Washington College Magazine
Call of the Wildfowl
The Eastern Shore provides some of the world's best waterfowl hunting —an oportunity not lost on generations of students who chose Washington College. As habitat declines and populations dwindle, today's hunters are working to preserve much more than the early morning hunt. By John Lang
Maryland's Eastern Shore is on the Atlantic Flyway used by migratory Canada and snow geese. Kent County's cornfields—adjacent to marshes, creeks and ponds—offer plentiful feeding grounds.
In this photo circa 1982, guide Clint Evans '78 and his dog, Major, helped a hunting party bag their limit.
Photos courtesy Clint Evans '78
After a hunting moratorium in the early 1990s, the Canada goose population has stabilized. The Eastern Shore is their most important wintering ground on the East Coast.
Rising before dawn on cold, crisp mornings, hunters conceal themselves in blinds, call in the birds over fields set with decoys, and wait until they are in range.
Chester retrieves a pintail dropped amid a decoy spread.
Wil Campbell '11 (second from left) and John Gifford '78 (second from right) were part of this hunting party led by Clint Evans '78 (kneeling) and his son, Cole '19.
Washington College quite naturally has an endowment unmatched by Harvard, Yale or Stanford—or, looking at handsomely situated universities around the world—by Oxford, Cambridge or the Sorbonne. All the others are, in fact, paupers in the context. The riches here may be summed by a simple calculation: water + corn = birds.
Smile maybe, but don't snigger. It's the bounty that surrounds us and sets us apart, and it's been an underpinning of Washington College and an enticement for students to these parts ever since the distant days when the men on campus wore stockings to their knees, and if women did, too, nobody got to see them. Times do change, but, as students are fond of lamenting, in Kent County not so much.
Even still, at hours when their peers are snuggling their pillows, some yawning few are trudging out in autumn dark to the wide, flat fields where the winds flog the flesh and come back for the marrow, for that mystic moment when a Canada goose, called down from low flight, flares on noiseless wings before a blind to meet a thunder.
It is an old story peculiar to the place. A student chooses Washington College in part for the waterfowling, succumbs to the landscape, graduates, does well enough to come back and buy a farm on the Shore, to be there for the birds honking hello at the dawn and the dusk. Or, the family already owned a farm hereabouts and the youngster wouldn't look any farther than this campus close to the waterways. It's happened again and again. They get rooted like the cornstalks.
Once, student hunting was more popular than any sport, going by the numbers active in it. The peak time was a quarter century ago when geese were at record numbers on the Eastern Shore, when estimates of winter populations topped 1.2 million concentrated through Kent, Queen Anne's and Talbot counties.
Paul Obrecht III '94, who had grown up on a farm near Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge in Cambridge, recalls that hunter-students in camouflage gear were a common sight on the campus in his time.
"I knew probably a hundred hunters and fishermen," Obrecht says. "My friends at school were very active hunters, and we often came to class in hip boots. We made some money at it, too. Weekends, I worked at Alexander's Butcher Shop in Massey, butchering deer. During goose season I worked at picking geese, for beer and peanut money."
Chandler Keyes '83, who serves now on the President's Advisory Board, notes that in his college days "you could just walk up to farmers back then and ask if you could hunt. That was before professional guide services had really gotten going. You'd go to farmhouses and ask if you could fish their ponds. Everybody thinks of the Bay and the Chester River, but some of the best fishing I've ever done was on farm ponds of the Eastern Shore."
Keyes' timing was right. His WC years "were some of the best hunting ever on the Eastern Shore." And that helped to fill stomachs at his fraternity. "College kids then were notoriously poorer than they are today. We called it meat hunting. We'd shoot geese or catch pan-sized bluegill out of a farmer's pond, come back to the KA house and grill on hibachis outside Middle Hall.
"We went all over Delmarva finding places to hunt, sleeping in cars. Anytime the moon was new or it had been cloudy and the geese hadn't been foraging at night, we'd be up for the dawn shoot and rush back to 9 or 10 o'clock class. We'd also go on hunting trips after parties. It was totally part of accepting the local culture. I think a lot of the professors liked that."
Keyes grew up on a farm of 3,500 acres in Montgomery County. Now that's all suburbia, he says, but he hasn't lost his attachment to the land. He works as an agricultural lobbyist in Washington, DC, on issues such as switching money to conservation programs, away from direct aid, and supporting preservation of the Chesapeake Bay and wildlife habitat. He currently owns a 130-acre farm in Kent County that he leases out for hunting.
For Clint Evans '78, his college hunting experiences helped feed his friends on campus and actually inspired a career. "There were lots of us going hunting, and on Sundays when the dining hall was closed we hosted goose and duck cookouts on campus, with kegs of beer. We were feeding the masses and actually making money at it, which was illegal. But it allowed me to pay for my education."
His family had a farm outside Rock Hall, and he'd been taken on hunts since he was four, though he wasn't allowed to handle a gun until he was 12. During his sophomore year, Evans began to realize the amount of money he could earn as a guide and thought of opening his own outfitting business after graduation. Today he works as a realtor and property manager, but when the waterfowl return in the fall he operates a commercial hunting operation that owns or leases some 3,000 acres on the upper shore.
Evans says he came to Washington College because of the location—specifically for the hunting—and to play lacrosse. "It was pretty much a no-brainer for Clint where he was going." Evans, who later coached the Shoremen lacrosse team for 22 years, jokes that he "graduated with a degree in history and a double minor in lacrosse and hunting."
Evans, who later coached the Shoremen lacrosse team for 22 years, jokes that he "graduated with a degree in history and a double minor in lacrosse and hunting."
It was easier for students to hunt in his time, Evans admits: "There was no rule about having shotguns in our rooms. And the professors were very tolerant when I'd show up for courses starting at 10:30 in the morning wearing hip boots and covered in mud."
The weapons policy today is strict. The only guns allowed on campus are those used by the Skeet and Trap Club. The guns are stored in a safe that is opened only for a scheduled shoot. "The reason," says Jerry Roderick, Director of Public Safety, "is that permitting weapons in residence halls is a risky and dangerous idea. The hunters may be responsible but roommates may not be."
Another disincentive for hunting now, says Evans, is simply the lower number of birds. "When I graduated, there was a bag limit of three Canada geese per man per day and a 90-day season. Today it's a two-goose daily limit and a season of approximately 45 days. Also, in the late 1990s came a moratorium on Canada goose hunting that lasted seven years. The goose population had crashed. To say things have changed would be an understatement."
And yet, goose numbers did stabilize and begin to increase— this season estimated at close to 600,000—and so, also, did the student hunters.
Rob Sentman '08 says his family owns a farm in Melitota where he's always done a lot of waterfowl hunting, "So that was a major factor in deciding to come to Washington College. I was hoping to meet more people like myself, outdoorsmen, than I'd found in high school in Wilmington." If Sentman hasn't found as many as he'd like, he's doing what he can to rally more. He's the incoming president of the WC Ducks Unlimited chapter, where at last year's banquet some 50 new members were signed up. The auctions at that banquet raised $8,000 that is largely dedicated to enhancing wildlife habitat.
Recruiting more hunters and providing for more birds is a Sentman family mission. Rob expects that his younger sister Maureen '10 will want to take over running the WC chapter of Ducks Unlimited when he graduates. After all, it was his older sister, Maggie '06, who was the founding president when the chapter formed two years ago.
"I got weird looks when I came to class from hunting, wearing boots and camos," says Maggie. "When I was at WC I felt there was kind of a uniform: girls in mini-skirts and Ugg boots, and boys in polo shirts. But I wasn't alone; there were half a dozen female hunters when I was there.
"A lot of the faculty, when I was getting the DU chapter started, didn't want to get involved," Maggie says. "They thought of hunting as killing. It's the exact opposite of that. I mean, there's shooting, but it's also conservation, saving wetlands and marshes, preserving lands so valuable to the area."
The sad fact is, hunting these days is viewed by non-hunters in much the same way as the rest of the family regards illegitimate offspring at a reading of a last will and testament. They see it as superfluous, a drain on resources, and they wish it would just go away with no expectation of affection.
Meanwhile, hunters look on non-hunters as being ignorant of the facts of conservation—and blind to some unpleasant truths of modern meat production. They see those who would turn up noses at shot game as being in such denial they can drive past a poultry truck laden with thousands of dirty birds crammed into little cages stacked a dozen rows high—a common enough sight on Maryland roads—and still buy chicken.
Maggie Sentman's arguments that hunters actually multiply the hunted are supported by wildlife authorities.
"I got weird looks when I came to class from hunting, wearing boots and camos."
That $8,000 WC Ducks Unlimited raised last year went into the national organization's kitty, some $200 million brought in across the country each year, more than 80 percent of which was used to buy critical breeding grounds in the U.S. and Canada, or for purchasing conservation easements. In Maryland alone this hunters' group has restored or protected more than 55,000 acres over the past decade. Grace Bottitta of the DU office in Annapolis explains, "A lot of what we do is working with private landowners to sign 15- to 20-year agreements not to do anything to their wetlands. After that time it becomes legally a wetlands, and they'd have to get a permit to destroy it." Unsaid but understood: getting such a permit, then, would be about as likely as getting a PETA member to eat a duck.
Larry Hindman, waterfowl project manager for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, points out that the hunting license fees and the game bird stamp required of water fowlers fund the continent-wide population surveys and pay for habitat management. Thus, the monies to preserve the primary breeding grounds of ducks and geese come almost wholly out of the pockets of hunters.
Today, bird populations once in serious decline are rising. Hindman says the spring breeding index found about 196,000 breeding pairs of Canada geese—the highest recorded since 1993 when the annual surveys began. "That's not counting the teenagers who aren't old enough for breeding," he says. The total number of Canadas was well over a million. The mallard survey found 446,000 breeding pairs, a seven percent increase over last year, and a total population above eight million. Coincidentally, Hindman notes, "Waterfowl hunting is the third most important industry in the Kent County area."
That's no accident. Kent County has remained one of the least developed places in Maryland—and consequently among the friendliest to wildlife—because of some good work by Kent County planners. According to the Eastern Shore Land Conservancy, Kent ranks first on the Eastern Shore in containing urban sprawl. Ninety-two percent of new residential building permits in the county in recent years have been kept within designated growth areas. That compares with just 64 percent in eastern neighboring Queen Anne's. In 2004, the most recent year surveyed, Kent allowed only 35 new residential permits outside of growth areas. Queen Anne's allowed 195, northern neighbor Cecil County okayed 367.
A prime example of keeping prime real estate open is the 2,500 farm of Tyler Johnson '80, whose Quaker Neck Gun Club is totally devoted to growing feed and cover for wildlife and hosts upwards of 1,000 hunters a year. On a drive through his fields, Johnson points to improvements he's been making for the past 25 years that support animals, and not just the species hunted. Where once there were just a few ponds and impoundments, now he has dug 35, with floodgates and pumps to adjust water levels. Those specifically meant for ducks are planted with dense stands of corn. It won't be harvested. Instead, as the season goes on, the water will be raised so ducks can eat their way up the stalks.
Coming to the end of a wide field, Johnson nods toward an extensive stand of saplings. "Once we plowed right to the fields' edges," he says. "Now we've planted along all the creeksides, put in thousands of trees, 10 or 12 different varieties, all bearing fruit or nuts. It's for feeding the animals but also to prevent runoff into the bay year-round. We work with the wildlife habitat program, the conservation reserve, Ducks Unlimited, the Wild Turkey Federation. We've planted barley, Japanese millet, bluestem grasses. It's not just for ducks and geese and quail and deer but for everything—what we don't hunt, too—frogs and snails and salamanders. There are a dozen bald eagles here on this land."
For all this, Johnson doesn't ever expect to see the Canada geese in the numbers that were here when he attended Washington College, kept his shotgun under his bunk, "and tried never to schedule any classes before 10 or 11 so we could go hunting and clear hangovers." Noting that the geese wintered in North Carolina a half century ago, concentrated here in the 1980s, and now many come no further south than Pennsylvania, flocking around Lancaster, Johnson shakes his head: "I don't like to say global warming, but we don't see as many geese here since the winters aren't as cold."
If birds aren't as plentiful as the glory years of the 1980s, Greg Eckenrode '08 nevertheless feels sorry for fellow students who don't, or can't afford to, hunt.
The Eckenrodes are cutting back on tillable lands and putting in summer grasses around the creeks to stop erosion.
"A lot of them just stay in Chestertown and never know what's around us," he says. "It's just a shame because it's a great area. You don't know how gorgeous it is until you get outside Chestertown and poke around the farmlands, the creeks and ponds, just watching wildlife." Of course, he admits, "most students don't have the money to throw down $800 to go hunting on a top place. Even if you band together it can cost something like $100 a person for an afternoon's hunting."
Greg was lucky in having strong family support for his interest in hunting. After he saved $2,400 for a lease on a farm during his sophomore year, and then found the place didn't attract as much waterfowl as he'd expected, his father was persuaded to buy a farm devoted to game habitat.
John Eckenrode, chair of The 1782 Society and member of the Board of Visitors and Governors, is just slightly sheepish about the transaction. "Okay, I indulged him. But since he discovered girls I've found the times that I can still command his attention are when I take him skiing or hunting. So that's why I got the farm. If I got it, he'd come with it."
It was a tortuous path that led them to their 178 acres with a mile and a half of frontage on Swan Creek. John Eckenrode had been a partner in a 900-acre spread near Easton. Then Greg informed him during his senior year in high school that he'd decided to go to college in Virginia. John thought, "Well, what's the point having a farm in Easton now," and he sold his share. Then a young mind changed.
"Greg decided to go to Washington College right after his first visit to the school. That was good for me. I could reach out and touch him. But now he didn't have a place to hunt. Frankly, I was impressed when he took the initiative and leased a hunting property, and I agreed with Greg, we needed a farm."
In their hands just over a year, Swan Hall Farm is being transformed into an environmental showcase. The Eckenrodes are cutting back on tillable lands and putting in summer grasses around the creeks to stop erosion. They have two impoundments and two ponds, one of which isn't hunted, a safety zone. "We also don't hunt the creeks," says Greg. "We consider them sanctuaries." The Eckenrodes are in touch with Chesapeake Wildlife Heritage about a master plan for increasing game on the property.
John Eckenrode is particularly pleased with the 38 wood duck boxes he and Greg have installed. "The goal is to provide habitat for wildlife, not just to shoot," he says. Case in point: in the 1970s and '80s there were so few wood ducks they couldn't be hunted anywhere. Chesapeake Wildlife Heritage took on the building of thousands of nesting boxes and the result is a strong comeback. "It's really not a species hunted here," Eckenrode says. "As soon as the first frost hits they go to the Carolinas. It's not about hunting them but creating habitat for the birds. The issue is that we build the population on the Eastern Flyway. And I plan to do a lot more of it."
Taking a guest around the periphery of his land, bouncing along on a rattling Gator with a loose belt, Eckenrode points out several low, boggy spots at the edge of Swan Creek. "We're getting runoff there and I want to stop it. We want to put in two more impoundments, which would close off the erosion that goes into the bay and also make for habitat." He's planting summer grasses in a 30-foot wide buffer between the creek and his fields, and he's told the farmer who tills his land not to plant in that zone. Today he's finding his instructions were sometimes ignored. "I haven't been back here for a while," he says. "Well, that's corn he won't get," he adds, satisfied, as his Gator bounces over the intruding corn, snapping off stalks.
Eckenrode observes that a lot of college kids don't care for hunting but, he says, they need to understand hunters. "Most do work to get populations up and not just to shoot them. When I canoe up the river and see wood duck babies climbing out of a box, that's what it's all about. I've owned the farm only a year, and there's a lot to do, but I'll get it there. My hope is that someday when I'm gone the farm is something Greg will keep, and it will remain an important part of his life."
John Lang teaches journalism at Washington College and accepts invitations to go hunting.
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