What do you consider the ultimate prize in the world of duck hunting?
Ding.
<What do you consider the ultimate prize in the world of duck hunting?>
I received that question in a text from a fellow scduck’er around lunchtime a couple of weeks ago. I imagined that he was having lunch with friends and he needed my answer to settle an argument or maybe he was planning to use it to start an argument. Either way, I immediately began thinking through the list of North American duck species. I felt a little rushed because I didn’t want to keep his audience waiting. My kneejerk answer was going to be King Eider.
Anyone steeped in modern waterfowling culture knows that a prime King Eider drake taken on St. Paul’s Island in the Bearing Sea is the epitome of the sport. Most hunters will save the King for their final species in the waterfowler’s slam. Considering the planning time, cost of the hunt, distance of travel and ruggedness of the actual hunt, in the end the hunter’s role is reduced to nothing more than pulling a trigger at the right time and only after being told to by a guide. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking this. I hope to do it one day myself but is that the “ultimate” in the world of duck hunting? I just don’t think so. I thought about the American Black Duck.
If the duck species itself is the total focus of this question, then the black duck wins hands-down. Migratory black ducks are, in my mind, the most difficult of all waterfowl to hunt. They’ve proven their legend for wariness. Encounters with black ducks are seldom planned so the duck hunter has to be ready to pull from his entire bag of tricks in exactly the right order and for just the right duration or he goes home with only a story for friends or facebook. I almost typed that as my response but considered that hunters living in the black duck’s home range seldom have as lofty of an opinion of the bird. The ultimate prize in waterfowling certainly can’t be a bird that so many hunters consider predictable and mundane. I moved on to consider my own current nemesis.
I’ve spent many empty mornings over the past two-and-a-half duck seasons looking to get a quality shot at South Carolina’s newest resident waterfowl, the black-bellied whistling duck. In my limited experience, BBWDs lack the black duck’s redeeming qualities of wariness and caution but they have their own survival strategy built on being unpredictable and aloof. That strategy is working but the ultimate waterfowling prize’s origin can’t be one that is traceable to being released from a zoo as the result of a Cat. 5 hurricane. I thought about divers.
I have no qualms with handing the prize for the most ultimate of waterfowl prizes over to what many consider the most dimwitted representatives of the family of waterfowl because, on any given day, diver ducks can exhibit the best of the best qualities of the more glamorous puddle ducks. The canvasback adds beauty, speed and grace, and they’re uncommon. There are 1 million duck hunters in the US and only about 500,000 canvasbacks. Given an allowable hunter mortality of 10%, the average duck hunter will kill a canvasback once every 20 years. Certainly, rarity counts in the contest for the ultimate prize in waterfowling but at this point the list is getting longer not shorter. A bead of sweat pops out on my forehead as I realize that there may be a bunch of rough-and-tumble alpha males sitting around a lunchtime table in a sports bar waiting for my reply text. I don’t want to keep them waiting or worse, risk their losing interest and moving on. I thumb “canvasback” into the phone’s keyboard then delete it. I had totally ignored the international waterfowling scene and there are places more remote and less commercial than St. Paul’s Island and ducks more rare than canvasbacks.
How about a Madagascar Pochard in the land that time forgot, or a Brazilian Merganser buried deep within the uncivilized Amazon basin? Certainly either of those has to be in the conversation of the ultimate waterfowling prize. Again, I’m getting carried away and I need an answer quick. I still take an instant to consider going the poetic route. I’ve got it, “a kid’s first duck.”
A duck hunter will never kill more than one first duck. That’s about as rare as it gets. That one duck, for a lot of hunters, defines them for the rest of their lives. It dictates who their friends will be, how they will spend their time and money. It affects the woman they’ll marry (and maybe cause a divorce or two along the way). That one duck can even shape his relationship with the God of the universe and change how he spends eternity. There’s nothing more ultimate than that. I type it out and hit send. With smug satisfaction for the perfectness, poetry and profundity of my answer, I placed the phone down beside me on the desk.
Ding.
<No, moron. That answer is not acceptable> read the reply to my prefect answer.
I can only console my hurt feelings by trying to tell myself that he’s probably at a sushi joint watching soccer…
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Originally Posted by Dook
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