Skip Knowles - Wildfowl Magazines Duck Hunting: Best of Wildfowls Skills, Tactics, and Techniques from Top Experts

Copyright 2017 by Outdoor Sportsman Group

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Stephan Ledeboer and Tom Lau

Cover photo by Dale C. Spartas, www.spartasphoto.com. The hunt was provided by Northern Prairie Outfitters, www.northenprairieoutfitters.com

Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-1910-1

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-1911-8

Printed in China

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

IN THE BLOOD

Duck hunters dont have to wait to go to heaven. For us it exists right here, all fall and winter. So why do people think were crazy? A friend who hunts upland birds once asked me why duck hunters are willing to endure all they suffer through. Struggling in mud that will suck your boots off or breaking ice just to get soaked throwing decoys in the dark. How is that fun? he asked. The 4 a.m. starts over freezing boat ramps or in sleet and rain, building brushy blinds all summer in the heat and insects, and the stinky wet dogs shaking water and mud and blood on everything all while hauling grimy, expensive and always-breaking paraphernalia. Living with the mountains of expensive decoys, overpriced ATVs and specialized boats good for just one place: The swamps that most people avoid at all cost.

It is all rather unappealing to a refined tweedy upland birder with a glossy double gun and a pretty fair-weather dog with frills hanging off its tail.

There is so much I want to tell him. How those mission-specific boats and gear are ugly aesthetically, yes, but very beautiful to us. How a handmade heated floating portable dog blind you killed a weekend building (hey, the thing almost works) totally made sense at the time you were trying to re-purpose that old Igloo cooler.

Because youre holding this book, you get it, but how do you explain?

That to you, waterfowling is so rich in diversity, pageantry and lore, no other avenue in the hunting life is as noble. That nothing stirs you like the skinny fingers of daybreak reaching out in quicksilver traces through your decoys as dawn peeps across a marsh.

We can give ourselves goose bumps at any time just by closing our eyes and thinking of ducks and geese on their final approach to the layout blind, as you hold your breath and try to become small and invisible.

How we love all that filthy gear, that post-apocalyptic boat/blind, that messy pile of decoys in need of paint, those ragged bags full of fake birds, that wobbly old MOJO with the steel shot pellets embedded beak to butt. That dirty layout blind in the corner of the garage. These are our weapons, our tools of the trade, not encumbrances. Magic things happen when we climb in a blind and look to the sky.

There is simply nothing like waterfowling. How the hiss of wings cutting the air before you have even seen the birds can be louder than you can believe, as your stomach knots up at the realization they are really close . How often before you have seen them you catch that flicker of motion reflected across the surface of the water, the speeding shadows of these much-awaited sky-born creatures that fly as fast as arrows.

With time, you know their language and can tell by their chatter whether they are happy or nervous birds even on the approach. And just by the shifting sounds their wings make you can tell if they have seen you or not. How do you explain that when you are washed in the blood it is not so much work, as it must appear to a genteel quail hunter, but truly living?

Heaven to you is friends and family in a blind, the 10 a.m. smell of propane and cooking sausage creeping through the cold dense air, inside a boat or a hide where even little peoples legs are long enough to join in the fun. Your subconscious registers the thump-thump-thump of a Labs tail telling you to hurry and scan the skies for approaching silhouettes. Everybody get down, here they come!

Hunting is a reminder that not all men can be tamed, and waterfowlers are the Wild Bunch of bird hunting. Each fall, everyone who is not crazy is home watching football, sleeping in, eating Christmas turkey where is the reward in that? How intensely alive and happily weary do you feel coming home after a day of snow and boat spray and wind in your face? Its a much different kind of tired, a pleasant warm glow, many worlds removed from the fatiguing stress of career and day-to-day modern life.

But I dont tell all this to my pheasant-chasing friend. Instead, I put it in terms I knew he could grasp: Imagine if the pheasants or Huns or quail came in 15 different subspecies, every brilliant color under the sun? Now imagine if giant flocks of pheasants showed up overnight and covered entire fields when just weeks prior there were none in your area. A few show up, and they start migrating through by the tens of thousands? What if you eagerly watched for storms to the far north to bring the harbinger, the forefront of this migration? Now imagine you could call those upland birds in and decoy them in huge flocks and shoot them right in front of a comfortable blind with friends.

Thats why we do it.

I love upland bird hunting. There is something great about just grabbing a gun and going for a walk. It is a simple pleasant experience, like golf, an enhanced stroll in the outdoors, and the explosion of a pheasants flush is thrilling. But neither pheasants nor Chukar nor Huns are even native wildlife (though they are delicious). And the dog work is not remotely the same. Training a Lab to launch off your boat or blind and land with a heavy splash, already lined out and chasing a drake pintail, breaking skim ice, even diving for a cripple, it is as intense as gun dog-work gets.

And the wingshooting is far more challenging. Calling a flock of greenheads shining in the sun in close, seeing them buckle their wings in commitment, and folding a duck clean to splash in the water is as close to a major league home run as us amateur athletes are going to get. Standing up in a rolling boat and killing a drake sea duck that is screaming like a fighter jet with a tail wind, or successfully shooting a single bird from a clump of dainty teal doing their drunken flock-of-bats flight approach you do that, and you know you have done something.

WILDFOWL has been there over 30 years and going strong, surprising, no doubt, to those who thought print contentboth books and magazineswould go the way of VHF and compact discs. While internet content has improved slightly, its not happening nearly fast enough. Blue-facing your way through websites to try and find meaningful, immersive features and stories is still an unpleasant experience wherein unwanted auto insurance pop-up ads and videos are blaring at you, as you navigate a sea of intrusive prompts, many of which are phony attempts to get you to click-through to an unrelated advertisers site. It is all rather annoying, and you cant even see your devices screen well in bright light or sunshine. We live in fear of getting wet and if your tablet or phones battery doesnt die, you still have to shut it down when planes take off.