#26
#26
It’s been four years since I posted one of these updates. I hadn’t given up. I didn’t take time off for family. I didn’t lose interest. I have spent some time with the deer and deer hunters but most of the duck mornings over these past four years were singularly focused on getting the next bird on the list.
The focus bird on most of these mornings was a Black-bellied Whistling Duck. The obsession was so intense that I took a break only by allowing myself a day or two to look for a common merganser or to spend an offshore morning with the hopes of getting a Power Ball-probability shot at a South Carolina king eider. I considered these respites as what the kids would call “mental health days” but would jump right back into the madness of the search for my first tree duck on the next day out.
I chased ideas, clues and tips across most of South Carolina’s coastal counties. I put in at boat ramps and on bodies of water that I had, at that point, never seen in the daylight. I had to trust light bars, GPS maps, and depth finders to keep me out of trouble in unfamiliar dark waters. Most of these mornings, though, I never saw or heard a tree duck.
I’ve come close a couple of times during these past four or so seasons including one particularly painful morning when a group of black-bellies flew 30-yards high right over my head while I was picking up decoys. They whistled while I panicked-fumbled but failed to get my gun out of the case and loaded in time to shoot. I’ve had them fly low but 70 to 100 yards up or down the bank. I’ve had them fly directly overhead but 100 yards high.
I had daylight passes from tree ducks during the teal season when they aren’t legal. I photographed tree ducks in a dozen places either closed to hunting or during the closed season. I’ve been around tree ducks enough at this point to say, in my opinion, that they are unpatternable (if that’s even a word). In my experience, they don’t do the same thing twice in a row and they don’t fly at any predictable time other than maybe 15 minutes before legal. When using yesterday as a template, today is nothing more than a blank slate for a group of tree ducks. They are frustrating little brats.
Well meaning "friends" have texted me pictures of their tree ducks or tree ducks killed by one of their friends. I've seen pictures of someone else's BBWDs on SCDUCKS. I even had someone send me a picture of a girl that had killed a black-bellied whistler. Best I can tell, it's a lot easier to kill a tree duck on accident than it is to do it on purpose.
The BBWD decoy I made has been ignored more times than I can count. I've kept it around mostly for pictures if I was ever successful. None of the tactics I learned over a lifetime of hunting ducks seemed applicable to these birds. Yes, I know, they aren’t really ducks. Biologists say that they are actually just tiny swans. Their genus name, Dendrocygna, literally means “tree swan” but nothing I’ve learned from decades of swan hunting helped me kill a black-belly either.
My obsessive approach to The Quest included developing a strategy for every species on the list. The strategy for the black-bellies had morphed into a “just get under them” strategy. It was built around the probabilistic hope that at some point there would be an intersection between dogged persistence and tree duck randomness. Applying this strategy rose to the literal definition of insanity. I was doing the same thing over-and-over while hoping for a different result. Well, it finally happened. A group that flew 100 yards down the bank circled to a slurred whistle call and came back over. I missed with the first shot. This has not been a small fear of mine. I'm not a great shot and with almost every duck added to the list so far, I've shot above my pay grade. The only exception was an eider that I missed twice but thought enough of me to circle back and give me another chance. Being down the the last of two barrels brought a stark realization that I might just reset 4 seasons of hard work, but the over barrel buckled the second bird from the end. He fell between me and the decoys that he and his flock were ignoring. I fished him out of the water without any additional drama.
Now, all the sudden, my new reality is that I have no idea what I’m going to do tomorrow.
He (or she) seems to be an adult bird. The bill was very pink but faded quickly.
Why would anyone make fun of my decoy's neck? The proportions seem perfect to me.
My new tote board. Everything except for the cackling goose and tundra swan were killed in SC.
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Originally Posted by Chessbay
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