How We Brought Wood Ducks Back From the Brink

Last month, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed HB 4044, making the wood duck Michigan's official state duck. It was bipartisan vote with wide margins in both chambers, sponsored by Rep. Alabas Farhat, a Democrat from Dearborn, which tells you this wasn't a culture war bill. Nobody had a problem with it.

And why would they? If you've ever seen a drake wood duck in April light on a flooded timber pond, you haven’t forgotten it. Big green head, chestnut breast, white racing stripes.

But the ceremony in Lansing skips over the part worth knowing. A century ago, this bird was almost gone. And the reason it exists today has nothing to do with legislation and everything to do with hunters paying for its survival.

By the early 1900s, the wood duck was in what the Michigan DNR called "imminent danger of extinction." Decades of unregulated market hunting had gutted the population. But the bigger problem was habitat.

Wood ducks are cavity nesters. They don't build nests on the ground like mallards. They need old-growth hardwoods with holes big enough to crawl into, anywhere from 15 to 50 feet off the ground. Michigan's logging boom had clear-cut millions of acres of exactly the timber they depended on. No trees, no cavities. No cavities, no ducks.

Michigan banned wood duck hunting in 1915. The federal government followed with the Migratory Bird Treaty Act in 1918. That ban held until 1941 federally and 1944 in Michigan. Thirty years of no hunting. Meanwhile the woods began to grow back.

Hunters wrote the check.

The wood duck didn't come back on its own, and bans stopped the bleeding. But what rebuilt the population was money. And most of it came from hunters.

Nest box programs started in the 1930s, giving wood ducks artificial cavities while Michigan's forests matured over the next 80 to 100 years.
Those programs ran on hunting license fees, federal excise taxes on firearms and ammunition under the Pittman-Robertson Act, and the Federal Duck Stamp Act of 1934, which sends 98% of its revenue to acquiring and managing aquatic bird habitat.

Every duck stamp a hunter buys, every box of steel shot taxed under Pittman-Robertson, and every license fee paid at the Secretary of State before opening day was money sent to wetlands, nest boxes, and habitat restoration.

Dave Bowers, Ducks Unlimited's Michigan state policy chair, said hunters "transformed the wood duck's story from near extinction to a conservation triumph."

Michigan now has an estimated 100,000 wood ducks. The species is the second-most harvested duck in the state. Their range is expanding north and west. Extinction's doorstep to 100,000 in one state.

The wood duck is a comeback story paid for by the people closest to it. This was lead by hunters buying stamps for $25, not a government programs that trickled down or celebrity social-media campaigns.

This succeeded because of volunteers hauling nest boxes into swamps on Saturday mornings and conservation clubs putting up boxes county by county because they wanted the bird to make it.

Most state symbols are decoration.

The wood duck is the first one I know of that exists because ordinary people decided it should, and then spent decades making sure it did.