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On a frigid May morning just west of Minneapolis, three brothers in their 60s—Bob, Jim, and Joe Hautman—peer through a chain-link fence at the ranch-style house on the other side. Tarps hide much of its rear face. The grass is overgrown. A lawnmower and a motorboat sit exposed to the elements. “I can’t believe how decrepit that is,” says Jim, a touch of melancholy in his voice. It’s their childhood home.

Back then, the forest where the brothers stand, now part of a 160-acre nature center, was just “the woods,” a defunct golf course reclaimed by nature and the setting of much Hautman lore. Here hung the rope swing that came apart beneath Bob, launching him on a surprisingly graceful flight. Over there is where he and Jim returned sopping wet from an ill-fated canoe voyage on Westwood Lake. And this former fairway is where the young Hautmans hunkered like prairie dogs in holes they’d dug—a spot, they are mystified to recall, they named Gopher Bazaar.

All that time in nature proved formative. For more than three decades the Hautmans have dominated the , a juried competition sponsored by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) featuring paintings of waterfowl in their natural habitat. Each year’s is printed on $25 stamps that duck hunters must, by law, purchase. Stamp collectors covet them, and birders and others buy them to gain entry to national wildlife refuges or simply to support conservation; about 98 cents from every dollar spent on stamps goes to habitat projects. Duck stamp purchases have raised more than $1.2 billion since 1934, enabling the FWS to conserve more than 6 million acres in the refuge system. Targeting wetlands where waterfowl breed, the program has played a significant role in helping populations rebound from habitat destruction and overhunting, says Steve Adair, chief scientist at Ducks Unlimited: “It’s one of the most efficient sources of federal funding out there.”

For painters, the contest is serious business; they might spend months meticulously fine-tuning each feather and cattail, striving for perfection in both artistic composition and anatomical detail. Winners receive no direct financial prize, but they earn name recognition and the right to sell prints of their design, which together can bring life-changing wealth.

If you aren’t a wildlife art buff and you’ve heard of the Hautmans, it’s likely because of another set of artistic brothers who grew up down the street: Joel and Ethan Coen. The filmmaking duo name-dropped their neighbors in a side plot of the movie Fargo: The husband of police chief Marge Gunderson is intimidated to learn that the Hautmans have also submitted to a contest he entered. “Oh, hon,” Marge reassures him. “You’re better than them.”

He isn’t. Maybe no one is. With six top finishes each as of this writing, Jim and Joe are the winningest artists in the contest’s history. Bob has won three times, a feat that in any other family would astound; only one non-Hautman has surpassed him. The trio have also racked up a combined 50 wins in state competitions. “They have the genes; they have the background; they have the eye that catches everybody else’s imagination,” says Suzanne Fellows, who retired in 2024 as FWS duck stamp program manager. “Not taking away from anyone else, but their style—there’s just something about it.”

Much has changed since the Hautmans began competing. A once ravenous public appetite for wildlife art has waned, as has participation in duck hunting. Through it all, though, the brothers have come out on top with amazing regularity. One can’t help but wonder: Why are these guys so good?

When Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the 1934 Migratory Bird Hunting and Conservation Stamp Act into law, waterfowl numbers were depressed from an era of unchecked slaughter and wetland draining. The Dust Bowl made matters worse, drying up the prairie pothole breeding habitat known as America’s duck factory. To raise money for conservation, the law required waterfowl hunters ages 16 and older to purchase a duck stamp. The FWS commissioned works from established painters for the first stamps, but in 1949 it invited others to compete. Now any American 18 or older can enter the contest, held each September to determine the following year’s stamp. Since 1993 a separate contest has welcomed younger artists to compete for the .

For many hunters, what began as a required purchase became a passion for collecting. That was the case for Tuck Hautman, who carved his own decoys and took his boys along on hunts. His duck stamp collection dating back to 1934, which Joe keeps in his studio, fueled Tuck’s sons’ love of wildlife art. Tuck also painted, but he was too busy working as an attorney and entrepreneur to dedicate himself to art. The real artist in the family was his wife, Elaine.

Of all the painters the Hautmans cite as influences—Rembrandt, Sargent, and the bird-focused New Zealand artist Raymond Harris-Ching among them—none looms as large as their mother. Elaine Hautman somehow managed to paint prolifically while also working as a commercial artist and raising five boys and two girls. She never gave her children formal lessons, but the creative atmosphere she fostered and the example of her own artistic life made a profound impact. Bob, Jim, and Joe each showcase her canvases in their homes, including portraits, still lifes, and cave-style paintings inspired by a trip to Lascaux in France. In the years before she died at age 94 in 2017, Jim would visit her each Wednesday and they’d paint together.

With her guidance and encouragement, the brothers experimented with art from the get-go. Things got serious when, a few years after Jim finished high school, he and Bob bought a house. They converted the two biggest bedrooms to studios and painted obsessively. Within a few years they were netting enough from art fairs and galleries to quit their roofing and house-painting jobs. In 1987 Bob’s painting of on a quiet lake won Minnesota’s state duck stamp competition, making him the first Hautman to notch a victory. Two years later, Jim won the federal contest with in flight. The baby of the family, he was just 25 and the youngest person to have won the contest at that point. Accordingly, he partied all night and hardly slept before boarding a plane to meet President George H. W. Bush at the White House, arriving with what he recalls as “a crankin’ hangover.”

Meanwhile, Joe, the oldest of the three, had built a life as a theoretical physicist at the University of Pennsylvania. He’d always loved science and figured that having a solid job would give him the freedom to paint whatever he pleased in his downtime. “Which didn’t really work out,” he says. “I’m not a multitasker.”  His brothers urged him to push himself artistically by entering the federal contest. He took them up on it in 1988 and entered again the following year. Then, in 1991, he submitted flying low over choppy Arctic seas. It was only his fifth wildlife painting. It took the prize.

Conspiracy theories swirled: You’re telling me this “Joe” Hautman guy just happens to materialize when Jim is ineligible? (Federal rules bar artists from entering for three years following a win.) Contest officials went so far as to privately ask a recent winner if he thought Jim could have painted the eider. No, he concluded; the styles were distinct. Joe eventually left academia to paint full-time.

When Bob won his first federal contest in 1997 with , the Hautmans cemented their status as what headline writers can’t help but call a duck dynasty. Today their peers admire the Hautmans for both their artistic skills and their humility. “They’re just great people,” says Scot Storm, a fellow Minnesota native who has won the federal contest twice. When Storm was unhappy with his painting mere days before the 2018 contest deadline, Bob encouraged him to start a new one. Storm laughed; duck stamp artists often spend months planning and hundreds of hours painting their submissions. Then he decided to go for it. The result of his feverish work was that came out on top. “That was due to Bob,” he says.

Kira Sabin, a young artist who began entering the federal contest in 2019, was “a bit starstruck” when they met Bob and Joe at the 2023 competition. Viewing a room full of submissions, the Hautmans’ mastery becomes readily apparent, notes Sabin. “They are extremely talented when depicting dramatic lighting in a natural way,” Sabin says. “They know how to do realism in a way other people don’t.”

That talent keeps companies clamoring to print Hautman scenes on clocks, coasters, mugs, puzzles, and other products, says Marty Segelbaum, their longtime licensing agent. “The Hautmans are probably the best I’ve ever seen—the most realistic to detail,” he says. “It’s just astonishing the kind of reaction they get.” As for how they achieve that degree of realism, no one—including the brothers themselves—seems able to say. “If you figure that one out,” Storm says, “let me know.”

The hen’s neck is too skinny. “I get kind of a snaky look here,” says Joe, pointing at the female in a pair of Canvasbacks on a rippled pond. Bob brought this unfinished painting over to Jim’s home studio, where the brothers are holding one of their regular critique sessions. (It’s not for the contest, Bob says: “I just wanted to paint some ducks.”) Jim points at the water’s surface. “I don’t like this reflection,” he says.

On this rainy morning the brothers each offer blunt feedback on one another’s works in progress. Jim’s wolf scene needs more vegetation. The goldenrod skeletons are too scrawny in Joe’s painting of deer in winter. Far from recoiling from candid criticism, the Hautmans welcome it from anyone; Joe recently asked his electrician what he thought of a painting. But honest assessments from one another are their secret weapon, an edge unavailable to their competitors. Well, usually. On rare occasions when Bob thinks his brothers have missed the mark entirely, he’s been known to simply say, “Painting is hard,” and leave the room. 

As precisely as they can diagnose what’s not working in a painting, the Hautmans have a hard time explaining what they do so well. “We never really learned technique,” says Jim. “We just started pushing paint around until it looks like you want it to look.” Any special talent lies not in their brushstrokes or mastery of color theory, they say, but in their knowledge of the outdoors, their feel for composition, and their insistence on nailing the details. “I just want to paint what’s there,” says Joe in his soft but direct way. “The challenge is to maintain your perspective so you can still see it—see that it looks right or doesn’t look right. That’s the hardest part.” 

The Hautmans use all sorts of tricks to help them see their work anew. They’ll set a painting aside for months and come back to it with fresh eyes. They’ll turn it upside down on the easel or look at it in a mirror. But when they need a change of perspective, nothing does the job like getting roasted by their brothers.

They not only tolerate one another’s barbs but seem never to tire of one another’s company. They absorb detail from ducks they shoot while hunting together and from reference photos taken on trips together. When one of them paints a duck on a lake, the others often know exactly which duck and which lake.

That isn’t to say they’ve mind-melded into a single artistic entity. Each has his own style, says their brother Pete, the oldest Hautman sibling and the only one to attend art school. (He gave up painting to become .) “Bob is very loose,” Pete says. “He paints from the gut.” Jim is the most disciplined and consistent; he knows what the judges are looking for. Joe, on the other hand, is a restless experimenter: “Joe’s more like Leonardo da Vinci.” 

One thing they do have in common is the sense of calm they exude. Maybe it’s in their genes, or maybe it’s that their extraordinary achievements have left them with little to prove. They have beautiful homes in the Minneapolis suburbs, vacation properties in wilder country (Joe’s was previously owned by former Vice President Walter Mondale), financial security, and extraordinary freedom to hunt, fish, golf, and forage as they please. They will be just fine if they never win another duck stamp contest. 

Yet they keep painting. And as a certain artist once said, painting is hard—especially when you’re trying to meet the duck stamp contest’s exacting standards. (One reason the Hautmans mainly use acrylic paint: They like to work right up to the competition’s postmark deadline, and oil takes too long to dry.) Joe is generally imperturbable unless he’s on the golf course, but in their studios, frustration sometimes erupts through his brothers’ placid demeanors. Jim has yet to follow through on his occasional urge to use his shotgun on a work in progress, but he has thrown a glass of red wine at one. Even preternaturally mellow Bob says he’s tossed a painting or two: “It’s not all Bob Ross all day.”  

The world in which the Hautmans began their painting careers is no more. Back then, the wildlife-art market was sizzling. Federal contest winners could sell thousands of prints to hungry collectors at hundreds of dollars apiece. “In the ’70s and ’80s you could have painted a two-headed duck and it would have sold,” says Russell Fink, a retired gallerist and publisher of a massive duck stamp compendium.  

As interest in wildlife paintings grew, more states launched their own contests, yielding a surge of new collectibles. Publishing houses cranked out larger and larger numbers of prints, eroding their value. The market became glutted, and by the turn of the century it had collapsed. The Hautmans had established themselves by then, but it was difficult for other painters to make a living. With diminishing financial rewards, the contest drew fewer submissions. Nearly 2,100 people entered the 1981 competition; today the average is closer to 200. 

Just as there are fewer duck stamp painters, there are also fewer buyers. Federal sales have declined from around 2.4 million stamps per year in the early 1970s to roughly 1.5 million in recent years. That tracks with the dwindling of the only group required to buy them: Some 2 million waterfowlers went afield in 1955, but by 2020 that number had fallen by half. To ensure that the program can continue to put significant amounts of habitat on the landscape, it’s crucial to build broader interest in the duck stamp and encourage nonhunters to buy one, Adair and other experts say. 

Fellows says that holding on to the duck stamp’s fading material culture is critical to restoring its popularity. Some states no longer issue physical versions of their own stamps, and the federal government now allows hunters to use an electronic certificate as their hunting permit. They still eventually receive a stamp in the mail, but that means less time to experience the artwork firsthand—time that Fellows says deepens people’s emotional connection to the duck stamp’s history and conservation impact. “A lot of people don’t know they’re missing that,” she says. “So my fear for the program is that we go all digital.”

The Hautman brothers don’t have children to carry on their legacy, but a younger generation has taken an interest in helping the contest stay relevant. When Sabin was preparing their duck stamp submission in 2021, they decided to explain how the contest works on TikTok. The post went viral. Nearly 3 million people watched , and Sabin and their twin sibling, Kess Fennell, who also competes, made the news, bringing fresh attention to the duck stamp. Sabin says they hope more young people, and women in particular, will enter the contest: “If we want this program to continue, it has to live up to the popularity it once did.” 

Among those who saw the video was Bob Hautman, who sent Sabin an email to thank them for getting the word out and helping to protect habitat. The contest’s conservation impact is a big reason why the brothers continue to compete. Jim recently acquired property that he is restoring to native grassland, and Bob says these days he probably spends more time working on habitat—he’s rebuilt native prairie on about half of his 115-acre farm—than he does painting. In truth, though, their main motivation for continuing to enter is that they remain as competitive as they were in boyhood, when anything could become a contest: Who can drink the most juice? Who can write the smallest? They like to see one another succeed, but not as much as they like to win. 

Jim and Bob both entered the 2025 contest, judged September 18 and 19 in Maryland (after ̽����ѡ went to press), but Joe was ineligible. Sitting out has given him more time to think, and lately he keeps returning to questions about time itself. For a while he didn’t even paint—just sat in his studio, trying to work out why the past feels different than the future does, even though in theory they are symmetrical. He’s still ironing out kinks in the conclusion he reached, and anyway, it’s impenetrable to a nonphysicist. But it has to do with the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which holds that myriad futures and pasts extend forward and backward from any given moment. Given countless universes, anything that can happen happens.

On this chilly May morning, the house where the brothers grew up is like a window into a different version of events. Its chaotic lawn full of rusting machines evokes alternate universes where the Hautmans didn’t grow up with such security and freedom, where they didn’t have parents who cared deeply about art—where they didn’t have one another. But then, reassuringly, there are signs of the childhood they remember: the big basswood that was just a sapling when Tuck planted it, the black paint that still lingers where Joe created a “hole” in the fence. The only past they know is the one that brought them here. Of all the innumerable worlds, who could possibly ask for more?

This story originally ran in the Fall 2025 issue as “Lucky Ducks.” To receive our print magazine, become a member by .