Cutter and I were back on the Missouri for the weekend. The weather forecast is right and the ducks are starting to cooperate. It's nice to get some fresh birds on the river. They ain't stupid but they haven't been pressured like the local ducks have been for the past few weeks. Probably a good idea to start packing extra shells...
It's been a little while since I've had really good shooting on ducks. The weather is the main culprit. When it warms up, they just seem to disappear The birds that are around don't come out until well after shooting hours and then they leave the river before it gets light. With weather, that all changes. Cold and snow not only brings more ducks but it gets them moving all day. Although it's not supposed to get crazy cold, it should get cold enough and the few inches of snow really helps. It's what I've been waiting for and I'll be honest, I was pretty psyched for this weekend.
I got up to Wolf Creek yesterday afternoon and did a quick evening hunt with John LaRue and the boys. It had snowed earlier but by the time we got out, the clouds had left, the sun was out and there wasn't a breath of wind. Those aren't great conditions to start the weekend off but that was going to change over night. We did shoot a few quackers and saw a good number of mallards coming in late so I knew there was going to be action for the morning.
I got up a little earlier than I normally would and hit the road. It's a pretty quick drive to the channel I set up in but I wanted to get to my spot before anybody else and early enough to let things settle down a bit before light. It was a good half hour before legal shooting hours but I was ok with that. Sitting in the dark after setting the decoys up with Cutter brought back a lot of memories.
As a teenager and even pre-teen, I spent a lot of mornings in the duck blind on Mulberg Lake in Northern Minnesota. It was probably my all time favorite place to be--waiting in the dark, drinking coffee, watching the sun come up. We would quietly whisper and listen for the ducks as they set into the decoys. It would still be too dark to see them but you could definitely hear them. They sounded like jets flying overhead and sometimes they would be so close you'd feel like you had to duck to get out of their way.
None of us had our drivers licenses so we would actually walk about a mile in the dark through the woods just to get to our little honey hole. My dad would drive the canoe and decoys down to the lake at the beginning of the season so we would already have that stuff stashed in the brush along the shore but we would walk that entire way with guns and shells and lunch and whatever else we needed for the day. We loved being out there and it was worth the hike just to hear those ducks in the dark and anticipate the action as we waited.
This morning, waiting in the dark brought me right back to Mulberg Lake. Hearing the ducks setting, feeling the cold on my nose, sipping coffee--I could almost smell the combination of mildew and gunpowder that lingered on the heavy tan canvas shooting jackets we would wear back then. Man, there's no place I would rather be in late December.
As the dark gradually gave way to the morning, I started picking out silhouettes on the water that weren't my decoys. They were swimming upstream. I was picking out ducks as they flew by; occasionally dropping into my spread. Still too dark to identify what were "good" ducks and which one's were divers, I listened to the whistling as they flew by. A mallard's whistle is very much different than a golden eye and I was trying to get an idea of how many mallards were in the area and how long it was going to take for me to shoot my limit of them. This is going to be awesome...
With about 15 minutes left before legal shooting, 2 or 3 ducks on the water turned into 30 or 40 and as it got light enough to really get a good idea of what I was looking at I could tell they were all divers. Diver ducks aren't worth the cost of the shotgun shell to shoot. Cutter doesn't even like to put them in his mouth to retrieve them. Eat one and you'll never shoot another. Trust me.
It was all good though. I knew there were good ducks in the area and I knew that eventually, they would appear. It was a waiting game now and the conditions were right. I had clouds. I had cold and I had wind and there were plenty of people on the river pushing the birds around and with the wind, they don't want to fly high or very far. It's still going to be good.
It was literally about an hour into it before I saw my first green heads and they didn't want anything to do with me. My excitement turned to frustration as I listened to shots being fired upstream and down but nothing was coming my way except for those damn divers that were still sitting on the water right in front of me. They would drift down stream until they got right in front of me and then they would swim to the other side of the channel and back up stream. They kept cycling like that--taunting me--over and over and when they would get close I thought about how easy it would be to take about a dozen of them out with one shot. I was getting a little itchy on the trigger...still not worth wasting a shell.
All of the sudden, a couple mallards flew over me. I was taken by surprise but able to get a shot off but not a good one and I missed. A few minutes later, two green heads cupped up coming in low just above the willows. It was like they were on a string and they were hell bent on sitting down in the landing area I had created within my decoy groups. I stood up and pulled and the first one dropped. I pulled again and down went the second.
With a wind approaching 25mph, ducks just hang there when they've committed to landing. They will always land into the wind and because they are being jostled around so much, they're focus is less on the decoys or their surroundings and more on just making the landing. They want to land quickly and because they're fighting the wind, they're moving in slow motion. A slow moving target is definitely easier to hit than ducks that are just doing fly byes. And if you do miss your first shot, it takes that much longer for them to recover and head out giving multiple opportunities.
The actions wasn't as fast and furious as I had thought it would be. I would say it was steady and after shooting those first two, another single came in and then another and my shooting percentage was looking pretty good. I had 5 birds by about 11am and had blown a few other scoring chances by either not being ready or having to go out and readjust decoys that were getting blown down stream.
I was stuck on 5 for a while until a flock of gadwalls set into the decoys and I dropped one. A short while later I shot my seventh to end the day. I had six green heads and the one gadwall. It took a while and I definitely had to be patient but a good day. Can't wait for tomorrow.
Keep 'em where they live...
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