Arbitrary changes coming to federal duck stamp
A federal duck stamp costs $25. Waterfowl hunters have to buy them every year and fix them to their licenses. But millions of other people buy them as well — lovers of wetlands, lovers of birds. People can use them as an entry pass to any of the nation’s wildlife reserves.
Philatelists with a fancy for stamps with beautiful pictures of waterfowl collect them. Artists vie every year to have their paintings chosen to be on one.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has been issuing duck stamps since 1934 and the program has been hugely successful. It has raised over $1 billion that’s been used to conserve about 6 million acres of waterfowl habitat. Nationally, 300 national wildlife refuges have been created or expanded with duck stamp money.
So naturally, the Trump administration, which has, willy-nilly despoiled environmental programs across the boards in its three years, has stuck its thick fingers and thoughtlessness into it.
By executive order this spring, President Donald J. Trump and Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt changed the stamps. From now on, or until the end of the Trump administration, the stamps can’t just be of ducks, which is what they largely have been.
Starting with the designs this year and the stamps issued in 2021 the stamps “must depict an appropriate waterfowl hunting scene or include a hunting-related element.”
In other words, there will be ducks, but there also will be people with guns.
Ducks Unlimited, the national organization dedicated to both waterfowl hunting and habitat conservation, is on board with this change.
But area conservationist and ecologists have been left wondering why it had to be made at all.
“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” said Patrick Comins, executive director of the Connecticut Audubon Society.
“With all the other issues out there, why pick this one?” said Robert LaFrance, policy director Audubon Connecticut, the state chapter of the National Audubon Society.
Jenny Dickson, director of the wildlife division of the state Department of Environmental Protection said the staff there is disappointed with the change.
“It changes the ability of an artist to paint the scene,” Dickson said. “People have collected these stamps as beautiful artifacts of ducks.”
“It’s just one more example of the horrendous activities of the Trump administration,” said Ben Oko, of Ridgefield, an avid birder who led the town’s Conservation Commission for years.
The duck stamps program had its roots in the early decades of the 20th centiry when development across the country — along coastlines and in the prairie pothole country of the northern Great Plains — ate up wetlands, destroying the habitat waterfowl need.
Earlier legislation had called for preserving wetlands, but hadn’t provided any money to do the job. Jay Norwood ‘Ding’ Darling, a Pulitzer-prize winning cartoonist, sportsman and wildlife conservationist, had the idea of the duck stamp.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Migratory Bird Hunting Stamp Act (now the Migratory Bird Hunting and Conservation Act) in 1934, and Darling designed the first stamp.
The program has been so successful that individual states, including Connecticut, have started their own duck stamp programs.
This year, the DEEP announced from this year forward, state winners will be chosen from participants in the Junior Duck Stamps program consisting of students in kindergarten to 12th grade. In the past, professional artists from outside the state could submit paintings.
“It’s the perfect time to get them involved in conservation,” Dickson said. “They are our future conservationists.”
One of the reasons the duck stamp programs have succeeded has been that they brought together all the parties involved in wildlife conservation: Hunters, birders, lovers of natural beauty, lovers of painting of birds.
The Trump administration’s change in the program has the potential to alter that coalition. It creates another wedge issue.
LaFrance pointed out this has never been a problem. Right now, hunters and environmentalists support the Great American Outdoors Act, which will allocate as much as $1.9 billion annually for long-overdue maintenance of the country’s national parks.
Likewise they are supporting the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act, which allocates $1.4 billion a year to the states for wildlife conservation projects,
Both bills are moving through Congress. The Senate has passed the outdoors bill, while the House of Representatives has passed the wildlife legislation.
“If COVID has taught people anything, it’s an appreciation of the great outdoors,” LaFrance said. “That’s the whole issue.”