The Rise and Fall—and Rise Again—of Eagle Lake, Texas

The town of Eagle Lake, proclaimed the “Goose Capital of the World” in the 1960s, didn’t start that way. Train passengers crossing the Eagle Lake prairie before the Civil War described seeing large numbers of sandhill cranes, greater Canada geese, uncountable numbers of ducks, and even swans along the route. What they didn’t see were any snow geese or specklebellies, the birds that would later make Eagle Lake famous.

At first, it was ducks, particularly mallards, that put the town on the sporting map. Prairie potholes and the lake that gave rise to the town name—Eagle Lake—were “so literally covered with ducks you couldn’t see the water. There were millions of them,” according to one local. “They would leave the ponds with a roar like a big whirlwind and form black clouds in the skies.”

Then came rice. The grain that was to have a profound effect on Central Flyway waterfowl patterns was first planted on the Eagle Lake prairie in the 1890s. Ducks found water and rice an ideal combination, roosting by day on Eagle Lake and nearby prairie pothole ponds, then swarming to rice fields by night. Rice field hunting did not start as sport but as a necessity to reduce crop destruction.

During the 1930s, duck numbers started falling as farming consumed many of the native prairie ponds. Renowned Eagle Lake hunting guide Jimmy Reel, with businessman and conservationist David Wintermann, had an idea. Why not use rice irrigation infrastructure to pump water on harvested rice fields to offset the loss of wetlands? They did, building the first Eagle Lake roost ponds where ducks were allowed to rest undisturbed from hunting pressure. By the late 1940s, those prairie roost ponds were holding not only ducks, but also geese.

Before the 1900s, snow geese, as well as blue, Ross, white-fronted, and lesser Canada geese made a non-stop journey from their northern breeding grounds to wintering areas along the Texas and Louisiana coasts. They first began to follow rice to the upper prairie in the late 1940s, but returned to the coast nightly to roost, a one-way journey of over 70 miles. That changed with the construction of man-made duck reservoirs in the rice belt. Eagle Lake’s Clifton Tyler recalls: “As the duck ponds got bigger, they became goose roosts, and then it dawned on us that we could put up holding ponds and somewhat control the geese. It took time, but more geese started staying here all winter.” Eagle Lake rice and roosts had created a wintering flyway shift.

Members of Eagle Lake area duck clubs who saw those big flocks of geese were intent on hunting them. Clifton Tyler’s father Marvin, who took his first goose hunting clients to the field about 1950, was the one who figured out how to decoy geese on the Eagle Lake prairie. While he did not invent the Texas rag spread—loosely defined as hundreds of pieces of anything white placed on the ground to resemble a flock of feeding snow geese—it was Marvin and Jimmy Reel who made it famous.

The first white decoys that moved in the wind were newspapers spread over rice stubble, and they worked well—unless the wind blew too hard, or it rained. Enterprising hunters replaced newspapers with white cloth rags, and the Texas rag spread soon included tablecloths, bed sheets, and diapers. After a hunt, they were wet, heavy, muddy, and filled with rice straw. Guides dragged them into laundromats to clean but often broke the overloaded machines. In the early 1970s, Chuck Barry of Texas Hunting Products commercialized the lightweight windsock, a blessing to guides and laundromat owners alike.

Hunting white geese over Texas rags was introduced to a nation in 1969 when ABC’s American Sportsman featured TV star Andy Griffith and golfer Sam Snead on a hunt with Marvin Tyler. After the American Sportsman footage aired, the boom to Marvin’s Blue Goose Hunting Club was louder than a 10-gauge on a foggy morning. Sportsmen flocked to the Eagle Lake prairie. Marvin’s business doubled the first year, then tripled the next. In only two short years he went from eight guides to 25 and from 10,000 acres under lease to 100,000.

Recognizing the value of sport hunting to the Eagle Lake prairie, the Eagle Lake Headlight newspaper promoted the town of Eagle Lake as the “Goose Capital of the World.” For the next 40 years, outdoor writers, TV and film crews, and tens of thousands of hunters converged on the Texas rice prairie, each morning participating in the pre-dawn ritual of following their guides to the field in a long procession of cars and trucks. It’s a ritual mostly gone today.

It seemed like it could never end. But it did, and it happened fast. In 2005, I spoke with an Eagle Lake guide whose customers killed just 90 geese that season. His parties the year before had killed 900. It was mostly the same everywhere on the prairie. Texas wintered as many as 1.1 million snow geese at its 1996 peak. Within the past 15 years, the population of light geese has been as low as about 100,000. What happened?

It was not just one thing that caused the downward spiral in Texas prairie goose numbers. The list is surprisingly long, and it started early. Perhaps the first cut was short-stopping, or its more formal term, “suspension.” During the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s, 223 refuges were built in 43 states in just a single year. Most of the coastal prairie greater Canada geese and over a third of the Central Flyway snow and blue geese population began wintering in those new refuges as early as the 1960s. It was similar with the lesser Canada goose, which shifted its wintering range from the coastal prairie to the Texas Panhandle after reservoirs were constructed to irrigate grain and cereal crops in the region.

Ducks and geese received another push from the coast and prairie as rice production began to decline. The culprit was mainly water, or lack of it. A hundred years ago, rice farmers pumped irrigation water from the Colorado River bordering the Eagle Lake prairie. The problem was that they took more than the river could deliver. The solution, at the time, was to build a series of dams in Central Texas to impound water for downstream users, and in the 1930s, the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA) was established to administer it.

LCRA’s roles include flood control, hydroelectric power, water conservation, and downstream irrigation water for agricultural use. But between 2007 and 2014, the Colorado River Basin experienced the most severe drought ever recorded in the Lone Star State. In 2011, the LCRA cut off all water for agricultural use. It was the first time in its history. It’s one of the reasons that, from a one-time high of 700,000 acres, rice in Texas has plummeted to below 200,000 acres each year since 2012.

Those fewer acres of rice also have fewer calories now, at least for wildlife. Some of it is a high-yield, hybrid seed variety with only limited food value. Then, there’s agriculture practices like laser leveling and more efficient harvesting equipment that leave less food on the ground. Rice fields are also treated with herbicides that eliminate the germination of non-target seed-bearing plants. Farmers, too, are incentivized to till their fields immediately after harvest, replacing stubble with disked black soil. It has zero food value. I call it “scorched earth.” So do the birds.

Today, perhaps the single biggest threat, not just to geese but all wildlife, is the increasingly rapid loss of Texas agricultural land. It’s come to the prairie in the form of urban sprawl and the blight of supposedly beneficial “green energy” that litters the landscape with solar panels and the giant, spinning blades of wind turbines.

Like a lot of hunters, my response to the changes in the Eagle Lake prairie 20 years ago was to hunt somewhere else. Texas is, after all, a mighty big state. But lately, I’ve been going back. While I’m not optimistic about the “return of the geese,” as some are, I am seeing some of the largest numbers of ducks I have witnessed in my lifetime. It’s darn good news, but what’s changed?

What I see is that many of the young boys who trudged behind their fathers and grandfathers through prairie gumbo mud hauling sacks of rag decoys have grown, and they are not about to let the area’s unique hunting culture disappear. Some now lease or own thousands of acres of land, and drill wells to reduce the uncertainty of LCRA water. They’ve abandoned the practice of flooding a harvested rice field with the hope that birds use it. Instead, they’re building and managing wetland units to grow native seed grasses and aquatic vegetation. It takes money, but ducks love it.

I was standing on the prairie on a cold winter day this past season, watching a skyline simply animated with ducks. Someone asked me to estimate how many were in the air, and I couldn’t. All I knew for sure was that it was a whole lot of birds. It reminded me of Eagle Lake 30 or so years ago, when the sky, as far as the eye could see, was often a circling mass of shrieking light geese. Only now it was ducks. True, the mallards and mottled ducks are mostly gone, but teal, pintails, and gadwalls are the new kings of the prairie.

Eagle Lake is back. Maybe somebody should put the sign back on the edge of town. Only this time it could read “Duck Capital of the World.” Or at least the “Duck Capital of Texas.”

Author R.K. Sawyer can be found on Facebook and at www.robertksawyer.com.

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