him $22.50 for gunning wild ducks from a “flying boat.”

When Orville and Wilbur Wright’s flying machine first took to the air in 1903 from the sand dunes of North Carolina, few would have imagined that just seven years later the world would boast over 60 types of mono-, bi-, and tri-winged airplanes. At first, it was mostly wealthy civilian pilots who used flying machines to chase waterfowl. That changed in 1917 when the U.S. entered the First World War. Almost overnight, hundreds of men signed on for U.S. Army Aeronautical Division pilot training as new military bases sprung up across the nation. America’s flyboys found the combination of aerial flight and waterfowl hunting irresistible. 

During the fall of 1918, three military airplanes took off from Ellington Field, south of Houston, and headed over the Texas coastal prairie. At the time, the Army Air Service was experimenting with automatic shotguns mounted on wing struts that were fired from the cockpit by strings linked to the triggers. Flying close to the ground, the aerial aces killed large numbers of ducks and geese that were collected by a fleet of Army vehicles. 

In New York, Long Island hunters grumbled about the dismal brant and duck shooting during the 1917 through 1919 seasons. The cause, they said, was military maneuvers that “scared the fowl out of their wits.” Nearly every day, roaring machines came in low over New York’s bays, strafing flocks with machine guns and dropping bombs on rafts of birds. The record bombing kill was said to be 150 birds. 

Similar machine gun and bombing anecdotes occurred wherever migratory flyways and the Army Air Service collided. The practice was even encouraged by the Army, with one Aviation Corps officer explaining: “There could be no better marksmanship practice than to hunt wild ducks in airplanes.” His sentiment was shared by a patriotic public and lawmakers who, during the throes of World War I, viewed the sacrifice of waterfowl as a necessary casualty of the war. 

At war’s end, the skies belonged to two classes of Americans; former military aviators and the wealthy. The gunning skill required to down birds in the air from an airplane flying at a similar speed to the quarry had appeal, and recreational aerial wingshooting appeared to have a bright future. The sporting goods industry began promoting the practice, advertising airplanes equipped for aerial shooting for $16,637. The price, they advised buyers, did not include shotgun shells or liquor. 

One who took up the sport was New York and Palm Beach adventurer Virginia K. Gunther, who flew the Florida coast for two years wingshooting from a seaplane. Two former Missouri airmen “achieved considerable prominence” in 1919 by perfecting a strategy to control flocks of geese using two planes to circle and herd them while a passenger whittled away at their numbers with a shotgun. At times, they were able “to kill all the geese in a flock.”

A new aerial waterfowling sport was born when pilots began flying into flocks and killing birds with the whirring wooden blades of the machine’s propellers. Dubbed “the California method,” it originated in 1919 with the Moffett Air Patrol, which was contracted by Sacramento Valley rice farmers to drive hungry birds from their agricultural fields. One of its pilots was former Ellington Field flying instructor Charles Stoffer, who knew something about aerial shooting from his days crisscrossing the Texas coastal prairie. When Stoffer “rushed a flight” of birds and caught several in the wire braces of his biplane, the idea of using the aircraft as a weapon was born. 

The skill and boldness of the flyers who flushed, chased, and plunged their low-flying aircraft into birds gained instant media attention. In 1919, stories circulated about the stick and rudder prowess of one Southern California rice field flyer who spooked a flock of mallards and “cut off the heads of 23 ducks” with his propeller. Other California flyboys who engaged in prop killing were the subject of a 1920 article in the New York Times. The caption under a blurred photo of an airplane amidst a horde of terrified waterfowl read: “The airplane penetrated the great rafts of birds which are killed by the propeller blades, while a motorboat follows the flight picking up dead and crippled game.” 

There was a downside to ramming a wood and canvas aircraft into flying waterfowl. The spinning blades of destruction sometimes splintered, as did struts and other rigging. Planes went down often, sometimes with tragic consequences. One of the dead was Clarence Bandy, of Seattle, whose obituary read that he “met death in a strange and tragic manner” while shooting ducks off the coast of Washington. 

Not everyone was enthralled with the magnificent men and their flying machines. A newspaper correspondent in 1910 worried that “running into birds” with a machine at high speeds while pirouetting “turn for turn” with ducks was so exhilarating that, one day, it would make the shotgun obsolete. Others maintained the practice was unethical. Conservation of wildlife resources was another increasingly common argument, with one opponent writing: “We see little hope for ducks now.” 

Early game laws dealt with technologies of the time, and few foresaw the role gasoline engines would occupy in killing wild game. The 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA) made it illegal to shoot wild fowl from a motorized automobile or boat, but the word “airplane” was not specifically written into the law. The government, however, interpreted the regulation to include the pursuit of waterfowl by any motorized means. At first, it hardly mattered. Most states had not yet passed anti-airplane hunting laws, and only federal game wardens had the authority to enforce the MBTA. But, by 1919, there were just 20 salaried federal wardens assigned to migratory bird protection in the whole of the United States.

The void in federal law enforcement was filled, albeit unevenly, by individual states and later the military.

Under the 1918 headline “Duck Hunting From Airplane Newest Menace,” Minnesota game wardens lobbied the state legislature to prohibit killing migratory birds from the air. By 1921, Minnesota was one of at least a dozen states that banned aerial hunting. 

Ironically, early efforts to clip the wings of airplane hunters caused something of a showdown between two branches of the US government. On one side was the Department of Agriculture Biological Survey and its interpretation and enforcement of the 1918 MBTA. On the other side was one of the perpetrators, the United States Army Air Service. The Army blinked. A year after the war ended, the Director of Military Aeronautics, tired of complaints about aviators who continued to spray ducks with machine gun fire along the Atlantic Seaboard and Texas Gulf Coast, ordered a halt to the practice.

By 1920, federal game wardens were making examples of some of the most egregious offenders. Among the first was Moffett’s Sacramento Valley Air Patrol and their propeller-killing “California method.” What began with just airman Stoffer and another flyer grew, by the fall of 1920, into a flying circus when Louis H. Hutt, a Pathe News Service cameraman, converged on a local airstrip with four government planes carrying Army officers and a crew of motion picture men. They came to airplane hunt. 

Hutt wrote articles describing the thrill of the sport and produced movies of planes as they dashed into clouds of rising birds. In the movie, some 2,000 birds were killed and that viewers saw maimed and killed by props, struts, and wings. Aviators were even filmed picking bird parts off their planes after landing. A storm of protests flooded the U.S. Biological Survey,and the agency responding by slapping half a dozen airmen and civilians with criminal charges for violations of the MBTA. The legal outcome was the same for the Missouri airmen who had perfected killing geese from the air.

In 1921, Popular Mechanics magazine featured three California aviators who thought they found a loophole in the 1918 MBTA. Instead of using guns, they mounted two “halibut trammel nets” between the wings of a biplane to capture live birds. The pilot dove straight into rising flocks and then targeted singles with barrel rolls, capturing 500 ducks and geese in three days. Their undoing was due in part to the media coverage and in part to their misinterpretation of the MTBA term “take,” which the government defined to include the capture of live migratory birds. 

Sensational aerial hunting movies, articles, and newspaper coverage mostly faded after 1921. Although the sport continued, it was less overt. Still, by 1926, federal game wardens had championed 22 aerial waterfowl hunting cases, and they were resorting to more aggressive tactics. In response to an aerial netting operation on the Potomac River near the nation’s capital, game wardens in 1923 enlisted support from the Navy, which dispatched a 110-foot patrol boat armed with an anti-aircraft gun. In 1924, wardens assigned to break a ring of three airplanes working the Missouri skies with long nets were ordered to shoot them down with high-powered rifles. The last large undercover operation was probably in 1928, when law enforcement sprung a trap on Texas aerial hunters that resulted in scores of arrests up and down the coast and inland as far as the borders of Oklahoma and New Mexico.

The advent of the gasoline engine came at a unique time in wildlife history. Conservation was just entering the American consciousness, with large bird kills and market hunting among its casualties. At the same moment, access to natural resources was made easier by the appearance of automobiles, motorboats, and airplanes–machines that also facilitated the kill. Airplane hunting was fashionable in part because of the allure of early acrobatic flying, but if you look at it though a modern lens, its killing code certainly brought out the worst of human nature.  

---