Story of Bay’s ducks, geese from a hunter & conservationist

By John Howell
Posted 11/25/15

John Kupa loves the bay and its ducks and geese.

A wildlife ecologist and professor emeritus at the University of Rhode Island where he taught wildlife science and environmental planning for 30 …

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Story of Bay’s ducks, geese from a hunter & conservationist

Posted

John Kupa loves the bay and its ducks and geese.

A wildlife ecologist and professor emeritus at the University of Rhode Island where he taught wildlife science and environmental planning for 30 years, Kupa is also a storyteller and a hunter.

He brings his knowledge of hunting and the bay together in “The Ducks and Geese of the Rhode Island Tidewater,” a book just published by Wickford’s Water Fowlers Association. But this is more than facts and stats, such as data on duck and geese migrations. It’s a book that offers the history of Rhode Island tidewaters – especially around Wickford – and the color and feel of early late fall mornings on the bay today, and what it must have been like when Roger Williams established his Rhode Island colony. The stories take the reader through colonial times and into the 1800s, when the state’s population mushroomed from 8,000 to a quarter of a million. It was a time for the market gunner, and the ducks and geese were plentiful.

“The leathers on the oarlocks squeaked as Charlie Tillinghast moved down the Green’s River under the high banks to the river bar. It was cold. December ice rimmed the river edge. He had laid out 80 decoys around the point last night and was planning a hunt this morning to finish the barrel of bluebills and black ducks that he had started yesterday. Boston was paying 25 cents a bird, and the bay was full of birds,” he writes.

The scene comes to life.

“Till” uses fat from ducks shot earlier to deaden the squeak of the oarlocks, yet he can’t stop Pojac, his dog, from anxiously whining. Till discovers he’s not alone on the Green River and the waters he knows so well. There’s a figure in the false dawn and it is apparent some of his decoys are missing. He’s angered, but he vows to deal with the thief later.

He moves on and the air is full of great flocks of ducks, with 500 or more spotting the remaining decoy spread and wheeling up the river.

Five hundred birds may seem like a lot. It wasn’t, assures Kupa.

Ducks and geese were so plentiful that slaughtering them for commercial purposes was relatively easy. A well-placed shot in a flock could bring down 20 birds, Kupa estimates. Rhode Island became the first state to recognize this resource, and in 1846 moved to protect its winter visitors with designated hunting times and limits and prohibited shooting from February to September.

As recently as 50 years ago, Kupa remembers, “You could look and the water would be black [with ducks].” Kupa said there are still “rafts” of scaup, a small dark diving duck, offshore from Gaspee down the west side of the bay, but there aren’t as many…yet a lot.

Kupa writes that counts for Greater and Lesser Scaup wintering in Narragansett Bay show 10,000 birds many winters, and in some years 20,000 to 25,000. The average for 2011-14 has fallen to about 8,000 birds.

There have also been shifts in populations. Atlantic Brant geese once wintered farther south, with less than 100 birds being recorded in 1976. Brant are now common visitors with numbers averaging about 3,000. Climate change and a change in diet, Kupa believes, accounts for their abundance, although this year’s numbers are down from last year.

Kupa said Brant once almost exclusively fed on eelgrass. The grass was decimated in the 1930s by an unidentified disease and the wintering geese starved. Populations dwindled. It looked like the species would fade out as their numbers declined. Then the birds adapted to eating sea lettuce, of which there is ample amounts in the Bay.

“They call constantly to one another in guttural murmuring that can be heard long before they come into sight. At times they travel in flocks that exceed 500 birds,” Kupa writes.

Kupa has seen Brant in their natural habitat in the Artic. He finds it incredible that these birds that are accustomed to an environment devoid of human activity can adapt to wintering in a place as packed with boats and activity as Bullock’s Cove in Riverside.

“They go from nothing to an environment covered with human activity,” he said.

The story of the Canada goose likewise illustrates how fowl can adapt.

Kupa documents how in conjunction with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, the Rhode Island Fish and Wildlife Division obtained a small flock of captive Canada geese from Montezuma Wildlife Reserve in New York State in the 1960s. The birds were pinioned and allowed to adapt to Rhode Island. The result is that the state has a resident population numbering about 10,000 birds and a nuisance to those trying to run golf courses, athletic fields, parks and airports, and even to motorists as the geese gather in numbers on highway dividers and even waddle into the path of vehicles.

“All of a sudden, everyone hates geese,” Kupa said. He points out that bag limits on Canada geese have increased dramatically in an effort to control the resident population with limits of as many as five and 15 birds a day. There is still a migrating population and distinguishing the birds is easy.

“They look like they haven’t eaten for days,” Kupa said of the visitors.

Kupa was educated at the University of Maine in Orono in Wildlife Conservation, graduating in 1956. While earning a master’s degree in wildlife science at the University of Massachusetts in 1958, he developed a technique to age the American woodcock used throughout North America. Kupa also hold a doctorate in wildlife ecology from the University of Minnesota. He was the first scientist to use radio transmitters to monitor wild Ruffed Grouse. He also used the transmitters later to study white-tailed deer in Rhode Island, which lead to their legal harvest.

Kupa, who still enjoys hunting, now with his two grandsons, has filled his book with observations about different species such as the whistler or American Goldeneye.

“They don’t trust men, but a good decoy set along their flight paths can sometimes bring them in,” he writes.

He advises, “You’ll need plenty of load for these big bull whistlers,” adding that sometimes a hunter will get lucky and also take down a Barrows.

“They are rich and should be roasted in mushroom sauce with some smoke oysters on the side,” he writes.

The book also contains suggestions on where to set up blinds and the use of retrieving dogs, a history of decoys, and a gallery of photographs of ducks and geese taken by Kupa, including some of those giant rafts of bluebills (scaup) numbering in the thousands off Pawtuxet Cove.

The work of renowned painter of outdoor sporting scenes Chet Reneson serves as the cover of the book, which sells for $25 and can be found at bookstores throughout Rhode Island as well as sporting good stores and the Warwick Beacon, located at 1944 Warwick Ave. in Warwick.

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