What is your annual reminder, tradition, or feeling that really gets you amped up for the upcoming waterfowl season? Well for me, it’s purchasing my hunting license and duck stamps. Your federal duck stamp has quite the backstory and significance. Without the initiative and forward-thinking work of Jay ‘Ding’ Darling, who knows how long the Federal Duck Stamp Program and collaborative conservation would have taken to materialize. Follow along for more!
Portrait of Jay Norwood ‘Ding’ Darling from US Fish and Wildlife Service found HERE
Ding, who was born in Northern Michigan back in 1876, began his professional career as a cartoonist for the Sioux City Journal. From there, Ding became a nationally renowned cartoon artist, racking up several Pulitzer prizes. Hunting, fishing, and the outdoors were lifelong passions of Ding’s and regularly were injected into his cartoons. Ding saw what was happening to America’s lands and waters and decided to use his platform to bring more awareness to these issues.
A Cartoon by Ding Darling – Credit HERE
Through his notoriety as a nationally syndicated cartoonist, Ding became a key figure in America’s conservation movement during the first half of the 20th century. He started off in 1931 with Iowa’s first Fish and Game Commission, where his 25-year state conservation plan was replicated across the country. Ding’s program was centered around educating men and women in conservation, so that science would play a bigger role in environmental policies and conservation efforts. Ding once said, “turn the natural resources of any area over to an ecologically ignorant populace and ecologically ignorant leaders, and they will rape the land and waters with as little regard for future consequences as the profit-motive boys display.”
However, Ding’s conservation career peaked in 1934, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed him to the ‘Beck Committee,’ which would devise a wildlife and land reclamation program. FDR created this Committee because, back then, waterfowl populations were in such serious trouble that something had to be done to rebuild the many species. Shortly thereafter, Ding was appointed Director of the U.S. Biological Survey, which was the precursor to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
In his 18-month stint as Director, Ding worked tirelessly toward establishing the Federal Duck Stamp Program. Thanks to Ding’s efforts, this idea became Federal law on March 16, 1934 with FDR’s signature. Coincidentally, Ding was also the artist behind the first Federal Duck Stamp.
First Duck Stamp – Credit HERE
If you’re a waterfowl hunter in the United States, you know this program and stick each year’s stamp on your licenses, but you may not know just how much good it does for waterfowl. Since 1934, every American waterfowl hunter over 16 years-old is required to purchase one of these stamps. More importantly, 98-cents of every dollar spent on the Federal Duck Stamp is deposited into the Migratory Bird Conservation Fund. Since its passage, the program has “spent 1.4 billion Migratory Bird Conservation Fund dollars to permanently protect more than 5.8 million acres of important waterfowl habitat, including nearly 3.3 million acres of Waterfowl Production Areas (WPAs) in the U.S. Prairie Pothole Region.” This year’s Federal Duck Stamp was $25; so, the roughly 1 million American waterfowl hunters in 2015 equates to roughly $24.5 million for waterfowl conservation!
However, waterfowl hunting participation data is trending downward. Without active involvement and recruitment within the waterfowl hunting community, this great program—and our beloved pastime—will falter. In Ding’s memory, do your part to support waterfowl conservation: take young people hunting, get your neighbor excited about waterfowl, be a responsible hunter, do what you can, and always support the Federal Duck Stamp! In closing, I’ll leave you with a thought from Ding, who was known as the ‘the best friend ducks ever had’, “Ducks can’t nest on a picket fence.”
