By Jack Ray

Bobbing on the water in front of me is a drake ringneck duck, with a bill colored in black, white and blue like a little toucan and silky feathers alternately purple, black and white.  He flew here hundreds of miles or more from who knows where in Canada.  On his way somewhere else.  He died here, killed by me, in the southern marshes of the Great Salt Lake. 

            The wind and waves that carry his body also move my soul with wonder as other flocks dart across the horizon.  I lift the soft gift and hurry back to the blind.  How could I do that? Kill and then plan to kill more.  Because, with the wind stinging my face, the water lapping at my knees, the warm bird in my hand and more flocks racing over the olive colored waves in this wild place, I feel – no, I know – at that moment that I am part of it, as connected to this place and this spectacle and this environment as every element in it.

That connection will continue and spread as I relate the events to fellow hunters, as my children watch me clean the bird and as my family shares in the meal that the marshes have provided.  Hunting is a process, a fabric woven one thread at a time, that intertwines the hunter with nature.  Some threads involve observation, some marshcraft, some preservation, some sustenance and, in this process, some necessarily involve death.  As each thread is added, the connection grows stronger, the tapestry more vivid, the story it tells richer.

 The story continues on through the winter when the marsh freezes and my children and I will slide across the ice to open water.  The ice this morning is pocked with the melted oval imprints of hundreds of tundra swans that spent the night here.  Their feathers, some frosted, lie about, so white they are as radiant in the early morning sun as if fallen from the wings of angels.  Most ducks have flown south but we come anyhow hoping to draw to us a part of what we are a part of.

 In the spring, we visit regularly to see the marsh fill with nesting birds.  Black necked stilts, killdeer and avocets marshalling their young across the upland to another playa.  Grebes and coots are perched on their array of floating nests.  Baby burrowing owls hunched around their den.  Cinnamon teal huddle in nests hidden along the shoreline. 

In the summer, we work in the marsh, we protect what we will never hunt and what we will but more than anything we preserve what part of us belongs to.  I cannot plumb the soul of every hunter, but I know that most feel something of what I do and this, more than self-interest, is what drives so many to improve habitat and preserve land they no longer or may never hunt. 

Duck hunting has preserved this marsh from the drain tiling, tillage and asphalt of surrounding land but that is not why I hunt, merely a natural result of it.  Whether my sense of connection that leads to preservation justifies killing an animal may only be answered by a power higher than mine.  But the absence of hunting here, on this marsh, will certainly reap a loss of habitat and an absence of wildlife as well.  Moreover, it will reap the loss of an activity that has ever drawn mankind into nature.  As I walk the aisles of the grocery store, there are few products that claim to or could ever create any bond with nature or commitment to its preservation.  All of our lives and most of our activities come at the expense of the environment generally and animal life specifically.  This one activity not only binds me to nature but also promotes it future.

            Through the summer in the marsh, we will watch broods emerge and then sadly dissipate as predators take their toll.  We will note the growth of cattails, bulrush and salicornia.  As summer ends, we will decorate blinds, paint decoys and wonder endlessly about the fall migration.  Finally, the season comes, more threads in our story as hunters are woven.  Another ringneck from far away may find this marsh and its way into my decoys and, if my daughter or son shoots straight, it will weave yet another thread in the story of this marsh, its future, the waterfowl and, in a sense, my family.  The connection between the waterfowl, the marsh and the hunter may seem paradoxical to some but, if so, it is only as paradoxical a story as the relationship, the connection, the interweaving of all of life in the natural world and I, a duck hunter, am part of it.