Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2018 i Wildfowl

WILDFOWL’s new art director Chuck Beasley asked a great question the other day. An outdoorsman but only a budding waterfowler, he inquired if duck and goose hunters shoot birds on the ground or jump them up first. I told him it’s considered a sort of cheap shot, bad form, as birds on the ground or water are sort of like fish in a barrel. It’s called wingshooting, not ground shooting, and unless they are wounded, “swatting” is considered unsportsmanlike conduct by those who were raised to respect the game. You don’t spit on the church sidewalk, and you don’t flock shoot geese on the ground or ducks on the water. The more murderous of waterfowlers do it, though, if not raised by hunters like my Virginia gentleman father, a literature…

THE SWANS MADE a looping circle then headed into the wind, their huge black feet acting as rudders as they came in for a landing. I clicked the hammers back on the Lincoln Jeffries double made five years before Theodore Roosevelt was president. The first shot rocked the 747-sized bird and the second folded him up like a cheap suitcase. The old Damascus-barreled double had been outfitted with a pair of full-length Briley 28-gauge choke tubes, and I had hand-loaded the bismuth ammo. It was a good example of how effective smaller gauges—20, 28 and even the little .410—can be under the right circumstances. Tundra swans are not at all hard to kill; neither are close-in ducks and geese. I repeated the same stunt in Canada hunting with Sean Mann…

AT FIRST IT looked like 20. No, it had to be more. Cupped wings, falling into the timber as eager hunters eased their gun barrels from their heated blind into the crisp December air. Just as safeties clicked, I noticed headlights. It was my ride. I quickly stopped the video playing on my phone and headed into the darkness outside. As we swung the last bundle of decoys over the side of his truck bed, I thought how 3 a.m. had come much too soon. It’d have been easier to be sleeping a couple extra hours before climbing into the same heated blind I’d been watching on film. Instead, the old Chevy bounced down the road towards the draw. Each duck season, thousands of hunters across the Midwest begin their…

HUNDREDS OF DUCKS DOTTED the horizon over the North Dakota wheat field that blanketed thousands of acres to low hills and trees, eventually touching the azure sky. Hunters languished in layout blinds, fending off squadrons of mosquitoes while scanning for birds. Flocks left nearby ponds to circle the several-thousand-acre field on a search for harvested wheat. This field, close to 220,000-acre Devil’s Lake, was located in an important section of North Dakota’s Prairie Pothole Region (PPR), a primary breeding area for waterfowl. Every pond or lake in early October is filled with divers and puddle ducks. “I have hunted here with dad since I was a little boy carrying a BB gun to the blind,” said Tanner Cherney, with Devil’s Lake tourism. “People have transitioned from potholes to field hunting.…

Hard-Headed Hounds AS A NEW subscriber I read with interest WILDFOWL’s Big Dog issue. I enjoyed it having raised, bred and trained Labs, springers and Brittanys, but the breed I believe to be the most intelligent, loyal and hardworking of all the retrieving breeds is the Chesapeake Bay Retriever. I have had Chessies since I was 12, way back when I lived in a little place called Tule Lake, California, in the 1940s. I have bred, raised and trained them for the last 30 years. Yes, they are stubborn as my late wife used to remind me. I always replied, “No, only hardheaded, like me.” Dick Lawe Temecula, CA Outdoor Writer Expertise I am on a plane headed somewhere I am less than excited to go to and the trip…

GARY ZAHM LIKES shot thousands of ducks with a camera. But the accomplished wildlife photojournalist from California also enjoys exercising his wingshooting skills. It was the first week of the season, and small flocks of mixed species crisscrossed the early-morning sky. Green-winged teal had not yet arrived in their usual numbers, but pintails and shovelers kept Zahm and his companions busy. “Drake shovelers, in varying stages of plumage, circled the decoys, emitting their nasally chuk-chuk calls.” he said. Zahm’s final duck of the day came directly out of a blinding sun, a silhouette 30 yards overhead. “The final reward,” said Zahm, “was the sight of a banded shoveler hen clamped firmly in the jaws of my hunting partner’s black Lab.” Zahm’s duck had been banded only 300 miles away, in…

“I ran into a pair of locals a mile downriver,” he said. “They’d spotted a johnboat full of decoys a couple hours ago, floating empty with two coats and a shotgun. They pulled the boat to shore, then called us." I knew immediately what had happened. I WAS SITTING low and hidden in the bottom of my canoe, tucked high and dry back in the edge of the reeds and willows 20 miles downriver from Fort Henry dam, when I suddenly realized my canoe was floating again. ¶ This was odd, I thought, for I had dragged the old boat 10 yards up the steep shoreline slope and into the fringes of the little thicket no more than 30 minutes earlier after setting my decoys just below the point of…

MISSISSIPPI DUCK HUNTERS will soon have access to an additional 18,000 acres of duck-rich bottom-land forest in the Delta. Thank the Nature Conservancy and the state of Mississippi for that new land. The conservation group was critical in the property’s acquisition, one of the largest contiguous private holdings in the state, and the largest public land acquisition in Mississippi in over 40 years. “Only 2 percent of the Delta’s hard wood bottomlands remain, so we thought this was an important piece of property,” says Alex Littlejohn, associate director of TNC’s Mississippi chapter. The Mississippi property known as Steele Bayou WMA is adjacent to Mahannah WMA. It was formerly owned by a corporate timber com pany and will provide world class waterfowl hunting when the land naturally floods. With the help…

JACKIE VAN CLEAVE comes from a long line of hunters and anglers. Both his father and grandfather were professional duck guides and fishermen on Tennessee’s Reelfoot Lake, and Jackie—now in his 60s—has been guiding on Reelfoot since he was 13. Over the course of five decades local hunting regulations changed dramatically as hunter numbers increased: 50 years ago Jackie and other Reel-foot guides were free to hunt in any hole or any blind they chose, but today Reelfoot’s duck blinds are numbered and a blind lottery system was established. Fortunately, Jackie’s favorite blind was grandfathered into the program and while he still has to obtain a permit to hunt there every year, his family’s blind will be available for Jackie to hunt for the rest of his life. On days…

ITS HARD TO tell from this image if the Delta Duck Club’s boat was anchored as a clubhouse or used to ferry hunters to the main house boat. It stirs the memory of a Nash Buckingham story entitled "How Come," which revolves around a trip made to his cousin’s duck club on Grand Lake in Louisiana. He describes the “speed boat” trip from the dock at Lake Arthur to a houseboat anchored on an island far from civilization. The point of the story is the tale of how he and his Cajun guide put a long stalk across the marsh on a big flock of resting geese. At the coup de gras, Buckingham nearly falls flat on his face as he anticipated the recoil from his fabled shotgun, Bo Whoop,…

THE DESIRE TO ROAM INFECTS most of us at some point in our lives. Before marriage, the weight of a corporate job, and responsibility, we chase north winds south. Hunters pursue the snow goose migration with abandon across state after state, and to some degree the Canada goose circuit. Why not ducks? Most of us lack the time or money, but what a lovely daydream, to save up and target a season to actually follow the mallard passage through our flyways. And for the fellows that have the imagination and gumption to make something like that happen, to take a year and chase green, this story is for you. Some duck hunters never get the disease; the comforts of a warm bed and a quick boat ride are all they…

ALBERTA’S WATERFOWL season is short and violent; in some areas it’s much more intense than others. This was supposed to be the pulsing epicenter of the very best the province offers, but it looked like our late October crew might just be too late to the party. The guys that picked me up at the airport in Edmonton still had adrenaline going. They had massacred 60 geese and 60 ducks in the Canadian sunshine in mild weather just a few hours prior near Elk Point, to the east, and were on their way home. Now it was cold and snowing, the mercury diving. Keith Heinlein from Stoeger and veteran fowler Joe Beal said the birds were winging south fast and “Sure glad I ain’t hunting tomorrow. It’s gonna be 24…