“Entry number 123!” The resonant words of Larry Mellinger, a senior attorney at the U.S. Department of the Interior, were followed by murmurs from the assembled crowd. An official from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) moved slowly across the stage, holding up a seven-by-10-inch painting before each of five expert judges. Behind the judges, a screen displayed the same image writ large: a pair of bizarre yet beautiful ducks. With its bright orange bill, dense green feathers behind the nostril and round patch of silvery-white feathers surrounding the eye, the Spectacled Eider is unlikely to be confused with any of the other four species that were eligible for this year’s contest. The colorful drake was pictured next to its brown-feathered mate in the early morning light, snowcapped Alaskan mountains rising in the far background.
This was the scene at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Conn., on September 20, when the judging of the 2024 Federal Duck Stamp Contest was poised to reach its climax. Over the previous two days, the auditorium had been packed with artists and spectators—a melting pot of flannel-clad veterans, aspiring young artists barely out of high school, curious onlookers, and even an adorable Seeing Eye puppy-in-training. The Duck Stamp Contest defies stereotypes: one is just as likely to spot a gray beard or a shock of bright blue hair in the audience. Additional thousands had been watching online, the live chat of the FWS YouTube channel bubbling with comments such as “I love the lighting on the neck here,” “eiders always look a little bit suspicious,” and even “Something about that Brant [goose] cheek is giving IDGAF brat energy.”
In the first round of judging, a field of 239 artworks was winnowed to 85. In the second round, 15 finalists were selected. Now everything was on the line. One of these paintings would appear on the 2025 Duck Stamp. The winner receives a sheet of 25 stamps signed by the Secretary of the Interior. It is a modest prize, to be sure, but victory conveys instant stature in the field of wildlife art. And print sales are so lucrative that the winning painting is often called “The Million-Dollar Duck.”
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For the 338th time at the event, Mellinger intoned, “Please vote.” One by one, judges raised their numbered placard in an old-school process reminiscent of the judging for cold war–era Olympic figure skating. Four judges held up a 5, and one raised a 4. The audience gasped—the painting of the Spectacled Eiders had scored 24 out of a maximum of 25 possible points! Six more paintings were judged, but none surpassed that score.
For two days, the artists had been anonymous, but now it was revealed that the Spectacled Eiders were the work of Adam Grimm. This is Grimm’s third win, and his previous winning paintings of a Mottled Duck and a pair of Canvasbacks are currently on display in a gallery upstairs from where the competition was held, in an exhibition titled “Conservation Through the Arts: Celebrating the Federal Duck Stamp,” on view through February 9, 2025.
David Maass’s painting of a pair of Wood Ducks appeared on the 1974 Duck Stamp.
Duck Stamp Art on Display
As I stood in the back of the auditorium, listening to the thunderous applause fade away, I took a moment to reflect on my personal journey into the universe of the Duck Stamp. As recently as 2021, my familiarity with the Duck Stamp was limited to a vague awareness that its purchase is required to hunt waterfowl. Then I met Richie Prager. A conservationist and former Duck Stamp judge, he spent many years assembling a world-class collection of Duck Stamps before turning to a much more difficult task: tracking down the original art behind each stamp. Prager managed to acquire an astonishing 61 original artworks, along with many associated preliminary drawings and prints. Ultimately, he decided to donate them to the Bruce Museum, and Duck Stamp history became my life for the next three years. As science curator at the museum, I worked to organize an exhibition that showcases the art and artists behind the stamp.
Our exhibition opens with a timeline. In 1900 ducks in the U.S. were in dire straits. The rise of technologies such as refrigeration, the railroad and “punt guns” that fired hundreds of pellets in a single blast facilitated the rise of market hunting. Whereas traditional hunters had long pursued ducks for their own table, market hunters killed birds indiscriminately and in great numbers, supplying merchants in ever-growing population centers where the public’s appetite for duck meat and feathers was seemingly insatiable. At the same time, drought conditions and the draining of wetlands for agriculture were shrinking habitat that waterfowl relied upon for feeding and nesting.
Pummeled from all sides, ducks found a defender in American political cartoonist Jay Norwood “Ding” Darling. A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, Darling used his platform to agitate for conservation legislation. Through the efforts of Darling and others, the Migratory Bird Hunting Stamp Act arrived on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s desk in 1934. The Act required waterfowl hunters to purchase a $1 Duck Stamp, with sales supporting migratory bird sanctuaries. In addition to preserving land, Darling worked tirelessly to push through hunting regulations that reversed the declining fortunes of waterfowl, giving the beleaguered U.S. ducks and geese the protections they needed to rebound.
Pressed to deliver a design for the very first Duck Stamp, Darling quickly whipped up six drawings on cardboard shirt stiffeners salvaged from his dry cleaning. These were merely intended as concept sketches but were passed along to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing by mistake. By the time Darling tracked down his missing sketches, engravers had already started production. Although the original sketch used for the first stamp appears to have been discarded, Darling later re-created the image as an etching. A trial proof print from this etching opens the art section of the exhibition.
For the next 15 years, from 1935 to 1949, a select few wildlife artists were invited to submit designs the annual Duck Stamp. Many were natural history scholars and museum professionals, and in keeping with the times, all were men. Among them was Edwin R. Kalmbach, who worked for the Bureau of the Biological Survey, a precursor of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Kalmbach’s research helped identify avian botulism as the cause of a mysterious “western duck sickness” that had killed more than two million ducks in the Great Salt Lake region in 1910. Emphasizing the program’s conservation mission, his wash painting of Ruddy Ducks for the 1941 Duck Stamp included a flotilla of adorable ducklings.
Many of these early artists were self-taught. For example, Walter E. Bohl worked for a telephone company but took up drawing while recuperating from a serious illness. Encouraged to pursue printmaking, he improvised a press and etching tools from an old clothes wringer, darning needle and hand-polished copper. Soon he was displaying his etchings at Chicago’s Century of Progress Exposition, where one was purchased by none other than Eleanor Roosevelt. Bohl was subsequently invited to design the 1943 Duck Stamp—a pair of Wood Ducks taking flight. Although the original drypoint etching on copper plate has been lost to rust, a preliminary sketch for his winning design is a highlight of our exhibit at the Bruce Museum. Today Bohl’s work is housed in such high places as the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
James Hautman’s painting of a pair of Redheads appeared on the 2022 Duck Stamp.
The Super Bowl of Wildlife Art
The Bruce Museum was able to host the 2024 Duck Stamp contest thanks to a decision made almost 75 years ago. Robert Warren Hines, who had been selected to design the 1946 stamp and became an artist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1948, subsequently argued that the selection process for the design should take the form of a competition that anyone could enter following stated guidelines. Thanks to Hines’s efforts, an open competition was declared for the 1950 Duck Stamp. Walter Weber, widely known for his illustrations in National Geographic, won that year with his Trumpeter Swans design, which bested 87 other entries. The early contest years feature relatively simple designs. They are clean, stylized representations of ducks—and the art tends to have a very “stamplike” feel, in part because it had to be submitted in black and white and also because the artists were aware an engraver would have to replicate it on a steel die at stamp size (1.75 by 1.5 inches).
Beginning in 1970, the contest allowed color submissions. David Maass’s painting of Wood Ducks for the 1974 stamp, on display in our exhibit, emphasizes this change with an explosion of color. A male and female pair are captured taking flight in front of a foggy autumn sky crossed by bare tree branches. The drake’s wings are lifted on the upstroke, and the hen’s are powering into the end of the downstroke. It’s an idealized representation of a real moment, a style of that era of the stamp that I particularly enjoy. Directly below Maass’s painting hangs the final black-and-white work to appear on a stamp since the doors were opened to color submissions. Alderson “Sandy” Magee’s scratchboard rendering of a family of Canada Geese for the 1976 stamp is sublime. Scratchboard engraving, in which the artist uses sharp implements to scratch a board’s dark ink surface, revealing the light-colored layer underneath, can lend itself to almost harsh lines. Yet Magee perfectly captures the softness of the goslings’ down.
As the exhibition proceeds towards the present day, acrylic paintings begin to dominate, and the artwork shifts toward near-photorealistic portrayals of waterfowl and their environment. It is almost a given that the depictions of the ducks and geese will be executed flawlessly. The winning paintings have an added edge—a certain warmth to the sunlight illuminating a Canvasback or an ominous storm brewing behind a White-fronted Goose. In 1991 Nancy Howe became the first woman to win the Duck Stamp competition with a pair of King Eiders poised in a landscape of contrasting textures. The image gives a realistic impression, but close examination reveals stylized choices strategically tailored to the small scale of the physical stamp.
One name that appears repeatedly on the wall labels over the last stretch of the exhibition is Hautman. Three brothers—James, Joseph and Robert Hautman—have collectively won the contest an astonishing 15 times. Their paintings are not only terrifically atmospheric but also capture the subjects in the finest detail. In 2001 Joe Hautman’s Black Scoters prevailed after four rounds of tie-breaking votes when one judge recognized that only Hautman’s painting included the tiny projections on the duck’s bill called lamellae, which form a sieve for filter feeding.
The exhibition closes with an array of the stamps themselves and a celebration of the pop-culture impact of the Duck Stamp. A poster highlights a subplot in the movie Fargo, whose creators, the Coen brothers, were childhood neighbors of the Hautmans. Toward the end of the film, a character announces that his Mallard painting came in second place and will be featured on the three-cent stamp, and he laments that “Hautman’s Blue-winged Teal got the 29-cent”—a nod to the many real-life wins by the Hautman brothers. More recently, the Duck Stamp was featured in an episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. Oliver explained the importance of the conservation funds generated by the program and successfully raised more than $70,000 for wetland conservation through the auction of five humorous paintings submitted to the Duck Stamp Contest. One of these paintings, Feuding Artists Handshake, by Roberto Parada, depicts erstwhile rival artists Tim Taylor and Rob McBroom making peace under the wings of a giant duck. Hanging in the exhibition, it captures both the serious nature of the art competition and the charm of a fandom that never takes itself too seriously.
As people exit the exhibition, the last thing they see is a video loop of footage from the National Wildlife Refuge System and a QR code beckoning them to buy their own stamp. Although hunters are still required to buy the stamp, almost half of all duck stamps sold these days go to collectors and those who wish to support conservation—98 percent of sale dollars go directly to conserving habitat. Less than three square inches in size, the Duck Stamp has protected more than six million acres of waterfowl habitat. I’ve got mine (signed by the artist, no less) sitting on my dresser right now.
