AH!  Another fine day for hunting.  Clear, cold and not a breeze in sight.  It does not sound like a very good day for duck hunting does it?  Well, that is what we are going to do.

Some days you just have to accept the fact that the weather doesn’t matter.  The birds (animals) still do what they do best and that is “whatever they want, whenever they want to do it”.  We will be there to intercept them in their endeavors.

Magpie and I have never hunted ducks together and so today will be the first.

Wish us luck!  I’ll report later on how the day went.

Bears Butt

Nov. 2011

The hunt began when Magpie arrived at my home.  As always he was just a wee bit early and so “right on time”!  I expected his arrival early and was standing at my already warmed up vehicle!  The dog was put up and I was ready and anxious to get going!

At the club we were faced with the coldest morning so far this fall and there was a 1/8 inch coating of ice on the water.  It made for a slower than usual walk to the blind, but still not too bad.

Magpie offered to bail the box out, but I had already decided to let him set the decoys out, afterall, he used to guide duck hunters in his past and I wanted to learn a thing or two about his uncanny ability to attract ducks via decoys.

The box bailing was done in short order as it had only filled half way from my hunt the day before.  Life was good!  And once that was done, I went to preparing the goose decoys for deployment.  Magpie set the goose decoys and we settled into the blind to wait for ducks, geese or other shootables to arrive.

It took a full hour or so for the first of the ducks to show and of course they would not decoy within range.  They would fly just on the edge of the guns capability and sometimes they would even land out on that edge.  A bit frustrating, but still fun.

When the sun had had a bit of time to melt off the ice, we decided to move the decoys a bit closer to the blind and also moved a couple of goose decoys to cover our movement in the blind.  The duck flight pattern today was about 100 yards to our right, which was different than the day before.

With the decoys placed closer to our blind the ducks were mostly now flying in the kill zone!  They began to hit the water after we shot and life was getting more interesting.  We tried a call or two, but the only one that seemed to actually draw in a duck was a vulgar attempt at speaking loudly through the duck call.  I had told Magpie a story about doing this some years back and it seemed to work then.  So, I spoke through the call and what to our amazement did arrive was a couple of teal that came out of nowhere and only one of which continued to fly on!  Calling was not to be done much the rest of the time.

With the price of shells being what they are today, we had shot quite a number of times at the fast little teal and had several in the bag when we decided to save our shells for bigger ducks.  We waited and waited for bigger ducks.  Meanwhile teal were sitting in our decoys by the tens!  I decided a bologna sandwich was in order and as I proceeded to explain to Magpie how the day before had me doing “this” when suddenly two pintails were flaring in my face.  He said, “like this?” as he raised up and politely downed a drake pintail!!!!  Good shot Magpie!

Well, there you have the big duck story of the hunt.  After an hour of not shooting because nothing but teal seemed to be flying I told Magpie I could not take any more of these little buggers flying around and that I was going to start shooting them!  We both started shooting at them and hoped for bigger ducks before we either shot all our shells or had our limit, which ever came first!

We ended with our limits and I had shot 22 shells.  How many Magpie shot is a mystery to me, but I’d guess somewhere around 30.  He took some long shots at big ducks because he was shooting 3 1/2 inch 12 gauge shells and could reach out there and get them, while my 20 gauge just wasn’t enough.

The end result was two limits of birds, a wonderful fall day in the swamp and a great memorable day for us both.

Bears Butt

Nov. 2011