The question must be asked, “Will the canvasback or can the canvasback ever recover and occurin numbers that would allow no closed seasons?”

It is doubtful, and if it does it will be through dedicated restoration efforts by transplanting and sowingthe seeds of wild celery, wapato, and a plant I haven’t mentioned for canvasbacks, the pondweed. In doing so, many depleted ducking wetlands can be restored and thus new ducking grounds can be created.

E64 LISTS 17 OF THE EARLIEST DUCK CLUBS IN AMERICA, ALL ORGANIZED BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR, SOME OF THE MOST FAMOUS DUCK CLUBS SUCH AS WINOUS POINT, CURRITUCK SHOOTING CLUB AND MORE.

The evolution of the duck call began some 45,000 to 50,000 years ago or earlier and this episode takes you from that time frame up until E16 which was starts in 1854.

Year after year, waterfowl have followed the ancestral Mississippi Flywayand made their usual stops, where along the way they feasted abundantly in theforested White River bottomlands on acres of high-energy pinoak acorns andaquatic plants, like wild millet, Chufa, and smartweed.

Before rice production came to the Grand Prairie,ducks were found foraging in the small prairie wetlands, seasonal herbaceouswetlands, the vast flooded bottomland, hardwood forests of the White andArkansas Rivers, and other smaller meandering rivers and bayous.

Once rice had been plantedfor the first time in the first decade of the twentieth century in theeast-central part of the state, it spread rapidly throughout the Grand Prairie,mainly in the counties of Arkansas and Prairie and small sections in westernMonroe and eastern Lonoke during that decade and especially during the 1920sand the 1930s. Doing so, prairie lands, bounded by the bottomlands of four streams, the White andArkansas Rivers, Bayou Meto, and Wattensaw Bayou, could not exist and was converted tofarmland, so the prairies essentially vanished after 40 years.

Rice changed the flyway intwo ways. For one, it moved a lot of the waterfowl migration from theMississippi River westward to the rice-growing regions of Arkansas. Second, italso shifted lots of waterfowl from overflying Arkansas and going to the ricefields of Louisiana. No place in the Grand Prairie of eastern Arkansas prior tothe construction of reservoirs reaped rice’s benefit more so than the twinlakes of Jacob’s Lake and Pecan Lake in Arkansas County.

The day after Memorial Day, I reflected back to Vietnam and the loss of my best friend when out on night patrol. He had just been in Vietnam after going through basic training for seven days. On the seventh night, he was shot in the neck by a sniper and died. I miss him dearly and Memorial Day made me reflect back on life and what is important.

With their primary breeding grounds inprairie Manitoba, the eastern continental population of canvasbacks stagedduring the fall in the olden days on Lake Cristina and Heron Lake in Minnesota;the Detroit River, Lake St. Clair and Saginaw Bay in Michigan; the IllinoisRiver in Illinois, in Iowa along the Upper Mississippi, and Lakes Poygan, Puckaway, Butte des Morts, Winnebago, Winneconne, and Koshkonong in Wisconsin. Lake Koshkonong was the countless hosts of migratory waterfowl which knew it from a time before a white man ever gazed upon its waters.

From its beginning, the Koshkonong marsh wascovered with from one to two feet of water and filled entirely with wild riceand in a few deep-water places wild celery grew. During the fall and springmigration, the marsh was literally alive with mallards, teal, and otherdabbling ducks with a few canvasbacks and redheads in a few deeper areas. Thenthe dam in 1851 was built which raised the water level enticing more wildcelery to grow and year after year it grew more and the canvasbacks came ingreat numbers. Then the dam was made higher in 1874, which raised the level ofwater even higher and once again more wild celery grew while the wild ricereceded closer to the shore. Then the canvasbacks came in greater number whichwas beyond computation and the mallards departed for the most part to thesurrounding marshes boarding on the sides of the lake. Furthermore, during summer,thousands of young canvasbacks could be seen as the result of the breedingseason unconscious of the fate that awaited them within a few months from thehands of sportsmen and market hunters.

But all of this changed with theoverharvesting of canvasbacks, the introduction of carp, the extended raisingof the dam, the onset of WWI, the Dust Bowl Years, pollution, the drainage ofthe numerous marshes which existed outside of the boundary of the lake and thedrainage of other small wetlands near the lake along with their ancient hangoutson the lake being covered with the dwellings of the white man which added extrahunting pressure on waterfowl using the lake and increased use of the lake forleisure motorboating which ran many waterfowl off the lake.

There are in every sport remarkableindividuals that become legends, and thesport of trap shooting as we know it today belongs to three of the mostinfluential and remarkable marksmen in trap shooting history, in what I call TheThree Pillars of Trap Shooting: Ira Paine, Adam Bogardus, and Doc Carver. Thelatter two are in the Trapshooting Hall of Fame and certainly deserving of thehonor; Paine is not, Why? I don’t know, but, perhaps, it may be that historianshave recognized him more of a pistol and revolver shooter than a shotgun trapshooter, spending a great deal of his time as he grew older pistol and revolvershooting. But that doesn’t seem to hold much weight as Carver was certainlyknown as much for his rifle shooting as he was for his shotgun shooting, maybemore so for his exhibition rifle shooting.

Maybeanother reason Paine is not in the Trap Shooting Hall of Fame is that when hefirst started shooting and for several years afterwards, it was in the dayswhen they used black powder, shot muzzleloading shotguns at wild pigeons, from fiveunknown traps with shotgun held below the elbow until “pull” was called, thepurpose being to place the shooter in the same unprepared condition at the riseof a bird as he was supposed to be at the rise of a bird in actual fieldshooting. This was the modus operandi both in England and America along withshooting 21-yard rise from ground traps. Paine, William King, John Taylor,Miles Johnson, and Edward “Ned” Tinker were considered giants in those days ofwild passenger pigeon matches, attested to by their scores they made indifferent matches.

Andmaybe another reason is because he died at age 53, so his short life spanshortened his shooting career, while Bogardus was 80 at the time of his deathand Carver was 87. But he lived long enough to see feathers fly in akaleidoscopic dazzling shower when he broke his patented feather-filled glassballs as his eyes never forgot how to look along a shotgun barrel.

Thereare so many stories and incidents about Ira Paine’s pigeon, glass ball, andexhibition shooting career that it is impossible to relate all of them. Butthere are some which must be told to make this story complete, so I would liketo give you just a short summary of why I think he should be and needs to be inthe Trapshooting Hall of Fame.

A continuation of Part I and II of Trap shooting, with Part III covering the three great trap shooters of the time--Captain Adam Bogardus, Doc Carter, and Ira Paine. It covers the period of time when pigeon trap shooting had advanced from live pigeon shooting to glass balls to Ligowsky clay pigeons.