Senior duck stamps: Rest of the story

In a recent article about South Dakota’s involvement in the nationwide Junior Duck Stamp Program, I added that there was also a “Senior” Duck Stamp Program, but the Senior was another story about a stamp-art competition and waterfowl refuges. Well, here’s “the rest of the story” of the Federal Duck Stamp and South Dakota’s involvement in this highly successful conservation program.

Geography is one reason that South Dakota has a central place in the duck stamp story. We are in the prairie pothole region of the northern great plains of the USA and Canada, which is called the “duck factory of North America.” Retreating glaciers left big chunks of ice that pockmarked the landscape with potholes that filled with water. Ducks like’em. Brookings County has about 10,000 potholes. For 30 years, SDSU hosted a research program called the National Wetland Inventory. The scientists counted and classified potholes, and studied their value.

From the time the country was founded, Americans assumed that natural resources were infinite, including the birds which were zealously hunted for food game and fashion, without any regulations. The book titled The Feather Wars by James McCommons tells of the unbelievable slaughter and the crusaders who fought for bird conservation. In South Dakota the bird conservation topic was waterfowl and their wetland habitat.

A newspaper cartoonist and a South Dakota Senator are two people at the center of the waterfowl conservation story.

The Senator was Peter Norbeck, who served from 1921 to his death in 1936. This well driller from Redfield had a great appreciation for nature.
His circle of friends, known as the “conservation Senators,” passed the Migratory Bird Act in 1929 to establish waterfowl refuges. The idea was to provide safe rest stops during the migration. Good idea, but the law languished because of lack of funding.

The cartoonist was Jay Darling from Sioux City. He was an outdoors enthusiast who fished the Missouri River and hunted waterfowl in the potholes of Iowa and South Dakota. He was an environmentalist before the word was coined.

He was kicked out of Yankton College and Beloit (Wis.) College for mischief making, but his cartooning abilities got him a job drawing political cartoons for newspapers in Sioux City and Des Moines in the 1930s. Long-story-short, his political cartoons often criticized Federal conservation programs. The disapproval got the attention of Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt, and Darling, a Republican, soon found himself in Washington DC as head of the Bureau of Biological Survey.

Darling had seen that waterfowl and wetlands were in severe decline from drought, habitat destruction, and over hunting. His ideas dovetailed with Federal programs to improve degraded, drought-stricken, eroded landscapes by rehabilitating the lands for wildlife. Work was done by the Civilian Conservation Corps.

Darling used Norbeck’s waterfowl refuge law, and proposed a federal hunting license to fund refuges. His hunting license was voted down, so Darling called the license a duck stamp and wrote a bill titled The Migratory Bird Hunting Stamp Act.

However, a duck stamp seemed unimportant to most politicians at the time, and the Stamp Act bill was dying in Senate debate – until Norbeck rose to speak. Though suffering from painful throat cancer, he was determined to see his conservation plans in action. He spoke in his heavy Scandinavian accent in support of the bill. Darling later wrote that he doubted the senators understood anything he said, but added, “If it had not been for Peter Norbeck’s request, the whole duck restoration program would have completely collapsed.”

The bill was passed and signed into law. Darling designed the first duck stamp, a black-and white sketch of a pair of mallards landing on water. In the first year, 635,001 federal duck stamps were sold at one dollar each, the money going to restoring marginal lands and associated wetlands as waterfowl refuges. Today there are about 570 national wildlife refuges. Four are located in South Dakota – Sand Lake, Waubay, Lake Andes, and LaCreek.

In 1949, an stamp art contest was begun. Artists retain the rights to the original art, so winning is financially rewarding. Four South Dakota artists have won the duck stamp contest. The first (1981) was John Wilson, a sign painter from Webster and Watertown. His colorful stamp showing a pair of swimming Ruddy ducks sold for $7.50. He also won state (SD, SC, MI, IL) waterfowl stamp contests. Eight of his original paintings hang in the Nicollet Tower and Interpretive Center near Sisseton.

Mark Anderson (Sioux Falls, 2005) and Josh Spies (Watertown, 2008) have also won the Federal Duck Stamp Contest. We see Anderson’s art displayed in his booth every summer at the Arts Festival. The

Spies stamp is unique in that it is one of only two stamps that include a duck decoy – quite provocative since live waterfowl are the main subject. Spies drew a long-tailed duck drake swimming near a wooden decoy. A competing artist stated “The decoy was what turned the trick.”

Adam Grimm, Burbank SD, at age 21 was the youngest artist to ever win the contest. And get this – he has won three times! Now living in Wallace, SD, his story is told in a much-awarded film titled “The Million Dollar Duck.” The ads for the film say that it is “a humorous and quirky film that reveals the excitement and tension around the art competition that has brought in over 800 million dollars to protect America’s wetlands.” https://adamgrimm.com/the-million-dollar-duck.

Duck stamps now cost $25; get one at the Brookings Post Office. Non hunters purchase duck stamps because of their importance to wildlife conservation through wetland conservation. Stamp collectors purchase duck stamps. The 1981 Wilson stamp is worth $10-$20.

However, there is a cloud on the horizon — duck stamp sales are down, which means money for conservation is down. From 2.5 million stamps sold in the 1970s, sales have declined to about 1.5 million annually. There has been a shift away from rural outdoor traditions like hunting. There are about 24,000 duck hunters in South Dakota annually; about 20% are nonresidents, whose numbers are capped by State regulations. Much of the economic value of waterfowl hunting in South Dakota depends on wetland habitat.