Opening Days: Classic Waterfowling in California

by Scott Herring, James Swan

From the Classic Waterfowling in California explores the ways that the waterfowl hunting experience has changed in California. It grows out of a history project conducted at the University of California, Davis, where we wanted to figure out what the wetlands of the state were like when older hunters were very young. We interviewed over fifty of them at length, and taped the interviews, using the 1950s as our boundary line; the people in this book were nearly all hunting waterfowl by at least the 1950s, a half-century ago, and many were hunting much earlier. We interviewed some people who were not very old, only in their sixties, but who were able to tell us about older people they had known who taught them, and whose memories stretched far back into the past. Opening Days is a distillation of those interviews, designed to be read by anyone with an interest.From the Foreword by James Days by Scott Herring is a history of waterfowling in California that is a treasure chest of oral history documenting how Aldo Leopold's "Land Ethic" grows, like a tree, out of the land. Filled with tales of teeming flocks of wild birds and equally compelling flocks of warm-hearted stories from men and women who came to love the earth through first-hand experience, reading this book gives precious rare insights into the heart and soul of conservationists. It allows the reader to understand why Theodore Roosevelt once "All hunters should be nature lovers."From California Waterfowl is an oral history, and Scott is a truly gifted interviewer. You scarcely hear his voice at all as he pulls forth information from his sources. He is missing the ego trip that so many writers unconsciously include in their accounts of what others say.... As a teacher of English at UC Davis, Scott is an excellent stylist.... As something that gives the rich flavor of waterfowling's place in the California of the 1930s and 1940s and how some of that heritage still carries on today, [Opening Days] provides a unique contribution.

204 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 1, 2006