Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2017 i Wildfowl

MALHEUR NATIONAL WILDLIFE refuge in Oregon was once a thriving marsh that attracted ducks by the tens of thousands. It's now an ecological desert of open, murky water that supports little aquatic life. Except carp. Less than 10 percent of the refuge’s suitable wetland habitat remains and waterfowl production on the refuge is down even more. Over the last 70 years, managers have tried to remove the troublesome intruder. As many as 7.2 million pounds of common carp have devastated the refuge’s three lakes. “I’m a hard core duck hunter and I wouldn’t hunt here,” says refuge deputy project leader Jeff Mackay. “We have very few birds in the winter. On a scale of one to 10, I’d say the carp impact has been a 10. The entire ecology of…

IT TOOK A booming voice from the heavens, tablets etched in stone and several miracles to convince a bunch of early unwashed heathens that lying, stealing and murder were immoral. Most folks know these are vices that can land you in the fiery pits of Hades, but then sometimes common sense isn’t so common. We’re not immune to this in the retriever world. Combine excitement, frustration and distractions with a fur-covered ball of energy and, well, stuff happens. Our job is to mitigate accidents by heeding basic safety advice. THOU SHALT TRAVEL SAFE What’s worse than an injured dog on a hunt? One that doesn’t even make it in the first place. Make sure your retriever has a safe spot to hunker down when you’re getting from the house to…

ANYONE WITH AT least one season of waterfowling under his belt has witnessed a situation where a duck has hit the water, is plainly visible, and yet the dog struggles to find it. This can be frustrating, because while we stand up and look at the duck floating away, we can’t understand why our retrieving machine suddenly can’t complete the task at hand. The natural reaction is to get angry, but you shouldn’t. Consider what things look like from your dog’s perspective before you let emotion creep in. If you’re of average height, and standing up in a blind or duck boat, you’re probably at least 5.5 feet higher up than the dog, whose eyes are about four inches above the water’s surface. Add in a bit of chop from…

HERE’S WHAT I KNOW ABOUT field spreads for Canadas. Nothing works all the time. Not numbers. Not intricate designs. Not thinking about the situation until your hair follicles bleed. I’ve painstakingly set 105 full-bodies by myself in the dark, only to have the birds pass by as if I weren’t even there. Conversely, I’ve hurriedly stuck six silhouettes in the dirt and hunkered in a nearby fencerow, shot my four-bird limit of feet-down Westerns out of the first two groups to make an appearance, gathered up my gear, and went home. How do you guarantee a goose hunt is going to be a skunk fest, with nary a shot fired? Just tell your cronies: “HEY! Wanna hunt tomorrow? I got us a sure thing.” We’ve all been there. But goose…

 WINCHESTER’S BLIND SIDE hit the market several years ago. Unique to this load are its hexagonal-shaped pellets, that according to Winchester, stack tightly in the shell providing more pellets per charge weight than traditional round shot. Skeptical, I actually cut open a traditional round shot steel BB 3" 1⅛-ounce payload and counted 80 pellets. I then dissected a Blind Side shell of the same size and counted the hex shot, which came to 81. It is interesting to note that BB-size Blind Side resembles little six-sided towers that have an all-business appearance. "A 60% pattern at 40 yards is a killer both in terms of pellets on target and allowing for aiming errors." Winchester’s standard Blind Side wad is a black one-piece wad with spear-pointed brakes along the sides of…

I hitchhiked upriver 13 miles in a soft, steady drizzle to retrieve the truck while Alan stayed with the guns and canoe. AND THEN WE HAVE THE WOOD duck… The biological taxonomy of the entire Duck Nation is deep and complex, and precisely how many variations on the theme actually exist is difficult to pin down. Canvasbacks, wigeons, buffleheadsblue-winged, green-winged, and cinnamon teal—eiders, mandarins, and Argentine bluebills—the list runs the gamut from the Abacot ranger to the Welsh Harlequin and New Zealand’s paradise shell duck. But then, as I said, there is the wood duck. There are multiple ways and multiple seasons in which we hunt ducks: from blinds in flooded autumn timber, sculling across wind-hewn salt flats, drifting a properly camouflaged boat or canoe down a winter creek or…

“RIGHT ABOVE US, RIGHT ABOVE us!” Rob Bellini interrupted our otherwise quiet morning over a Long Island, New York, farm pond as a group of black ducks circled. The iconic Atlantic Flyway birds gave us the once-over and dumped into a nearby corn field where we had just spent an hour setting a trailer full (and then some) of Avian-X full-body honker decoys. “Did they just friggin’ land in the field?” grimaced Bellini in an unmistakable New York dialect kids from small Midwest towns only hear of through movies like “Goodfellas,” or skits on “Saturday Night Live.” The crew of working-class guides at Elite Long Island Outfitters (elitelongislandoutfitter.comelitelongislandoutfitter.com) reminded me of tough-as-nails south suburban Chicago uncles—loud, crass ballbreakers, who would give you the shirt off their back… the kind of…

YOU MAY HAVE heard the news about the grand opening of an “Adult Preschool Facility” in Brooklyn last year. Yes, you read that right: adult preschool...finger painting, nap time, story books—the works. The school’s website claims to help adults “tap into that fiery 4-year-old inside of us," with a picture showing a bunch of New York City professionals sitting in a circle on colored carpet, getting ready to mess around with playdough and glitter. What's it cost to act like an adolescent again? Just $999. I was dumbfounded when I finished reading the article. Suddenly, everything about my waterfowling obsession made sense. I wasn’t wasting time and money by trudging off to the marsh with my shotgun—I was connecting with my inner child. Waterfowling is the ideal substitute for all…

In response to the “Uncommon Eider” from the September 2016 issue: I grew up on an island near Stonington, Maine, and graduated from Stonington High School, class of 1970. My father was a lobster fisherman and being on the water every day, he knew where the ducks were, so he was kind of doing the scouting for us. In my teens, we would go out, set a string of decoys, shoot our seven birds and be back in time for school. We shot almost all eider. My grandfather and father told the same stories from when they were young, shooting “coots” (scoter) and eiders were rarely seen. Maybe it’s just the natural cycle of nature. Send letters to associate editor Joe Genzel at joseph.genzel@outdoorsg. com…

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PENNSYLVANIAN TONY MARICH had an unusually productive spring snow goose conservation season in 2015, thanks in large part to some late weather patterns. “East Coast heavy snow cover stayed late into the spring causing massive amounts of snow geese to shift west to get around it and funnel into Pennsylvania,” he said. The heavy snow and a cold spring delayed the arrival of greater snow geese to one of their key spring stopovers at Middle Creek Wildlife Area, which lies about midway between Harrisburg and Philadelphia. “It all started March 10, with 10,000 snows,” recalled Marich. By March 17, there were an estimated 110,000 snow geese at Middle Creek, which typically sees in the neighborhood of 60,000-70,000 birds. “And it was all but over by March 28,” he added. In…

I run red tractor grease in my Thailand Long Tail and it was so cold the grease froze to the drive shaft. ON HIS FINAL hunt during the last week of Utah’s duck season in March 2017, Jeff Clines arrived at one of his favorite boat ramps to find the boats of five other hunting parties still sitting on their trailers. The hunters were milling about, trying to figure out how they were going to launch their boats. The temperature was negative 22 degrees, freezing the water at the end of the ramp solid. “Everyone was looking at the ramp but not launching their boats because the ice was four inches thick,” Clines said. “We launched my boat by backing the trailer out until it broke through the ice and…

GUIDED HUNTS ARE FUN ONCE IN a while. It feels good to have someone else do much of the work and worrying. Show up, sit back and enjoy. Let an expert do the scouting, set the decoys and negotiate the muck. But if I had my druthers, I’d prefer a do-it-yourself hunt. DIY hunts have a certain amount of risk/reward that many die-hard waterfowlers thrive on. Part of the allure of DIY excursions is that you’re not locked into doing one thing. There are times if you’re on a guided hunt and the birds aren’t down or stuck with a week straight of bluebird weather, you’re cooked. That’s why planning a trip that incorporates alternatives, like different spots, or even fishing or upland hunting are the most fun. Few places…