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Katie Burke welcomes returning guest Dan Thiel to discuss the founder of Ducks Unlimited, Joseph P. Knapp. In telling the history of Knapp, the two discuss the creation of More Game Birds for America and the evolution that inspired the same group to create Ducks Unlimited. The pair layout out the timeline of events plus Knapp’s role that ultimately lead to our organizations’ creation.
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Listen now: www.ducks.org/DUPodcast
Send feedback: DUPodcast@ducks.org
SPONSORS:
Bird Dog Whiskey and Cocktails:
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Creators and Guests
What is Ducks Unlimited Podcast?
Ducks Unlimited Podcast is a constant discussion of all things waterfowl; from in-depth hunting tips and tactics, to waterfowl biology, research, science, and habitat updates. The DU Podcast is the go-to resource for waterfowl hunters and conservationists. Ducks Unlimited is the world's leader in wetlands conservation.
Welcome to the Ducks Unlimited Podcast, RELOADED, where we bring you the best of our past episodes. Whether you're a seasoned waterfowler or curious about conservation, this series is for you. Over the years, we've had incredible guests and discussions about everything from wetland conservation to the latest waterfowl research and hunting strategies. In RELOADED, we're revisiting those conversations to keep the passion alive and the mission strong. So sit back, relax, and enjoy this reload.
Katie Burke:Today on the podcast, we have returning guests, Dan Thiel, executive secretary of Ducks Unlimited and COO of Wetlands America Trust. We are back talking about Ducks Unlimited history, and today, we are going to talk about our founder, Joseph Knapp Junior, and more game birds of America. So let's start with Joseph Knapp. I will be honest. I have tried to learn more about Joseph Knapp, but he's pretty elusive out there and it is hard to get a lot of information on him.
Katie Burke:I know that he is the heir to Metropolitan Life Insurance and that he goes into newspapers, which I'm not exactly sure how that transition actually happens either. So I'm gonna go to you, and I know you can kinda get us into that beginning story.
Dan Thiel:Well, I love Joseph Knapp. Every organization has their patron saint, and Joseph Knapp would be the Ducks Unlimited patron saint. It's been quoted in the literature that the duck had no better friend than Joseph Knapp. But it's interesting, like you said, there's not a great deal of information. He was a fairly reclusive individual.
Dan Thiel:He did not want much notoriety. Oftentimes, when I talk about DU history or the DU story, I'll often describe the Mount Rushmore of Ducks Unlimited. Who would be on the Mount Rushmore? He'd be the first guy to put on Mount Rushmore. Oh, for sure.
Dan Thiel:Had we not had his vision and not had his philanthropy, I don't know that we would ever have gotten started. If you look at the context of the Depression, what a challenging time to establish a nonprofit organization for the benefit of waterfowl. There's some pretty world level challenges affecting the world, and here's a guy that's careless about ducks, And he puts his vision, his energy, and his pocketbook behind waterfowl. And so, earlier you said that the first mention of him was in North American wildflowers. He was certainly one of the founders and leaders of more game birds in America.
Dan Thiel:And one of his visions was to better understand the problem. And Joseph Knapp was the money behind what we, I think, refer to it as the International Wild Ducks Census of nineteen thirty five. And that could be its own podcast, because that waterfowl survey was groundbreaking, and a lot of the way in which they conducted that survey is still utilized today by the Fish and Wildlife Service and Canadian Wildlife Service.
Katie Burke:I'll just mention to the listeners so they know. I'm pretty sure Mike Brasher, our other host, went through that in a series. So, you can go back into the episodes and check out more about the Ducks census.
Dan Thiel:So, to better understand who Joseph Knapp was, born into a wealthy family, as you said, his father was Metropolitan Life Insurance, and somehow he's credited with inventing the six color press. Okay.
Dan Thiel:And what a
Dan Thiel:lot of people of today do not realize that the world received its information from newspapers. Many major cities had multiple daily newspapers. But one of the big features in the Sunday paper was, it was called the Roto Graveur, or the color section. And that was a collection of photographs, both locally, nationally, and internationally, that were put into one large supplement to the newspaper. And that's where his publishing empire really grew to a pretty dramatic number.
Dan Thiel:And he got both into newspaper publishing, but also magazine publishing. But the thing that was his cash cow was the six color press, which printed the Rotogevuhrer, which every newspaper wanted to have that color section. And so, that was Joseph Knapp.
Katie Burke:Oh, I didn't know that.
Dan Thiel:It's also a minor, minor bit of trivia. If someone would ever read the book Leaders and Legends of Ducks Unlimited, I wrote the piece on Joseph Knapp for that book. His mother, Phoebe Palmer Knapp, was a famous hymn writer. And out of all the 500 hymns she wrote, she's most famous for Blessed Assurance. And so, a bit of trivia.
Dan Thiel:A lot of people, they don't know who Joseph Knapp was, but they know who his mother was because of her experience with hymns. He attended Columbia University or Columbia College. He did not graduate. He went to work early for his father, and then at a fairly early age, he basically bought out his father and really got into the publishing and printing business. And at one time, he certainly lived in the Gilded Age of society.
Dan Thiel:He had a place on Long Island. He is quite well known. In fact, the most information one finds about Joseph Knapp comes from North Carolina. And I'm gonna pronounce it as Mackay Island, M A C K A Y. But Mackay Island was his estate, and he bought a couple thousand acres.
Dan Thiel:He built a 35 room home on the island, and he began to immediately, dramatically impact the local environment. He hired local people to work for him. That area of North Carolina was very poor. There were very few employment opportunities. At one time, he employed 60 some people on his property.
Dan Thiel:So, most of the people in the little town worked for Knapp. He had a phenomenal interest in public education, and in fact, the school system is named for his philanthropy. He funded clothing for schoolchildren. He bought all their supplies. He hired a woman from New York City to be the superintendent of the school system.
Dan Thiel:Her salary was far more than North Carolina paid. He paid the rest of her salary. So, he had a pretty big impact. The Knapp name is still very alive and well and respected in North Carolina. Married three times, lived to be 86 years old, passionate hunter, passionate fisherman.
Dan Thiel:When you go online and you Google Joseph Knapp, you find a couple sources that have a lot of photographs of the home, the boats, the hunting, the dogs, quite well known, quite well respected in that part of the country. Why he's so important to Ducks Unlimited is, as we discussed in the last podcast, more game birds in America had reached a point where their efforts to bring the European method to The United States, I think they figured out it wasn't going to be successful. I think they determined, from a fairly scientific approach, that raising birds, which is somewhat the European method, was not going to dramatically increase wild fowl populations. And so, earlier you mentioned nest kidnapping.
Katie Burke:Yeah. So, was reading the More Waterfowl book that was produced by Moore Game Birds, and in it, it describes their plan to administer the European method, which is I don't think this is how it was done in Europe, but this is what their goal was. So, a duck, you can make up to two to three clutches a year of eggs. So, like, say if the first clutch they lay is destroyed by a predator, then they can they still have almost like two to three times to try again in a season, in a nesting season. So, with their in this way, were taking the European method of raising birds and releasing them in the wild.
Katie Burke:They were going to wait for that first nest and kidnap it, so to speak, take that nest and raise it to make sure they all hatch. Because in that they also state like penrays, I think, had that with ducks. Ducks actually have a really good success rate in the hatch, but penrays were around 85% of, like, actually hatching, whereas wild ducks it's over 90%. So they were going to take the wild ducks and then hatch them in a facility, and ducks will, which we all know from like the story, The Ugliest Duckling, they will adopt other ducks. So they were going to try in the first two days after hatch to reintroduce those ducks back to a hen mallard in the wild and then have that hen raise it.
Katie Burke:If that didn't work, then they would have to raise them all and release it. And that in more waterfowl is like, they kind of describe it as what I read was like, it's definitely not something they were they weren't sure. It was gonna have to be an experiment. Like, they needed to test it to see before they actually spent money on that method. And I'm not sure when they realized that method doesn't work.
Katie Burke:But that was kind of what it stated as, is like, we need to see if this is a possibility.
Dan Thiel:So, in the history of Ducks Unlimited, I think we have four publications which chronicle our history. The first was in the nineteen forties. The title is The Ducks Came Back, and it was written by Kipp Koss. Kipp does a nice job of really telling the story of how more game birds in America became Ducks Unlimited. Four individuals, all affiliated with more game birds in America, were fishing at a lodge on the Beaverkill River in New York, and those four men were Joseph Knapp, John Huntington, Arthur Bartley, and Ray Benson.
Dan Thiel:Ray Benson was on the staff of Moore Game Birds. He was the publicity director. And they are sitting around the fireplace at the end of the day, and they're talking about what's the next step for the organization. And so it's a little bit of free flow of information. They're throwing possible names out.
Dan Thiel:One of the first names was American Duck Hunters Association. And then the idea was, well, you know, most of our work's gonna take place in Canada, and companies and associations in Canada use the word limited. How about Ducks Limited? To which Joseph Knapp famously roared back, by God, we don't want limited ducks, we want unlimited ducks. And that's somewhere how the story came that Ducks Unlimited got its So, probably some truth to that.
Dan Thiel:Those names I just mentioned, there's another name in the history of all of this that we should mention. That is Dwight Huntington. Dwight was an attorney from St. Louis. He was active in the Game Conservation Society.
Dan Thiel:He helped found a game keeper school in New Jersey, and his son, John Huntington, back in the day when he and Arthur Bartley were young men and they were working for More Gamers for America, those two gentlemen were part of that original Wild Ducks census. So, we have to remind or remember that Dwight Huntington, an attorney from St. Louis, twenty years earlier had some of these same radical ideas about game propagation.
Katie Burke:Right. And remember when I this was a while back when I came across this but I know that Knapp eventually buys and funds that program with more game birds in mind so to produce more people to help in his cause. Tell me if I'm right, but at some point on Mackay Island, one of his staff goes to that school, correct?
Dan Thiel:That is correct.
Katie Burke:Yeah. So, did he and I don't know this did he kind of use Mackie Island as a place to experiment some of these ideas that he had?
Dan Thiel:So, Ducks Unlimited has a member of the board of directors by the name of Jay Taylor. Jay lives in North Carolina. He is a student of everything specific to Currituck, is the Currituck sound. That's a pretty phenomenal place for waterfowl, always has been and still is to this day. And Jay has tracked down some of the individuals who still have connectivity to Joseph Knapp.
Dan Thiel:Also important to share that here at Ducks Unlimited, we have a member of our editorial staff for the magazine, a writer by the name of T. Edward Nickens. Eddie Nickens is a writer for Garden and Gun, Field and Stream, but now he's with us. Eddie is also a bit of a historian, and Eddie is actually working on a piece which more fully explores who was Joseph Knapp. So, if you read some of the online sources, and of course online sources are a bit dubious, hard to check references on those, but yes, they And if you read some of the other publications of More Game Birds in America, I mean, they have articles and chapters on how to build a proper pen for raising quail, raising pheasants.
Dan Thiel:So, part of that European method was how to propagate birds. And these men, while their passion was waterfowl, they were interested in all birds. One of the great photos of Joseph Knapp shows him as a much older gentleman with his pockets bulging with seed and corn, and he's feeding some species of pheasant on his stoop at Curitac. So, yes, I think it's safe to say that they did a lot of experimenting with how better to manage waterfowl bird populations. I mean, was
Katie Burke:a great place to do
Dan Thiel:it. Yes.
VO:Stay tuned to the Ducks Unlimited Podcast sponsored by Bird Dog Whiskey after these messages.
Katie Burke:I kinda wanna go back a little bit, before we get into, like, the Ducks Unlimited part of where More Game Birds and Ducks Unlimited goes, like becomes Ducks Unlimited, to the work that More Game Birds was doing. So we mentioned before American waterfowlers then becomes more game birds and they mention in American Waterfowlrs when that's going away that they need a bigger organization. And one of the things that American Waterfowlrs did not discuss on, but where more game birds really started to focus was this, that ducks didn't have a lie. There was no boundary line for ducks between countries. You know, ducks weren't American, they were North American.
Katie Burke:Like, you know, there was no thing. And so, that's when that really starts to become that politics doesn't play a part in because that's something I find interesting that they were thinking about also in more Game Birds because it's something we also think about in Ducks Unlimited as we work today. They were we're a bipartisan organization and politics don't come into play. Ducks migrate, they go from Canada to The United States to Mexico. So, was it about more game birds?
Katie Burke:Like, why because this was pre census that they came out with this. Why did they start changing their thought pattern to this?
Dan Thiel:So, on what I've read, it was a broader understanding of the birds come from Canada. And I think before that time, we weren't really clear on where the birds were coming from. And I believe we discussed last time, even back with American wildflowers, they sent a survey group, I believe it was to Alberta, and they were on the breeding grounds. And they saw something there they weren't seen in great numbers in The United States. It's important to note that Moore Game Birds Foundation proposed an international program, and they published it under the title of More Waterfowl by Assisting Nature.
Dan Thiel:And the program proposed an international agency to increase waterfowl production, raising necessary funds from sportsmen, which that in itself was a pretty radical Right.
Katie Burke:So, I gonna ask you, like, why didn't they just say, hey, Candid, they come from you. Why don't you deal with it?
Dan Thiel:Well, I think they saw because at the time, we're in the Depression, neither Canada nor The United States had the funding to do this. Duck hunters are the end users. Duck hunters should pay. Restoration of the breeding grounds in both The United States and Canada, providing management personnel, because at the time, Katie, nobody was working with birds. I mean, if you were to have told your parents, hey, I've graduated from college and I'm going to go work to save a species of bird, they would have thought you were crazy because nobody did that in that period.
Dan Thiel:The other idea that they had, they really were the first to propose the idea of establishing waterfowl refuges along the major flyways. And that became part of both the Canadian government, state government. It was more than any one government could accommodate, so both state government, federal government, and the crown became very active in waterfowl refuges, which had a pretty dramatic positive impact on waterfowl.
Katie Burke:Also in that, like, first, in their plan, they talk about and this does not go over into Ducks Unlimited, so I want to kind of hit on those things like we talked about the European model, which doesn't become a part of Ducks Unlimited. But in More Game Birds, they go into, and they have multiple pamphlets on it, extensively about predators, and that's not something that we ultimately even deal with. But you don't see it in there why they abandoned the idea. So, why were they so focused, and was it just misinformation and then they changed their mind, like, once they figured out that it wasn't as important?
Dan Thiel:So, let me clear the air on an important fact.
Katie Burke:Okay.
Dan Thiel:Fact is, Ducks Unlimited was very active in predator control.
Katie Burke:Okay.
Dan Thiel:And predator control for Ducks Unlimited took place in Canada, and there were multiple ways in which we didn't. We shot crows, we shot magpies.
Katie Burke:I was gonna say, crows and magpies seem to be the enemy number one in the history.
Dan Thiel:And the other was you could collect eggs. And so, Ducks Unlimited Canada would actually have gatherings in prairie communities. Posters would be put up around the town, and children and farmers would gather. They would beat the bushes looking for nests of magpies and crows, and they would bring the eggs, and then they would receive a penny per egg.
Katie Burke:Oh, wow.
Dan Thiel:The other thing is they would collect the feet of the crow and the magpie. So, when the hunters would bag the birds, and, you know, a lot of people, that's protein. So, they're hunting, snip the legs off, turn them in for a little bit of cash from DU. Back in the day, if a school kid had a nickel, that a good amount of money. So, those were very effective.
Dan Thiel:And in the archives, I've actually seen posters, the posters that were put up in these small towns encouraging people to go kill crows. I am not clear from the history when we begin to step away from that. And I suspect we discovered, it's certainly the DU policy today, you're not going to move the needle on waterfowl populations until you begin to make dramatic strides in preserving habitat, conserving places where ducks are born. That became the primary focus.
Katie Burke:Yeah. If you create the habitat where all of, you know, creation can be and sustain itself, it all kind of works its way out.
Dan Thiel:So, even to this day, there are organizations, and we all know Delta Waterfowl has a strong tradition of predator control. They work with a number of universities. I've actually toured several Delta Waterfowl Station predator preserves. And picture, if you will, call a, it a 50 acre or a 100 acre plot with electrified chain link fence, and it is the best of the best of the breeding habitat. And in that test area, they'll have dozens of nests per acre.
Dan Thiel:They will still set traps for skunk and other varmints. Even through that electrified fence, through the chain link fence, they still capture great numbers of fur bearing mammals that are after those eggs and after They those know they're there, and they will dig under that fence to get to So, those the challenge is we have proven, science has proven predator control works. The other challenge is you simply can't do predator control on a landscape large enough to move the needle on waterfowl production.
Katie Burke:Yeah. I just wanted to, like, address that part because it's such a big part if you go back and you I mean, most of these documents are pretty easy to come by.
Dan Thiel:So one of my favorite stories, as Ducks Unlimited made the transition from more game birds in America to Ducks Unlimited, Our forefathers in DU, that group of men I mentioned earlier, they truly believed that if they could raise $600,000 a year over a three year period, they would have enough money to solve the waterfowl problem.
Katie Burke:It was a five year plan.
Dan Thiel:Okay, five year plan. Alright. When you go back to 1936, and we must keep in mind that they sold subscriptions at $5 a person. In the archives, we have a few of these old $5 membership subscriptions. The records that our people kept in those days are meticulous.
Dan Thiel:If you failed to send your $5, you were going to be followed up someone was going to ask you for that $5. So, the reality is, after the first year's fundraising, they raised just shy of $100,000 far short of the goal. They held a meeting, and it had to have been a fairly sobering gathering of leaders to be looking at your numbers. You've worked so hard, and man, you fell far short of your goal. But they determined to drive forward, and they sent that entire amount of money to Canada, and great things were done with that initial, I believe it was $90,000 that was sent to Canada.
Dan Thiel:In kind of true DU fashion, we were incredibly efficient, we were incredibly effective. We have to keep in mind too that in that era, you could buy land for $10 an acre. Right. You could put an easement for 25¢ an acre. So, that amount of money went a long way in the nineteen thirties.
Katie Burke:Right. I know also, and I don't know what came of it, I know eventually we get the tax on ammunition that goes back to conservation. But in More Game Birds, they really stress this 1¢ tax, and I think they the numbers were that they had If they did 1¢ tax expected on revenue, they would get $7,500,000 a year, and then that would have been split between them and then Upland Birds. So, that would still result in $3,500,000 a year. And it's just So, did they ever make that happen?
Katie Burke:How did they like How did the 1¢ tax, like, get initiated or the tax on ammunition?
VO:I don't know. I do know that there was, you know, there were
Dan Thiel:a couple of movements, and one of those movements dealt with the Katie, I don't remember the name exactly, but it was like the Sports Shooters Association. And that group, they realized the importance of duck hunting to people buying guns and buying ammo, and they did not want to see the waterfowl population disappear and lose people buying shotguns and shotgun shells. So, that association actually sent tens of thousands of dollars to DU back in those early days.
Katie Burke:Okay. So, to go back a little bit on Knapp, so Ducks Unlimited was born in 1937, and he's a part of that founding group. But one thing I've noticed, and I don't have the answer to, is he kind of disappears after the founding, like he's not as in the other members have roles and you see them in the history, but what happens to Knapp? He doesn't die until 1951, so there's another fourteen years. What does he do with those fourteen years?
Dan Thiel:So, it's important to note that they wrote to him frequently in our archives. I've seen the correspondence. It's pretty fascinating when you consider what travel and commerce was like in that era. They traveled by train. They did a lot of work by telegraph and telephone.
Dan Thiel:And John Huntington and Arthur Bartley traveled The United States. They would stay in hotels. They would go to Denver. They would call upon a banker, and they would ask that banker, who's the duck hunter in your bank? That banker would tell Arthur Bartley who his duck hunters were, and then they would solicit those duck hunters.
Dan Thiel:They would have meetings, dinners, essentially some of the same work DU does today. I mean, DU works in all communities in The United States. We're always on the search for individuals who love waterfowling and conservation, And just like we do today, those two gentlemen single handedly began to recruit like minded sportsmen to support the cause. And in the correspondence, I can picture beautifully written, typewritten letters typed in San Francisco sent to Joseph Knapp in New York City, identifying we met with 17 people, we received $2,400 It was a very productive trip. So, they kept the old man very much informed.
Dan Thiel:As I understand it, he was offered, asked, and begged to be a leader. He knew he was getting too old to be a leader. And, in fact, the person that was, I believe, the first president of Ducks Unlimited, Doctor. Hartwell, actually died in office because he was in poor health. And during that early, early, you know, those most important formative years, the age and health of these individuals was a challenge.
Dan Thiel:And it's really quite incredible that they were able to recruit Arthur Bartley at such a young age. And we'll have to have a podcast on Arthur Bartley because Arthur Bartley served this organization Right. From 1937 to 1970.
Katie Burke:Oh, '70, okay.
Dan Thiel:Yeah. I mean, quite some time. You know, his entire career was devoted to Ducks Unlimited. Just for the record, I would also have Arthur Bartley on the Mount Rushmore.
Katie Burke:Okay. Good to know. Before we end, I need to know the other two.
Dan Thiel:Jim Kennedy and John Tompkins.
Katie Burke:Well, is there anything more to add before we end on Knapp and more game birds before we go into the beginnings of Ducks Unlimited.
Dan Thiel:So, the one thing I would offer Katie, in fact, you and I are the two that are doing it. Earlier I mentioned Jay Taylor. Jay Taylor has actually tracked down and donated one of Joseph Knapp's shotguns, and it's now on-site here at National Headquarters. We are working on It's really quite incredible. Here we are, 84 years old, and we really have nothing that tells the Joseph Knapp story at our National Headquarters.
Dan Thiel:And you and I are working to resolve that and give this individual the recognition that he so richly deserves, because had there not been a Joseph Knapp, we would not have a Ducks Unlimited.
Katie Burke:Correct. So, yes, anyone out there, if you're listening and you have artifacts, pictures of Joseph Knapp, please share because we are looking. We don't have a lot. We have a decoy and a weather vane and a gun, but that's about the extent of it. Please share your information.
Katie Burke:Well, thank you, Dan, for coming on the show.
Dan Thiel:Always great to be with you, Katie.
Katie Burke:Special thanks to our guest today, Dan Theil. Also, thanks to our producer, Clay Baird, and thanks to y'all for hanging out with us today and supporting wetlands and waterfowl conservation.
VO:Thank you for listening to the DU Podcast, proudly sponsored by Bird Dog Whiskey and Cocktails. Whether you're winding down with your best friend or celebrating with your favorite crew, Bird Dog brings award winning flavor to every moment. Enjoy responsibly. Be sure to rate, review, and subscribe to the show and visit ducks.org/dupodcast. Opinions expressed by guests do not necessarily reflect those of Ducks Unlimited.
VO:Until next time, stay tuned to the Ducks.