SUISUN CITY, Calif. — As migrating waterfowl make their way into the Sacramento Valley in the fall, a line of cars and trucks starts to form on Grizzly Island in Solano County. The line of vehicles spans several hundred yards, and they are all here for one thing: the opening day of duck hunting season.
Grizzly Island Wildlife Area is one of California’s largest and most popular duck hunting areas — so popular that many hunters like “Duck Line Don,” as he’s known, will show up days before duck season starts just so he can secure a permit and be the first inside the wildlife area.
“It’s a real good place to hunt. I don't want a lot of people knowing about it,” Don said.
Unfortunately for Don, the secret is out. Very few hunting areas in the state have this much demand and being among the first in line on opening day of duck season has become a long-standing tradition for hunters like Chris Bruner.
“I think that tradition... people can't miss out on, you know, no matter if they knew they had a better hunting spot to go to. They like the whole concept of a couple of days of hanging out,” Bruner said.
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Much of the island’s wetlands are managed by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) and they only issue 350 permits. A limited number of those permits can be reserved on the Internet, but the rest of the permits are sold first-come, first-served in what’s called the sweat line.
“We call it the sweat line because you're sweating if you're going to get in or not,” said Matt Mooney, who’s been hunting here for 57 years in a row.
On the other side of the permit check point, Grizzly Island Wildlife Area manager Randy Weinrich checks one of the many duck blinds where hunters will be setting up.
“In our total Grizzly Island Wildlife Area, it's just over 14,000 acres and it's comprised of nine different units," Weinrich said.
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The food-filled wetlands on Grizzly Island are just a stopping point for millions of migratory birds on the Pacific Flyway.
“So roughly you could see up to 12 different species of ducks out here on any given day,” Weinrich said.
The waterfowl are on their way from Canada to Mexico and the island can get very crowded, which is not necessarily a good thing for birds.
“So sick birds can come into that area and just being that ducks are such a tight knit group and they stay in large groups all together, that disease can spread rapidly. So, it would cause just mass die offs. We do see that every so often with botulism or cholera outbreaks. It affects a lot of our region and a lot of our wildlife areas," Weinrich said.
CDFW says diseases like avian flu can be a real problem with dense bird populations and because humans have forced wildlife to confined spaces, natural predators like coyotes have a hard time helping to manage the bird population by themselves.
“So, to help prevent disease, starvation, just massive die offs, we implement a hunting program to help kind of mitigate that,” Weinrich said.
Hunters not only help manage the bird population but the licenses and permits they buy help pay for restoration or enhancement projects. CDFW says since 1971, duck stamps or licenses have raised $22 million for wetlands alone.
“So we've seen sort of a decline in kind of (those) younger hunters coming up,” Weinrich said.
At its peak, California sold nearly 700,000 hunting licenses a year but as of recent, that number has dropped to about 220,000. The decline in younger hunters can be blamed on several demographic, societal and generational changes.
Regardless of your stance on hunting, at its core, this sport is enjoying everything nature has to offer, whether you come home with a bird or not.
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