Unlike with sheep or turkeys, there’s no official list or organizing body that keeps track of the North American Waterfowl Slam. It’s an unofficial collection of 41 to 47 bird species and subspecies. Some hunters count color-phase birds, like the blue variety of lesser snow geese; others don’t. Bard is one of the hunters who counts the color phase, and all that’s keeping him from reaching No. 47 is a cinnamon teal. The quest has taken him all over the continent—from the Bering Sea in Alaska, where he shot a harlequin from a rubber dinghy (after which he fell into the water), to a Florida storm-water treatment pond, where he checked off a mottled duck, to Newfoundland’s Fogo Islands, where he dropped a borea*lis eider, a subspecies of the common eider.
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