Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2016 - January 2017 i Wildfowl

MY SWEET LITTLE daughters have been happily blowing duck calls since they could breath, tottering around and quacking like baby mallards. It never gets old with them. Probably because nobody has told him they stink at it, yet. Yet. Just get them around other duck hunters, and experts (all hunters) will tell my girls how they know way more one-year-olds who could call better at that age. All you duck calling snobs, hear this: your negative vitriole toward us average callers sends the same message as the guy with the extra eight inches of lift on his pickup. You are clinging to your lanyard, compensating for something. Cause if ducks wanna be called to, it ain’t that hard. And if they don’t, they don’t. Case in point. My buddy Mike…

AN OLD-TIMER once told me the cheapest dogs aren’t free—they’re the ones that get hit by a truck before they step foot in your house. I wasn’t sure what he meant at the time, but after many years with a dog by my side, I’ve come to understand he was spot on, albeit blunt. Sure, you could go cheap and get a backyard crossbreed for a few hundred bucks, or go all out and get a started pedigree-perfect retriever that will set you back $10,000. Food and training notwithstanding, however, the real costs of owning a hunting dog pile up in the form of vet bills. Trust me: Obamacare doesn’t have squat on dog care. People focus on the intial cost of a pup and possible training and accessories. You…

DIVER AND HUNTING ARE MY two favorite words in the English dictionary. When I hear or read these words together, I regress into a little boy, feather-brained and awestruck with excitement on his first duck hunt. There is no greater exhilaration than drawing a flock of divers into the decoy spread frequently and repetitively. An extraordinary amount of work goes into pulling this off, despite what a few people say. The two most ignorant vilifications about diving ducks are that they are stupid and taste atrocious. It’s not a coincidence the oldest decoys known to man are 2,000-year-old diver blocks, found in Lovelock Cave, Nevada. Just like the Native Americans who made those decoys, I too find diving ducks a worthy adversary and second to none on the palate, reasons…

Recently I re-read an issue and fell again onto M.D. Johnson’s old gun praise of the Model 24 Winchester side-by-side. For years I watched my father shoot grouse and waterfowl with his 24, 12-gauge. Losing his leg to a train accident early in my teens crimped our outdoor style. We made a few adjustments and got along. But I never asked to use his gun while he was alive. Not sure why. Two weekends ago, I was in the desert north of St. Anthony, Idaho, with my brother, three of his kids and my son. We tried to put together the sage chicken hunt I cut my teeth on. We saw plenty of birds and everyone got a shot in the windy conditions. A highlight for me was to carry…

FLYWAY VETERAN 1 HUNTER: Tom Kwoka, Sacramento, CA BAND #: 1096-22711 SPECIES: Gadwall (H) BANDED: 08/10/2005 LOCATION: Summer Lake, OR RECOVERED: 12/31/2014 LOCATION: Gridley, CA 2 HUNTER: Tom Kwoka, Sacramento, CA BAND #: 1146-40504 SPECIES: Gadwall (H) BANDED: 07/09/2010 LOCATION: W. Butte, CA RECOVERED: 01/21/2015 LOCATION: Willows, CA 3 HUNTER: Tom Kwoka, Sacramento, CA BAND #: 1105-63969 SPECIES: Wood Duck (D) BANDED: 04/06/2012 LOCATION: 1.5 NNW Fallon, NV RECOVERED: 12/10/2014 LOCATION: Butte, CA 4 HUNTER: Mac Harris, Winnetka, IL BAND #: 1176-26596 SPECIES: Lesser Scaup (D) BANDED: 04/02/2014 LOCATION: Montrose, IA RECOVERED: 11/18/2015 LOCATION: 1 mi SW of Mitchell’s Bay, Wallaceburg, ON 5 HUNTER: Scott James, Fort Smith, AR BAND #: 2087-45754 SPECIES: Mallard (D) BANDED: 08/07/2013 LOCATION: Durham, CA RECOVERED: 01/23/2016 LOCATION: 25 mi NW of Spiro, OK 6…

Today, Atlantic City is a surreal experience as you shoot ducks back-dropped by the columns of lights bathing the casino hotels. HOPEFULLY THE PHOTOGRAPHER who captured this hunt made sure the Winchester 97 or Model 12 Raymond Whitcomb is holding was unloaded before snapping this pic. This image was likely taken in the 1930s near Atlantic City, New Jersey, where friend Walter Edge figured in local and national politics. He was portrayed in the HBO series "Boardwalk Empire;" elected twice as governor of New Jersey, he became a U.S. senator—who voted to repeal Prohibition—and Ambassador to France. His election as governor in 1917 was due to the efforts of two strong-arm political bosses. Whitcomb was a wealthy owner of Raymond & Whitcomb, an early travel agency that offered excursions to…

WITH EACH STEP, MY FEET GOT heavier as the wad of mud gripping the boot bottoms grew to bowling ball dimensions. Though it was well before sunrise, and still black as night, I could tell my friends were struggling with the same problem. Their headlamps slowed and wobbled as they moved through the darkness. I could only assume they were also kicking at their boots to fling off what mud they could before trudging on to set another arm load of snow goose decoys in the picked-over bean field. We humans weren’t the only things struggling with the mud. The Yamaha Viking was having a tough time of it too. As it made repeated trips to the trucks for more bags of snow-white sock decoys and all the other accoutrements…

THERE ARE BOUNDLESS great things to say about the Remington 1100 shotgun. It was the catalyst of auto-loader popularity, a gun way ahead of its time, and so many of us share grand memories of this groundbreaking semi-auto. Here are mine. It seems like yesterday I was just 12 years old hunting pheasants, woodcock, grouse and waterfowl in northeastern Pennsylvania with my dad and his prize possession; a 12-gauge 1100. The firearm was always clean, well-cared for and emanated its own persona. That may have been due to the elegant engravings, the pressed checkering, or maybe it was that lustrous finish on the stock. Besides its looks, the vivid smell of the Hoppe’s No. 9 cleaner and the gun oil that lightly coated it every time it was taken out…

WHAT DOES IT take to make a new hunter? For years, state wildlife agencies and conservation groups assumed day-long workshops and multiple-day events would coax new hunters into the field and help stem the decline in hunting participation. As it turned out, that wasn’t necessarily the case. “Twenty years ago, we just assumed various programs helped hunter recruitment without any actual follow-up research. We are now taking a closer look at what works and what doesn’t,” says Clemson University assistant professor Dr. Lincoln Larson. What researchers have learned is sticking a duck call in a kid’s hand at a one-day immersion event probably won’t turn that child into a hunter, because he/she likely already is. As it turns out, the vast majority of children who participate in a typical recruitment…

TAKING A GREENHEAD in the southern Mississippi Flyway is hardly unusual. After all, each fall the greatest concentration of migratory mallards in North America funnels through the Mississippi Alluvial Valley, which extends roughly from southern Illinois to the Mississippi Delta. Even a banded mallard it not terribly unusual as researchers continually study our most populous duck. But Tennessee waterfowler Todd Elzie managed to find a rather interesting specimen last year. Mild temperatures that had plagued eastern waterfowlers all fall persisted right into December and though a big storm had recently moved across the country, Christmas Eve was a bluebird day in west Tennessee. “My son Brandon and I were hunting together on a local river as we do quite regularly,” Elzie began, “hunting from a blind where he had taken…

ZACH CUNNINGHAM OF Lincoln, Nebraska, is an environmental biologist and the president of a small duck club called the Submerged Land Company, founded in 1911 in the heart of Nebraska’s Rainwater Basin. Cunningham hunts out of a small three-person steel pit someone built and buried in a marsh levee years before he joined the club. Geese are his game, but so are occasional limits of puddle ducks, including teal, pintail, gadwall, mallards and others. “Each year, before the start of the season, I mow the levee to make it look like a loafing place for geese,” he said. “The blind is then grassed-in with hay and covered with four- or five-dozen full-body goose decoys and a half-dozen mallards.” A few years ago, Cunningham needed to hide a guest’s dog, and…

THE FAIR-WEATHER, WEEKEND warriors have long since packed it in. The dog now shivers from the freezing air, not just excitement. But you know the rewards can be tremendous in the late, great season. East to west across the country anywhere north-latitude of Amarillo, the Deep Freeze is gripping waterfowl-land as the heavy cold stretches its tentacles in all directions. Road trips are dangerous, the highways now icy serpents in the headlights. Snowstorms lurk each night along with the threat of freeze-up. Breaking through that crusty snow to dig your layout into shore along the only open water around, a moving river, or warm spring, you wonder if it’s too much for the dog this time. Shivering in your layout, you soon ponder whether those electric warm jackets really work,…