Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2018 i Wildfowl

IT’S CALLED THE SHOT Show lean-in. At the crowded annual shooting trade show in Vegas, anyone you speak to who has a weathered face is likely to cup their hand behind their ear, lean in closer and say, “what was that again?” All shooters suffer some hearing loss, and places that have a lot of background noise, like SHOT, make it really tough to follow conversations. Sitting here, writing this, my ears are ringing, and they shouldn’t be. Yours probably are, too. Getting “rung” is the worst part of waterfowling. Layouts and pits create perfect opportunities to have a shotgun muzzle blast go off way too close to your head. Swinging on birds lends itself to unleashing a thunderclap next to your buddy’s ear, however unintentionally. You tend to remember…

MANAGING PRIVATE GROUND for waterfowl has quickly become popular, but whitetail deer hunters have a two-decade head start on us. Twenty years ago, when whitetail food plots were a novel concept, the savvy hunter who tilled a few acres and planted corn or oats had a major advantage over his competitors. Now that every deer hunter is also a trophy manager you’ve got the whitetail equivalent of a farmer’s market on adjacent properties, and those savvy hunters must find new ways to market their property to big bucks. It’s the backwoods equivalent of fast food wars. Waterfowl hunters take note: If you’re going to spend the time, effort, and money to make your property attractive to birds you won’t get really good results if the four surrounding areas have slightly…

I HAVE FOND memories of Crowley, Louisiana, from a hunt there in 1976 with the late callmaker Eli Haydel. We hunted a place just south of Crowley, close to the Gulf of Mexico, where a storm drove the ducks inland by the hundreds. We shot our birds then sat on the back of the two-man sunken blind and watched as flock after flock, seemingly oblivious to our presence, would fill a pond behind us, then fly to the pond in front where our decoys were set, then leave as more piled in. This photo was taken in 1923, and it seems Fannie Horn, standing next to her husband Clyde on the far left, may have needed a basic lesson in gun safety. It looks as though she is ready to…

ONE BEAUTIFUL OCTOBER day, John Argue and his son Jeff were hunting near Defoe Island in Saginaw Bay, Michigan. Beside them were Jerry Romanowski and Greg Gumbrecht. “At daybreak, the ducks were already flying,” Argue said. “As the morning went on, we shot mallards, redheads and bluebills. A Canada goose came flying by and I hit it with one shot. It locked up, sailed into open water and went down. We went after it and had to shoot it again. By mid-morning, we thought the ducks had stopped flying, so we called it a day.” Then someone shouted, “Here come some ducks!” Argue saw 30 mallards flying high. He called and they locked wings. “We got our guns back out of the cases and loaded them,” he said. “Then the…

Wings cup, tails flare and webbed feet on four pairs of carroty legs extend toward the surface of the river. THEY WING UP the river, as subtle and silent as the swelling dawn in the leaden eastern sky. Gliding forms round a bend, silhouettes flickering betwixt patches of lightening clouds and a towering phalanx of stream-side cottonwoods. Before I can bring a call to my lips, the neural apparatus in a quartet of shimmering emerald pates has discerned a half-dozen decoys nodding in the lazy current as pleasant companions. Wings cup, tails flare and webbed feet on four pairs of carroty legs extend toward the surface of the river. They alight in midstream, then turn to paddle placidly in our direction, screened by a tangle of disheveled willows and the…

It is oftentimes better to stop the retrieves than to run the risk of pup picking up the unwanted habit of dropping. WHEN YOUR PUP is four to five months of age, he will start losing both top and bottom baby teeth that will be replaced with adult teeth. This natural occurrence is normally accompanied by sore, red and bleeding gums. This can present a problem during training sessions. During this transition, the pup will likely start dropping the dummy. Therefore, it is oftentimes better to stop the retrieves than to run the risk of pup picking up the unwanted habit of dropping. During teething, a quick examination of the gums for redness or the appearance of blood on the dummy are signals that the puppy may be experiencing pain…

THE TEAL CAME in from behind while I was otherwise occupied with the wrapper of a granola bar. My first inkling they were there was a whoosh like a jet passing overhead—the old-timers said it sounded like a sail tearing in a storm—so loud and low I ducked involuntarily. I looked up to see 200 little ducks over the decoys, their 400 powder-blue wing patches pumping almost in unison as the teal backpedaled in for a landing. Firing into the middle of them would have ended the hunt or earned me a ticket. I picked one straggler, shot, and watched it fall. When I looked up, the rest had vanished as quickly as they appeared, leaving me to wonder if I’d imagined all those ducks. The evidence lay floating in…

NECESSITY, THE SAYING goes, is the mother of invention. So when Garrett Walker and a couple of his friends realized they were set up on the wrong side of a pond, they made a quick decision to move. He and his partners scrambled to pull the decoys, gather up their gear and pile everything into the bed of their UTV. Or at least they tried to. The tangled mess of decoys spilled out of the bed and the men clung to their guns and blind bags as they eased around to the other side of the pond. “I knew there had to be a better way, so I spent the whole morning just thinking about how to get all our stuff on a UTV without it falling off or piled…

PREPARING FOR DUCK season means slapping mosquitoes, mucking through swamps and dodging snamkes while looking over property and talking with landowners of potential hunting locations. When you come up with a plan of attack you will need a way to get into the low-lying areas that you have located to see just how hard you will need to work to harvest heavy straps of birds. A side-by-side, equipped with products you can count on for a successful day in the woods is a fine consideration. Some of the best places to hunt ducks are not accessible by truck or boat, so where does that leave us? Enter the 2019 Yamaha Wolverine X2 adventure machine. This could be your muck-loving transportation to that fowl-filled honey-hole! Whether you rip across rice fields,…

SECRETARY OF THE Interior Ryan Zinke announced in May new or expanded hunting opportunities on 30 national wildlife refuges. The proposal will add an additional 248,000 acres to the refuge system’s hunting and fishing programs and will expand existing migratory bird hunting on 19 refuges. That's the good news. The announcement was part of a broader push by the Trump administration to increase hunter access and partici pation. The new opportunities are expected to pass the approval process and will be in place for the 2018 19 season. All told, 377 of the country’s 566 refuges will be open to at least one type of hunting. In most cases, hunting is allowed when it does not interfere with the mission or purpose of the individual refuge. “We have an unrivaled…

BAGGING A BANDED bird, even one as uncommon as a common eider, is not so exceptional for Massachusetts hunter Ken Schopp. In fact, one of the six banded eiders he’s collected over his 37 years of waterfowling— a drake banded in Milbridge, Maine, and shot in Orleans, Massachusetts— managed to make "Passages" in August 2015. He shot the bird while hunting a favorite haunt one January day on the barrier beaches of Cape Cod, where his technique is to pass-shoot the small to medium-sized flocks of eiders as they transition overhead from the Atlantic Ocean to a protected estuary. However, he didn’t hesitate to take a poke at an unusual lone drake, which proved fortuitous as the bird sported a shiny silver band. Though it stood out a bit from…

FOUR FLOCKS. Ten Guns. Sixty geese. It’s 9 a.m., and we are headed to Taco Bell for chalupas and gut aches. It’s how the boys at Kansas Hurt Locker wanted it fast and filthy. “We got bomb ass (expletive) hunts in Kansas,” says Christian Locke, while he sits beside college baseball buddy and fellow HL co owner Baylor Parker, laughing in a horse barn that doubles as the lodge. Trip Dugas, another 20 something, is creating a short film on the pair of long time friends and their band of ultra passionate hunting pals who put greenheads and geese through a grinder here in the Flint Hills from November to February. Listen to Locke speak into the camera lens and you might assume he and Parker are another couple of…

■ THE CHAMP IS HERE Many champion clays shooters started with a Beretta semi-auto for their soft recoil and shootability (those old A390s fit so well right out of the box). The A400 Xtreme Plus combines the durability a duck hunter needs with the performance of a sporting shotgun, plus a dual-recoil system in the Kick-Off Mega and Kick-Off 3. It also has a larger charging handle, extended bolt release and larger loading port. A 7x7 stepped rib should give you a better sight picture. $1,990 | beretta.com ■ MADE FOR ALL SEASONS Mossy Oak Bottomland is as southern as fried chicken, but you don’t have to hunt Dixie to wear this versatile pattern. Made for the flooded timber, we have hunted this camo in leased pits and public walk-ins…

IF YOU ARE a man who lives in the United States, you may be in danger. According to sociologists, the men of this country are lonelier than ever before. We spend less time with other men, more time alone, and more time staring into screens than any previous generation in history. The result of this isolation? What researchers have called a “friendship deficit”—and this deficit may be deadly. Researchers at Brigham Young University have found that loneliness is just as bad for your overall health as smoking two packs a day and actually twice as deadly as obesity. If you are a man, you need to make more friends. And that’s where water-fowling comes in. An article published last March in the peer-reviewed Journal of Social and Personal Relationships concluded…