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Author tells tale of Texas' waterfowl from decades past
Stories paint picture of coast filled with diverse birds decades ago
By Shannon Tompkins | November 14, 2012 | Updated: November 14, 2012 10:49pm
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Hunters at the Eagle Nest and Mener Lake Fish and Game Preserve in 1923 show off their take of Greater Canada geese. These geese were once the most common goose along the Texas coast and the only goose waterfowlers deemed worth pursuing.
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Texas waterfowlers used live decoys until the mid-1930s, when federal law banned the practice. Fred William Bates' live Canada and snow geese once shared his Palacios yard with domestic chickens and ducks.
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Houstonian John Winter, an inveterate waterfowler, took hundreds of photos of waterfowling across Texas in the early 1900s, when abundant coastal freshwater wetlands swarmed with mallards, which today have all but vanished.
" A Hundred Years of Texas Waterfowl Hunting - The Deoys, Guides, Clubs and Places, 1870s to 1970s" by R.K. (Rob) Sawyer is a remarkable book covering the history of waterfowl hunting in Texas, a topic rich in amazing anecdotes about the birds that once clouded the sky, the people who pursued them and the places where birds and man interacted. Photo courtesy of Texas A&M Press.
Signed copies of "A Hundred Years of Texas Waterfowl Hunting - The Decoys, Guides, Clubs and Places, 1870s to 1970s," by R.K. Sawyer are available from Kemp & Company (kempcosolutions.com) or through the publisher, Texas A&M Press (tamupress.com).
On the right autumn or winter morning in the right place, the Texas sky fills with waterfowl.
Rafts of thousands of redheads and pintails rise like roiling clouds of smoke over the shallow, shoalgrass-carpeted bays of the middle and lower coast.
On the coastal prairie, the sight and sound of thousands of geese - snows, blues, Ross's and white-fronted - leaving their watery roost, en masse, at dawn overwhelm eyes and ears.
In the half-light of dawn, the heavens over coastal marsh are animated with hurrying swarms of teal and shovelers and gadwall.
Across the state, where wetlands holding the food and other habitat the birds require remain, millions of ducks and geese come to spend the winter.
There to witness the spectacle are waterfowlers, a subset of hunters that includes acolytes with a devotion to the birds and all things associated with pursuing them that borders on obsession and, in more ways than many would admit, defines their lives.
This is not a new phenomenon. Today's Texas waterfowlers follow in more than 150 years' worth of muddy footprints left from marshes around Sabine Lake to the lagunas and resacas at the mouth of the Rio Grande.
There is, and always has been, something magic about waterfowl. And no other type of hunting in Texas carries with it such a rich, diverse, fascinating and often sobering history.
A hidden history
But that history - the story of the birds and their habitat and the Texans who have pursued them - has remained almost wholly hidden, scattered in small fragments across the state. Except for a handful of long-out-of-print books, most of them hard to find and expensive, the history of Texas waterfowl and waterfowl hunting has been handed down in stories told among families and between hunters.
That changed with the recent publication of "A Hundred Years of Texas Waterfowl Hunting - The Decoys, Guides, Clubs and Places, 1870s to 1970s," authored by R.K. (Rob) Sawyer and published by Texas A&M Press.
The book is a remarkable piece of work - a 400-page volume covering the history of waterfowl hunting in Texas and illustrated with more than 200 photographs, most of which were taken between the late 1800s and the 1950s.
It is the first work to gather the written, oral and photographic stories of what was an almost unbelievably abundant and diverse resource, the rich landscape that supported that resource and the waterfowlers who pursued them.
The book, divided into chapters focusing on specific areas of the state, tells the story through vignettes sifted from the few old books touching on the subject, newspaper and magazine archives and, most engaging, the personal stories of more than 150 people Sawyer interviewed over the five years he spent researching the subject.
It is those personal stories - remembrances from aging waterfowlers, family stories handed down through generations and reaching as far back as the 1860s, unpublished written accounts and photographs from family collections - that make the book a priceless treasure for any Texan who has ever watched dawn break over a wetland and wondered what kind of waterfowl wonderland this state must have been.
"Most people wanted their family's stories told. Waterfowl and hunting were such important parts of their lives and their family history, and they were happy that someone was interested," Sawyer said. "That they trusted me with their grandfather's photographs and their stories was very gratifying."
That no one had collected those stories surprised Sawyer. The 56-year-old petroleum geologist grew up on the shore of Chesapeake Bay and began waterfowling before he was a teenager. The importance of waterfowling and its influence on the Chesapeake region's history and culture is not just acknowledged, it is celebrated and well-documented in books and museums.
"When I came to Texas and saw what was here - the waterfowl hunting and culture around it - I tried to find books on the history because I knew it had to be great," Sawyer, an inveterate waterfowler, recalled. "I couldn't find anything. So I decided to write the book I wanted to read."
A different population
What he found amazed him.
"One of the biggest surprises was just how many waterfowl Texas held and how important hunting was to development of the Texas coast," he said.
Several towns along the Texas coast and coastal prairie began primarily as destinations for waterfowl hunters. "But probably the biggest surprise was how things changed - how the assemblage of birds changed."
In the late 1800s, Sawyer found, "swans - huge numbers of them - wintered along the entire length of the Texas coast."
One of the most impressive aggregations of swans wintered at the mouth of the San Jacinto River, where gorgeous white-sand sand bars stretched for more than a mile and were covered with resting swans.
Similar congregations of swans wintered on sand bars at the mouth of the Trinity River, with large numbers found as far south as Port Isabel.
Just as impressive and surprising was the number of Canada geese that wintered on the Texas coast. Big Canadas. Greater Canadas. Birds weighing 10-12 pounds.
Called "ringnecks" or simply "geese," the big Canadas were the most numerous geese found on the coast and the only ones waterfowlers deemed worthy to pursue.
Similarly, along the coast, where most of the waterfowl hunting was done, the marshes and prairie potholes and the collection of natural lakes such as Eagle Lake, Green Lake, Eagle Nest and Maner (Manor) Lake and dozens of others drew clouds of mallards and tornadoes of pintails.
Freshwater lakes along the coast held almost unimaginable numbers of canvasbacks.
The shallow bays along the coast drew millions of wintering ducks.
Waterfowlers - recreational and commercial - took stunning numbers of birds, sometimes with a single shooter downing more than 300 in a morning.
The abundance drew streams of hunters to the state, including presidents (Warren Harding), would-be-presidents (William Jennings Bryan), politicians of every stripe, and captains of industry and capitalism. And it triggered a flush of up-scale hunting clubs the length of the coast, on the coastal prairie and even in East Texas.
Sawyer tells dozens of their stories. How the town of Taft was created out of whole cloth in preparation for a visit by a hunting party headed by President William Taft. How ranchers on prairie west of Houston trained steers to serve as mobile hunting blinds, allowing hunters to approach feeding waterfowl. Tales of great hunts and mishaps. And the culture built around the annual influx of so many millions of birds.
But he also tells the story of how that changed as Texas changed and denied the birds the habitat that had for eons supported them.
"First, the swans went. Then the canvasbacks. Then the big Canadas. Then the mallards when the freshwater marshes went," Sawyer said.
Although Texas today holds some of the best waterfowling to be found in the nation, it is a shadow of what it was even a half-century ago - and unrecognizable from a century ago.
What has remained the same, though, is the connection waterfowlers feel toward the birds and the places they gather. And through the stories and photographs in "A Hundred Years of Texas Waterfowl Hunting," modern waterfowlers can reach across the years and share a blind with men who, a century or more ago, watched the same sky for the same reasons we do today.
They just saw more birds. A lot more.