It's 7.15AM and the sky is beginning to lighten. On a north-central Victorian wetland, the first gunshots explode. It's five minutes before the official start of duck-hunting season and I can't see any ducks. But somewhere, someone has likely made the first kill of the day.
I'm here with members of the Coalition Against Duck Shooting. Wearing bright colours and waving flags, the rescuers try to scare the ducks away. Their mission is also to rescue wounded ducks and to collect the dead birds that hunters can’t - or won’t - gather up.
We’d arrived at Lake Buloke in the dark. With headlights on, our vehicles had travelled in convoy from Donald. Twenty or so jungle-green tents were pitched on the shore, just clear of the mud that marked the high point of recent floods. In the gloom, cooking fires illuminated the hunters’ camps.
To prepare, I’d acquired a licence to hunt waterfowl. This allowed me to be within 25 metres of the water. In order to get a licence, hunters must sit the Victorian Government’s1990 Waterfowl Identification Test (WIT), designed to reduce the number of endangered birds shot. They must identify all the game species of ducks, each with different colours and other details - and identify non-game ducks, like endangered freckled ducks.
The test consisted of 22 clips of birds in flight, each lasting five seconds. Included were two sequences of freckled ducks. I scored an ‘A’, though I’d wrongly identified a freckled duck on screen. I received my hunting licence a few weeks later. But brushing up on duck IDs didn’t prepare me for my trip to a duck-hunting wetland.
At Lake Buloke, I am among 120 rescuers. We've been given ballistic goggles in response to an incident last year, when a rescuer was struck in the face by shotgun pellets.
A barrister briefs us. If questioned by police or wildlife officers, “just give your name and address,” says David Risstrom. “You don't have to say anything except ‘no comment’.” We mill around, reflective vests gleaming in the light of head torches.
The rescuers gather into teams. It's cold but the swampy water must be colder. There's a quiet, anxious moment when the rescuers get to the shore, then loud splashing as they wade in.
At their camps, the hunters tease one another. They’re still cracking jokes as they enter the water, shouldering shotguns and boxes of ammunition. Big river red gums stand in the mud. Some have collapsed and lie half-submerged, stark and stately.
The sky is now stunning: deep indigo, radiant orange in the east. Then the guns explode, and volley after volley splits the morning air. It’s incredibly loud and frightening. As ducks circle above, hunters sit in boats or stand among the trees in the water. Wearing camouflage, they blend in. Even their boats sport green and brown squiggles.
Each time a hunter shoots, his shotgun fires a spray of 200 steel pellets which maximises the chance of a hit. Waste pellets sometimes land in the water, a harmless steel trickle.
The morning is now bright and clear. A flock of corellas wheels in the sky and at the waters’ edge, dotterels scuttle back and forth.
Majestic lines of ducks cross the sky. When one is hit cleanly, it falls straight down. But others can be seen in the air, their bodies giving a stutter. These ducks are wounded. They lose height in a long parabola and land out of sight. Hunters are obliged to find them, but with a steady stream of rescuers bringing injured ducks to the mobile vet clinic, it's clear that some do not.
The noise is appalling but the theatrical cruelty is worse. Guns explode and when a duck comes down, men cheer like footy fans. Near the edge, cute, fluffy ducklings bob along behind adults. (Hours later, the ducklings, now alone, paddle about without purpose.)
Around 9AM, two rescuers stomp out of the lake, cradling wet pillowslips. "What have you got?” someone yells. “A duck and some other bird.” The teenager's face is as white as her beanie. The duck’s throat is blood-streaked, the other bird is a little black cormorant (a protected species). “The black one took ages to die,” says the rescuer.
Around 10AM, a few hunters come ashore, their “kills” draped like macabre accessories on belts around their waists. Some tote four or five ducks, dangling by the neck. They pose for photos with their haul.
A hunter approaches and says, “Nice day isn't it?” He says he wants us to know that “hunters aren't bad people…If my son weren't here with me, he'd be drinking and carrying on in nightclubs.” Nobody speaks to him and he wanders away.
The first few hours after dawn are the busiest then most hunters come ashore. Rescuers will be in the water for three more hours, looking for dead and wounded birds.
At Lake Buloke that day, rescuers would find more dead protected species: cormorants, plovers, pelicans and ravens, the work of 700 hunters.
But duck hunting is declining. In the mid-1980s, Laurie Levy says there’d be 10,000 hunters at this lake. In 1987, 95,000 people held licences to hunt ducks; now it’s 21,000.
After visiting the wetlands during duck season, I found my beliefs about human decency rocked to the core. But beyond the limited sample I saw, rescuers with cameras saw much worse.
The man is dressed in green. Thigh-deep in water, he picks a duck up by the head and twirls it, once. The duck thrashes and jolts. A few seconds pass, then 10, 20, 30. More than a minute later, the duck is still flailing its wings.
This scene of animal torture is part of a video taken by CADS rescuers at Lake Buloke. The man fails to kill the duck. He fusses over his gun and looks up at the sky. The small bird jiggles and jerks. It’s hard to watch, and seemingly a long way from the code of ethics which urges game be “dispatched quickly and in a humane way”.
Back home, I think about the duck in the video, how it didn’t get a quick death. How the shooter treated it like debris or a feathery rag. Above all, I want the ducks of Victorian wetlands to live like those in my local park. Paddling, upending, stretching their wings. Birds of the city, no one’s trying to shoot them dead.
A longer version of this article was published in The Big Issue No 409 (June-July 2012)
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