A world apart on the Butte Sink marsh
Deep in the heart of the Sacramento Valley, the morning sun poked a hole in distant overcast and sent oranges, pinks and reds across the marsh wetlands before us.
Pintail ducks, along with wigeon, mallards and other waterfowl, sailed past, at times making a turn to our calls. Above them, vast skeins of snow geese were silhouettes against the sky. Flocks of blackbirds, flying as if telekineticly connected, rose up, down and across. In the distance, a few miles off, you could hear thousands of geese gabbling as they prepared to rise from the marsh.
Right then, I received a phone call from a pal, Tom Hedtke, nature lover and vegetarian, back in the city.
“I’m doing the shopping thing this morning,” he said. “The traffic is terrible. People are rude in the stores. I hope you realize that you’re in paradise.” It put the moment in perspective.
This scene was unveiled this past week in the Butte Sink marsh, nestled at the foot of the Sutter Buttes about 60 miles north of Sacramento. Those who know the marsh would rather be here and watch the birds come to life than be anywhere else in the world.
As the sun claimed the day, the marsh “smells like birds,” we agreed. The occasional white-faced ibis, long-billed curlew, black-crowned night herons darted past, and in the shallows, willets and other waders poked for food.
“It’s magic here in the morning when the sun comes up and you’re looking toward the Buttes, watching the birds fly,” said Rich Vannelli of Sonoma County, who has made a pilgrimage to the Butte Sink every Thanksgiving week since the 1970s.
A million birds
The Butte Sink is an expanse of 18,000 acres, nestled on the valley floor. Gray Lodge Wildlife Area provides another contiguous 10,000 acres. This habitat is fed and flooded by Butte Creek and is defined by a matrix of marsh, tules, shallow waterways and uplands with oaks and willows.
Roughly a million ducks are now in the vicinity. Two weeks ago, 700,000 were counted at adjacent Gray Lodge alone. To the north, more than 500,000 pintail ducks were counted in the Sacramento National Wildcache, life Refuge Complex. Duck hunters, who pay for the federal wildlife refuges and state wildlife areas with their licenses and stamps, excise taxes and donations through organizations, have a limit of 1 pintail.
We were on the marsh at 6 a.m., well before dawn, and motored in a flat-bottomed boat in a slough out to a shallow-water blind secreted away by tules and tree branches.
“It’s one of the last truly wild places left in the Sacramento Valley,” said Yancey Forest-Knowles, a past chairman of the California Waterfowl Association. The roads are dirt and dead-end at the marsh, he added, and at times, flooded for weeks at a time with no access by car. Most people don’t even know it’s here.
In 1841, Capt. John C. Fremont, the Indian fighter and explorer, camped at the base of the Buttes while his troop rested and hunted elk, antelope, deer, grizzly bear and wildfowl to supply the food noted Forest-Knowles, a historian and educator. In the 1830s, a contingent of the Hudson’s Bay Co. expedition spent the winter in the Buttes trapped by floodwaters.
“When I’m in the marsh here, I get this great sense of history that connects me to all those that came before,” he said. “The explorers, the hunters, the pioneers.”
Nobody gets here by accident, he said. People are here for the ducks.
“This is one place on Earth where I can watch the marsh come alive,” said Chandler Young of Foster City. “It’s invigorating. It gives you an injection of vitality and a visceral connection with nature that you often can’t get anywhere else.”
The interior of the Butte Sink is comprised of roughly 50 duck clubs where the owners and members have paid to protect the wetlands habitat. At each club, there are selfimposed no-hunting sanctuaries. On their own, they often choose tighter limits, both on numbers and species, than required under state and federal regulations.
Habitat equals ducks
Many people do not understand the life of duck hunters. Those who do and take part aren’t always willing to explain it.
In California, the fulcrum point is that 95 percent of wetlands have been lost, according to state and federal scientists, and of that remaining 5 percent, duck hunters own and protect 70 percent of them.
The duck clubs in the region include the Brady Club, the Wild Goose, the Greenhead, Field & Tule, Live Oak and others. The land value is about $15,000 to $20,000 per acre, but instead of farming rice or wheat, they raise ducks. All the clubs pay to have their properties flooded, for instance, to create wetlands habitat.
“It costs a lot of money to keep this place going,” said Gene Bugatto, born and raised in San Francisco (and who still works there). “We provide free room and board for the ducks and all the other birds.”
At one quiet moment in the blind, we watched how refracted sunbeams changed color across the Sutter Buttes, with flights of geese stretching across the distant sky. ForestKnowles then noted that it was duck hunters, in 1918 with the Migratory Bird Act, that demanded the end of commercial market hunting that threatened many bird species.
They also pay the freight, he said. In 2016, hunters and fishermen contributed $130 million to conservation, according to the Department of Fish and Wildlife, from sporting licenses, tags and a federal self-imposed tax on ammunition and firearms that is returned to states. Most also contribute through the organizations California Waterfowl and Ducks Unlimited.
If 10 percent of bird watchers would buy the $25 Federal Duck Stamp, according to one report from the Department of the Interior, it would raise $125 million per year for wetlands purchases and protection.
Forest-Knowles patted his Labrador retriever, Mick, and gave him a piece of a dog biscuit. “I know a lot of people don’t understand life on the marsh and why we enjoy it so much,” he said. “I think anybody who saw a marsh come to life like this morning would get it.”
In four hours in the blind, roughly 40 flights of ducks passed overhead, and without a word between us, we allowed flight after flight to pass without a shot. For many in the region, it is part of a selfimposed ritual that comes without effort. You might choose to try to take the occasional pintail or mallard, and enjoy the procession of waterfowl without needing to pull out the shotgun. We each ended up with one. We saw thousands.
As we prepared to leave, my phone rang; it was an update from Hedtke in the city:
“At Costco, I almost got run over a bunch of times by shopping carts. I wanted to get on the loudspeaker and tell everybody to just take a deep breath and relax Or they could be like you guys out there, in a beautiful place in nature, watching all the birds, and just let the rest of the world go crazy.”