Gary Greene’s Memories from an Old Hunter………..#33
This column will be a little different than most as it is my satire on: “I haven’t shot ducks that well!”
There, I’ve said it. I admit it: “And geese are bigger and probably slower than ducks and I’ve missed more than my share of those too.”
Pheasant, now there’s a bird, I can shoot at and actually hit with regularity. They usually start out near you and the shots are usually similar in nature…...going in the away direction. Oh of course, you will get the occasional pheasant fly back into your face or fly straight up as if it were trying to escape a silo. Then even more rarely, you will get the fly in, with its duck imitation, coming from some far distance, as if landing into your well placed pheasant decoys.
In comparison, as a duck hunter, I am never quite sure what those ducks are going to do to surprise me. The larger geese don’t alter their course as often or as quickly as their cousin the duck. Those ding-dong ducks can arrive out of nowhere, and give your decoys a good look, all while you have your back to them. Or they can come right at you as if you were set up in the bay at Pearl Harbor. Or they decide, just out of gun range, there was something they didn’t like with that tilted, seventh decoy from the right, that you didn’t set up properly at 5:00am, because your hands were froze.
Even we have success sometimes. Here's my son Nate Greene with a pair of beautiful drake Mallards. (2014)
As far as I am able to calculate, most other duck hunters, with whom I’ve discussed their hunting capabilities, successfully shoot nearly 90% on all their shots. They get lots of double and triple kills, usually using only one round. Their ducks always are full plumage drakes sporting eight inch curls or 15 inch tail feathers. Their daily limits will include a couple of bull Canvasbacks, and a Black Duck. Each hunt they will shoot at least one of the rarely seen Brazilian Teal, South Africa Shelduck, or European Mandarin ducks.
They are burdened with the amount of banded ducks that they harvest. So much so, that in the boat, they have little disagreements regarding who has to keep the bands and complete the troublesome task of registration.
I wonder how OUR hunting party watches a dozen geese setting down into our dekes and all six of our guys take aim, and all six of us claim we were right on our goose and we killed it. When we tally up the retrieved head count, it appears we all shot the same goose.
The other duck hunters never shoot a hen of any species, even if it is a Canada Goose. How do they do it? No matter, how many hundreds of ducks they shoot each year, with almost every shot, there is a kill. Every duck is immediately dead in the water. They haven’t lost a shot duck since the Eisenhower (He was a president!) administration.
I have two fine duck retrieving labs and within seconds, they are on our shot duck. Many times our ducks hit the water, and they submerge like a 1923 Houdini magic act, only to reappear in the adjacent lake. We’ve wounded a few ducks that leave a wake as if they were operating a 35 horse, Mercury Outboard. When a large flock (For me, that’s more than one) flies past our spread, how come, I always have trouble picking which bird to shoot. When the other duck hunters, have a flock of 50-60 birds come flying in, at 50-60 mph, and there are only three drakes in that flock. Every time, they easily, are able to shoot those three drakes……with one shot.
I have wounded a duck that ended up twenty yards in front of me and as I’m trying to put it out of its misery, I fire another three shots peppering the water. After my shooting had ceased, my duck appeared somewhat annoyed with the entire situation and then it went airborne. First, it circled my blind as if it were threatening me, then as it departed, it looked back over its shoulder at me, thinking in duck language: “What was that all about?” My son Nate and I use more shells shooting at wounded ducks on the water, than we do when they are flying. We will take our boat, out from the blind, to retrieve a wounded duck that has sailed too far of a distance for my dogs to safely retrieve. Our wounded duck will float on the water, motionless, outside the cattail line, until we troll over and I begin to lean over the side of the boat with my big fish net. Then our, no longer playing “possum” duck will run on the surface of the water, like a mud hen to the cattails, never to be seen again.
Other hunters, if they ever have wounded ducks, they will not attempt to recover it by pursuit, instead they will use their “Come back Call.” Their wounded duck, even if it landed in the world’s largest freshwater cattail marsh, will return to the scene of the crime, as if it were its’ mother’s nest. The duck hunter will use a call, he designed with four reeds, and personally crafted with a knife he forged himself. The wood he chose for his call, he selected from just the right, knot free branch, while crawling 40 feet up into the top of a three hundred year old, Amazon Rainforest, Kapok Tree, while he was retracing Teddy Roosevelt’s 1913 journey on that treacherous river.
Then there’s me…….I just haven’t shot ducks that well!!!!