How Duck Hunting is Conservation

It’s 7 a.m. on a frosty October morning – a couple of us college students are huddled behind an embankment at a local marsh, laughing, chatting, watching and occasionally discharging a volley of rounds from their respective shotguns at flying ducks. To the untrained eye, this looks like a bunch of young delinquents skipping class. Maybe it seems to you that they’re even hooting and hollering over destroying populations of beautiful, wild animals with deadly weapons. I hope by the end of reading this, you will understand why that is not at all what’s happening. North America Model of Conservation and User Pays, Public Benefits systems are crucial and vastly effective frameworks for protecting public lands and conserving wild animals and places. We need to start giving them the credit they deserve. 

Let me slow down here and define a few terms. The North American Model of Conservation is a set of seven principles that govern wildlife management in the United States and Canada to ensure everyone has access to wildlife and populations are sustained for eternity. The tenants include things like wildlife as a public trust resource and scientific management of wildlife. In this system, consumptive recreators — hunters, anglers, trappers and adjacent recreators — pay for the privilege/right to take wildlife from the environment, and the money paid goes directly into conserving habitat, wildlife and research. The vast majority of conservation funding in the United States and Canada comes from this system, which many of us refer to as “self-imposed tax.” That is what makes it possible for you to go for a kayak ride or hike on most pieces of federal and state land for free or a very small fee. You benefit directly from this system without even realizing it. 

With that as a basis of knowledge, I want to explore the mechanisms by which this entire system is actually funded. This can be broken up into three basic pillars: licenses, excise taxes and hook-and-bullet conservation organizations. 

On the pillar of licensing, the first step is state hunting, fishing or trapping licenses. Before heading afield, all consumptive recreators must purchase a license from the respective fish and game agency with jurisdiction over the place they plan to recreate (with very limited exceptions). This can range from $22 to hunt small game in New York as an instate resident to $1,000+ to hunt a mountain goat in Wyoming as an out-of-stater. These hunting license sales alone fund, on average, 75 percent of their respective fish and game agencies, and they sometimes even fund 100 percent of it. State fish and game agencies are tasked with managing most conservation initiatives — public lands, research and environmental laws — and have an outreach far beyond consumptive recreators. You have safe air to breathe, beautiful places to explore, and water to drink, largely due to the work by your state fish and game agency. 

The next is federal licensing, which generally pertains to the specific wildlife resources maintained by the federal government, such as some saltwater sport fish and all migratory game birds. The most famous of these is the Federal Duck Stamp program. First instituted in 1934, all migratory waterfowlers — except some snow goose hunters during spring conservation season — are required to purchase this stamp to hunt. They currently cost $25 a stamp, and they raised around $40 million last year. The stamp has raised over a billion dollars since 1934, and by law, 98 percent of all money raised has to go back into the ground for conservation; this has taken the form of the National Wildlife Refuge System. The NWR encompasses over six million acres of wetlands, which are conserved and managed for migratory waterfowl. It’s worth noting that the vast majority of duck stamps are purchased by us duck hunters; however, some stamp collectors and bird watchers also pay into this system. The duck stamp has been a wildly successful form of wetlands conservation. 

Moving now to excise taxes, there are two real notables. The first is known as Pittman-Robertson, which is a 10 or 11 percent excise tax on all firearms, ammunition, archery equipment and a few other sporting goods. This fund is managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the federal government and appropriated to states based on a variety of factors. This money only has three acceptable uses: conservation initiatives, hunter education programs and public shooting ranges. The entire fund is dedicated to conservation or keeping the current cycle of User Pays and Public Benefits running smoothly. Since its inception 77 years ago, P&R has raised over $7 billion. Everybody benefits from this tax, yet only hunters, trappers, and recreational shooters pay for it. 

The other notable excise tax is known as Dingell-Johnson. This is a 10 percent excise tax on sport fishing equipment and 3 percent on boat motors and fuel, along with some duty imports. Similar to P&R, D&G funds are managed by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service and distributed to states based on a combination of criteria. Also, like P&R, these funds are only allocated for projects that involve aquatic habitat or aquatic species conservation (like coastal wetlands projects or fisheries studies), education and recruitment efforts (like boaters safety or take a kid fishing initiatives), and increasing angler/boater access (like building new public boat ramps). Combined, P&R and D&G have raised over $25.5 billion in their program history. 

Finally, we land on the last pillar: hook and bullet organizations. This is a catch-all term used to describe our coalition of conservation-focused organizations, which are primarily funded by consumptive recreators. There are far too many to examine each one in depth in this overview, but some of the most prominent include Ducks Unlimited, Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, Bonefish and Tarpon Trust, National Wild Turkey Federation, Pheasants Forever/Quail Forever, and so on. All of these organizations function in quasi-similar ways, so I’m going to focus on Ducks Unlimited, which is the largest and most successful of these. 

Ducks Unlimited is the world’s leader in wetlands conservation. According to their Fiscal Year 2022 annual report, they raised $276.7 million dollars and conserved 575,000 acres in FY22. Boasting a return rate of 84 to 88 percent of every dollar raised to dollars in the ground for conservation, it’s among the best in all non-profits. The other 12 percent pays for things like the 16-person government affairs staff, which lobbies on all levels of government for wetlands conservation and environmental protections. In its 86-year history, DU has conserved over 15 million acres of wetlands and associated habitat. They have projects from southern Mexico to the Arctic Circle in Canada. DU prides itself on being founded by waterfowl hunters and is supported primarily even today by waterfowl hunters. There are numerous other organizations in a similar boat that are not endowed with the same resources but do similarly impactful and important work. 

Consumptive recreation is the basis on which all conservation happens in this country. There are plenty of other mechanisms by which we contribute to conservation separate from dollars and cents, and that’s a discussion for another time. Now, when you picture that October morning scene, I hope you see us for what we really are – young, proud, and excited conservationists. Consumptive recreators are proud to be the tip of the spear in the fight to conserve our natural resources. By hunting, fishing, and trapping, we aim to protect the very thing some believe we intend to destroy.