Your finest hour
Tell us about your finest 1 hour or less as a duck hunter.
I am recalling past hunts where we killed 70 mallards in 30 minutes, 160 redheads in an hour, mucho slaughterage scenarios are running through my head. But I also harken back to a *boom* *boom* *boom* true triple on bull wigeon to round out a quick limit. A well executed 3 snatch for an entire limit of teal. Hunting ducks isn't a speed contest, but sometimes it just works out that way. Let's hear about the one you can't forget...
My excitement knew no bounds as we met up at the club house. We were gathering to hunt ducks the following morning on our club in the midlands. One of our members, Mr. Raiford Trask owned a large seafood outfit in Wilmington, NC and he always brought us a feast of fresh goodies plucked from the sea.
The oysters were always my favorite and the job of rigging an oyster pit fell to me. I dragged several large sheets of metal from the scrap pile and with a few cinder blocks fashioned a steamer. Using a burn barrel I would then burn wood down to coals and shovel the coals under the sheets of metal. All that was left was to put the huge oysters on the sheets and cover them with wet burlap sacks from the barn. The effect created a fine steamer and we were able to keep the shucking table full of hot barely opening oysters.
On this particular trip Mr. Trask brought in a cooler full of shrimp that looked to be 12" long each. I have never seen such shrimp before or since. He marinated them in some family recipe and placed them on the grill. I will stand by the assertation I made all those years ago- "Those are the best shrimp anyone ever had".
As the older men of the club ate their fill and moved on to their liquid desserts, the younger group was left to try and eat the remaining 3 bushels of salty oysters. After cleaning up, we went into the clubhouse to listen to the tales being told of days gone by, ducks killed by the croaker sack load, marlin the size of station wagons, and so on. We youngsters hung on every word the older Southern gentlemen had to say. When we were lucky enough to be included in a story or asked about something we puffed out our chests and recited for the thousandth time whatever small part we had played in that particular adventure.
Those times among those old gentlemen are indelibly etched in my memory. I remember the time one old warhorse, a long dead former chairman of what is now the DNR, told us about shooting more mallards than we had ever heard of on the coast when he was a young man. Another time one of the older men told us about shooting redheads on Tangier Island on a duck club that was over 100 years old at the time he shot there. The stories of shooting great migratory geese in Maryland, pintails on Mattamuskeet, and black ducks in Maine were all it took to forever hook a boy and make him a lifelong lover of the sport of waterfowling.
The mallard stories were the ones that always captured my attention though. Far away places like the Dakotas, Canada, Mississippi, and Arkansas called out to me as Darkest Africa calls out to big game hunters. I knew even then that I would visit all of those places in my quest for ducks. Since that time I have been to all of them and have added even more to the list. Places like Kazakhstan, New Zeland, Russia, and California now call out to me.
As we stoked the fire for the last time and headed off to bed, I knew sleep would be a long time in coming. We stayed up staring into the dark for hours talking about how tomorrow the ducks were going to fly. My father had predicted good hunting in the morning but even he had no idea how right he was.
The day had transformed from the cold grey of dawn to one of those rare days in South Carolina that only a duck hunter could love. The temperature was hovering around 32 degrees and the wind was blowing a steady gale at 30 mph. To a young boy with his first set of real waders it was heaven. We were not interested in such mundane matters as wind chill, barometric pressure, or even what time we had our church league basketball practice. We were consumed only by what time legal shooting time started.
The ducks were already in the air by the thousands and some of the swamp hunters were already fudging it a bit and shooting before it was strictly legal to do so. Finally, shooting time arrived and we began to go to work.
Duck hunters, as it has been said many times before, are a breed apart. Where other outdoorsmen revile changing weather, duck hunters thrive on it. Nothing gets our attention like the call for a strong cold front barreling down on us from Canada. To hear that rain, sleet, or snow are forecasted is to hear that Santa Claus is coming to your house when you were a child. The only thing that sounds better than nasty precipitation filled weather is hearing that a strong dry cold front is bearing down.
There are no better days than those bluebird clear, brutally cold, and extremely windy days. The combination of the three, sadly, does not come along very often. Maybe once in a season. Those are the days that put ducks to feeding. Mallards and Pintails will dive bomb you to get out of the fierce wind. The wary black duck will make a fool of himself and alight in your decoys without taking his usual care to look everything over 10 or 15 times before committing. Teal will fly 4 feet off the water in the attempt to avoid the gusts that must buffet the tiny speedsters like a turbulent plane ride.
It was a day just like this that we had set out upon to try to hunt ducks. This morning we were hunting a flooded field just off the Wateree river. When we entered the field that morning, we ran about 15,000 ducks out. Mostly mallards with a bunch of pintails, black ducks, and a few teal and divers mixed in. This was long before the days of hydrilla, and wigeon and gadwall were practically rare as penguins in our area. The summer ducks had dissapeared weeks before and we always assumed that they went to Georgia or Florida for the winter.
The temperature was so low that we had to break ice with the stocks of our guns to get to the open water that the feeding ducks had so politely kept open for us. Our hunting party split into 2 groups of 4 and we each set up on either side of the field about 500 yards apart. The older guys went to one side and the teenagers took the other. On most days at 500 yards it is a competition between the groups to see who works the ducks in to shooting range.
On this day we couldn't even hear the shots of the other crowd. The ducks just piled into whichever set of decoys that they happened to see first. With the wind whipping up a tempest, the cork decoys were dancing and moving with the look of real ducks. We didn't make it back to the little clump of trees that served as our blind before a pair of mallards lit in our decoys.
We had picked our spot well. The wind was blowing steady out of the Northwest and the sun was rising at our backs. That meant that the ducks were blinded by the sun on their swing and had to come over the trees to our backs to land in the decoys. While we got the dogs situated and our guns loaded, ducks continued to bombard the decoys. We could see that the other group was already hunting as a big mallard dropped from the sky over their heads. We found out later that the "old men" had quickly realized that this was one of those magic days and had abandoned putting out the entire spread of decoys opting for only 6 total.
Our club had always strived to shoot drakes only. A limit of greenheads is always our goal. On this day we could tell that it would be very easy to attain as thousands upon thousands of mallards were already in the air above us trying to get into the field. We made a pact that we would shoot one shot each draw at one greenhead mallard only. If a man missed he was not allowed a second shot and had to wait for his turn to come back around.
Our set-up proved to be deadly that morning. Mallard after mallard came over that little tree line and we had the field day of all field days. When they came over us into that unyielding wind, they literally stopped moving for a brief second as they transitioned into landing mode.
The highlight of that day for me was seeing my yellow lab retrieving a big northern mallard. When I took the bird I checked and sure enough there was jewelry! But wait. This band looked a bit different. Upon close inspection it turned out that I had the luck of the draw to shoot a Jack Miner banded duck. My father had one around his neck from a few years before and I figured I would be lucky to ever see another. My turn came around and the big greenhead never even circled. He came from on high and cupped straight down to the gun like a kamakaze pilot.
Our group limited on greenheads in seemingly no time at all. We passed up pintails and even our favorite black ducks that day just because we could. As we were slapping ourselves on the back and replaying certain misses and shots, we noticed that the "old men" were already walking out of the field having limited even quicker than we did.
In that tally I shot my first Jack Miner band and a friend killed his first Federally banded bird. My father managed to kill 2 Federally banded birds himself that morning on consecutive draws. He was paying attention and picked them both out on the swing as he had taught me to do from an early age. Many people have been startled when we say look at that dog bringing me my banded duck and can't believe the luck when they see the tiny band of aluminum. The secret is, it isn't always luck and you can see a shiny silver duck band more often than you would think if you know where to look. Another tip I learned from my father is to always shoot the duck that is trailing a piece of straw or grass. It is fairly common to see such detritus dragging through the air having been snagged in the seam of a duck band.
I shot a hen mallard one year on the Grand Prairie of Arkansas on an "all greenheads hunt". She had flown 3 or 4 circles around our group before I noticed the grass trailing. When I raised up and dropped her, I met a hail of derision and rude speculation about my lineage. I simply said "Don't worry boys. She's banded." When the dog brought her back I was very quickly vindicated.
As we trudged across the field, each with a full duck strap, we turned to watch as ducks poured into the spot we had just left. In my many years of hunting ducks I have never seen that many big ducks wanting to go into a place so badly. Looking back I know that we were truly blessed to have been duck hunters that day.
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. They fly almost rite over me and i jumped up and threw 3 20. ga shots at them, dont even think i was aiming at any of them just into the group. Well one of the birds start the one wing flap of death and falls at the edge of the field, i take off running through the beans a pick him and ring his neck. I had done it, after many of afternoons on that bank i had finally killed one. I jumped on the fourwheeler and went home to call pops and tell him the good news, i had my first duck 
Originally Posted by JABIII
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