Innholdsfortegnelse for December/January 2021-22 i Wildfowl

THE SMILING OLD HUNTER had some kind of strange-looking call hanging on his lanyard, a long wooden thing resembling a turkey box call even longer than his thick grey beard. He stood beside me, blurry in the pre-dawn, our heads peering above the lip of this north Arkansas pit blind. The look in his eyes told me there was no place he would rather be. I felt the same. It was my first real dedicated snow hunt with some crazy new friends from Chicago I’d met in a camp in Alberta. I’d dubbed them The Albanian Goose Mafia, and they were the loudest, gold jewelry-wearing band of big city brothers I’d ever met, and serious hunters. We’d all shot snows on other hunts here and there, enough to get the…

LIKE A RARE trophy, you only get one shot at beginner’s luck and Adrian Smasne made the most of his opportunity, with enviable results. “It was the first snow goose hunt of the season and I was using my brand new snow goose decoys for the first time as well,” Smasne recalled about the day. “My son Jack and a buddy, Jay also joined me; it was also my son's first ever snow goose hunt.” Things didn’t begin all that well as the birds were working, but landing several hundred yards away from the spread. Pivoting became a popular practice in 2020 and Smasne quickly adapted by leaving the blind to push the birds and get them airborne. “I was able to shoot an easy one that flew directly over…

WEATHERBY HAS OFFERED shotguns for a good while now; everything from Spanish-made side-by-sides, Turkish autoloaders to affordable pumps. The now-Wyoming-based firm has had some shotgun home runs. I believe its latest autoloader, the 18i Waterfowl to be the best it’s ever offered. Why? I’ll tell you below. In 2018, Weatherby partnered with the Italian gunmaking firm Breda to deliver shotguns to its specifications. Breda is not just another johnny-come-lately manufacturer that’s cranked up lately with CNC machines as a substitute for knowhow. Rather, it’s been around since 1925 and holds many patents and industry firsts—such as removable choke tubes in 1953. It also worked closely with one of Italy’s most accomplished engineers in Bruno Civolani, the gentleman who invented the inertia action system used extensively by Benelli. A few years…

FERN demonstrates the best qualities of a British Lab in both her desire to please and trainability. Her conforma tion is representative of the breed standard She has produced some of the best pups we have seen here at the kennels For nearly 20 years, Bill Gibson has studied, trained and learned how to apply low-force training methods from masters in the United Kingdom, Ireland and U.S. Bill and his dogs have won Team and Gundog Challenges in Northern Ireland. He has also served as a judge for the British Field Trial Society of America. A retired law enforcement officer, Bill is the Director of Gundog Operations for Mossy Oak GameKeeper Kennels SOMETIMES, WHEN YOU cast your dog for a retrieve, he or she may get distracted by white objects.…

“UNBELIEVABLE,” I muttered,“The hottest white goose feed in the county, and we can’t hunt it.” Across the table, Duane dumped two packs of Splenda’s into his stale diner coffee and began to stir. Expressionless. “I mean, what are the odds that the Hekker boys would have asked for permission five minutes before us?” I lifted my eyes to the stained ceiling panels. “WHY?” Still no reply from Duane. He was staring out the window to the parking lot. One finger tapping the side of his mug. The waitress walked up to our table and pulled out a notepad. “What’ll it be, fellas?” Duane turned to me with a smile. “We may not be out of luck after all.” I raised an eyebrow. Duane locked my eyes and began to nod,…

WHEN YOU THINK of CRP (Conservation Reserve Program), what vision pops into your brain? Likely, thousands of acres of native grasses waving in the wind, right? Or, possibly, the site of a gagger whitetail buck, or a pair of coyotes yapping away? However, there is much more to this program than meets the eye. This voluntary, incentive-based program provides excellent nesting habitat for waterfowl and is scientifically proven to boost duck production. More ducks mean fuller flyways, which leads to more spent shotshells and fuller totes. Farmers benefit greatly from enrolling their land in CRP. This land is mainly marginal land that likely won't produce an outstanding yield. By registering, farmers pen a contract (typically 10-15 years) and receive a Rental Rate Incentive that usually falls around the $150 per…

THE HISTORY OF Labrador retrievers is one that covers quite a few centuries now, and leads us back to Newfoundland. This Canadian island is not exactly known for tropical conditions, nor will you find it on a cruise itinerary where folks are looking to test drive their new Hawaiian shirts and soak up some much-needed Vitamin D from the big nuclear generator in the sky. It is the official birthplace of our most popular duck dog, and did set some of our modern retrievers up to handle cold weather fairly well. But this tolerance for extreme conditions is highly variable, just like personality, rock-solid steadiness, or the ability to mark three downed birds and take perfect lines to each. Even though we intuitively know this about our waterfowl dogs (not…

LIKE THE GERMANS who founded New Braunfels, Texas, their European neighbors from Denmark settled south of Houston in places like Danevang, not far from where this hunt took place. Close to Bay City and right handy to the east coast of Texas and the Gulf of Mexico, these guys found a field—probably rice—where the ducks would feed then return to the Gulf to rest and doze. Memory takes me back to a similar hunt with the late Eli Haydel of call-making fame. We were in a marsh south of Creole, Louisiana when a storm over the Gulf drove huge flocks of ducks inland to the ponds we were hunting. It might be a stretch to think it was the same this day...could have been! We sure didn’t have the legal…

CHARLIE LONG HEADED offshore from Lewes, Maryland, his excitement tempered by apprehension. It was the first hunting test for Ironclad. Towing his aluminum layout boat behind his 26-footer (See Boats and Blinds, Going Big..and Long, November 2017 WF) he navigated 7 miles to the shipping channel. "We were targeting sea ducks," Long said. "It was slow going because I was being careful in Delaware Bay. Some spray accumulated, so I pumped it out with the bilge pump. I didn't hunt, only watched as the scoters decoyed right in despite calm conditions that usually mean poor shooting. None of the guys were used to hunting in layout boats. But they had plenty of opportunities and wound up with good bags of surf and black scoters. They absolutely loved it and said…

IN OUR SMALL town out on the Minnesota prairie, we hunt waterfowl on a schedule, and we’d come to the final part of that schedule. Sloughs and shallow lakes were frozen and only one lake in the area remained open. It was naturally the deepest one. Ever the scout, I had been watching the lake to see what our chances were. Steve Aagesen and wife Sue were just finishing their deer hunt and really looking forward to resuming their waterfowling in late season. "Many years of ice pushing up had put a rampart of mud for us to hide behind." I reported to them that opportunity abounded for us on that lake until it, too, froze up. Geese and a large mob of mallards were located in a remote bay…

REGARDLESS OF HOW your duck season has shaped up, the good news is geese. Early indications from our guys in the fifield this fall revealed a healthy number of juvenile snows showing in Saskatchewan. “I can’t think of a single goose population that is not extremely strong,” says Rocco Murano, South Dakota Senior Waterfowl Biologist. “Canada geese are above management objectives in most places...and the light goose issue, overpopulation, the opportunity to harvest geese is extremely high. Extremely.” Last spring, following a tough year in which many of the best laid plans seemed to fall through, our spring snowgoosea- palooza adventure looked like it was coming together perfectly. Early March found us at the Black Duck Lodge just outside Stuttgart, Arkansas, on a snow goose safari to test the new…

To give yourself the best shot at a snow goose mass-casualty event, go with a pro. Between securing access and hundreds of decoys, and the low price of this guided hunt, it just makes sense. What’s cool about hunting with an outfifit like Dirty Bird? You learn, a lot. Between us, Jimmy Mac and I have a combined over half century of goose chasing, yet we saw some stuff we’d never seen with Ekren’s crew of killers. McConville noted: “The very fifirst thing I noticed was they pulled the blinds out of the decoy spread. The fifirst time I’ve ever been snow goose hunting where they took the hides out of the decoy spread. The key to finishing the birds was where they put the motion in the set. That…

NEW YEAR’S EVE . Winds out of the north. Temps are in the teens and low twenties, and the southbound flyways are cluttered with ducks of all sizes and species. But the ponds and puddles from here to no matter where are frozen solid, and the only open water for miles in any direction is to be found solely in this river that I have hunted alone on New Year’s Eve for years. The scene is always the same—my dozen or so oversize magnum decoys bippin’ and bobbin’ in the stiff north wind, me huddled and happy in the bottom of my meticulously-camouflaged canoe, while entire flocks of migratory waterfowl from all points north are executing strafing runs up and down this little river in Tennessee. They are most often…