Indholdsfortegnelse for November 2020 i Wildfowl

IT’S TRUE, this has been an awful year, but there’s a bright spot. Combine a meat shortage with legions of folks suddenly having time on their hands, and unable to go to the NBA playoffs games, and BOOM! Lots of new boots are hitting the fields this year. Only a few states like Florida and California have not seen an increase. Most have seen a spike in hunting license sales, with New York doubling turkey, big game and trapping licenses and a 105% increase in hunter safety tests. Duck and goose hunters have been increasing since 2016, and a record was set for background checks in March. So many people are crowding state wildlife areas in Colorado they passed a law mandating purchase of a hunting or fishing license just…

DUCK STAMP KING DIES AT AGE 100  A five-time winner of the Federal Duck Stamp painting competition—a standing record— Maynard Reece passed away on July 11, 2020. While Reece’s most remembered piece will forever be his 1959 duck stamp, which shows the official moniker of Migratory Bird Hunting and Conservation Stamp, Reece’s artistic talent and his love for wildlife and the outdoors are forever etched in waterfowl lore. YAMAHA DOES MORE  Yamaha Motor Corp., USA continues its efforts to make the great outdoors better than ever. The manufacturers latest outdoor access initiative grant supports a wide range of outdoor recreation projects, from OHV staging area maintenance and infrastructure development to trail rehabilitation, signage and mapping. “Mirroring the goals of Yamaha’s outdoor access initiative, the recent passing of the Great American…

RIGHT AGAINST THE NebraskaSouth Dakota border, Cherry County’s several rivers, including the North Loup, Snake and Niobrara, offered these guys some great shooting. South Dakota and Nebraska are smack-dab in the seam of the Central and Mississippi Flyway’s migration funnel from the fertile Canadian Prairies of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta, so it probably wasn’t hard for them to turn their gun barrels red hot on a chilly fall morning. In their canvas-coated hunting uniform of the era, it doesn’t seem like the bitter wind-swept winters of the Great Plains have set in. In those days, hunters often wore white shirts and even ties when they hunted. It must be early, as most of the birds aren’t yet in winter plumage but rather still in transition from the summer molt with…

THANKSGIVING MORNING OF 2019 dawned cold, windy and rainy. Christopher Wilson and Scott Kingry had arrived at a Virginia reservoir at 5:40 a.m. to launch Wilson’s pontoon boat blind. Heading to a sheltered cove, they set up some Canada goose decoys and waited for dawn. “It was only my fourth or fifth time out in the boat,” Wilson said. “That morning, when we woke up and found out it was raining, we decided that if we sat on the couch, we weren’t going to kill anything, so we went anyway. About 30 minutes after legal shooting light, we heard geese coming down the channel. They hooked into the cove and came right in. I have to give the credit to Scott for the calling because I was so excited the…

THE SIGHT OF LAND grew smaller and smaller as Chris Nicolai yanked on the starter cord to no avail. One fuel tank had run dry, and he had swapped it for the extra that the Cessna pilot left with them as he took the last load of biologists to less remote parts of the Alaskan Bush. Unscrewing the cap revealed about a quarter of the fluid was water. Chris Nicolai, and his wife and fellow biologist Amy, were drifting toward Russia at the mercy of the Bering Sea, one of the most notoriously dangerous waters on earth. Alaska’s Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta is so named because the Yukon and Kuskokwim Rivers bisect the fertile chunk of land. The abundance of lakes, ponds, streams, and coastline combine with ample vegetation to make the…

SPRING CONSERVATION seasons were implemented to address the overabundant midcontinent population of snow geese that was damaging its own arctic and sub-arctic nesting grounds. They also provide waterfowlers with a source for some additional recreation and organic protein, and occasionally a band or two worth bragging about. Red Deer resident Spencer Podgurski and his pals Riley Kloss, Jake Dahl and Roger Marcil are experienced fall hunters but were newcomers to the spring season when they set out in search of some sport. “We started out leaving the house on Saturday around 4 p.m. to follow up on a hot tip,” Podgurski began, recounting his adventure. “The field we were directed to had birds, somewhere around eight to ten thousand, but we had issues, including locating the landowners to get permission.…

ASK MOST DUCK hunters when they really want to be in a blind and you’ll probably get two answers—early season and late. The early season is special for obvious reasons, but mostly because you’ve got the chance to target local birds and the action can be pretty reliable. The late season, with its (hopefully) colder temperatures and waves of migrators is equally as special, again, because of the promise of action-filled mornings. Tucked between the two is the mid-season, which can be really hit or miss depending on where you hunt. If the local birds are largely gone and the migrators are stalled out 200 miles north of you, the action can nearly slow to a halt. This is a bummer for us, but can be something else entirely for…

THE MOONLIGHT through the clouds didn’t provide much visibility, but all you needed to do was listen. The water against the side of the boat and the hum of the motor mixed with the rumble of chatter and wingbeats of hundreds of thousands of ducks painted a picture that a blind man could see. It didn’t matter that we were only a few miles from home, we’d entered a whole ‘nother world the second we left the boat ramp. The flooded hardwood timber of Arkansas’ river bottoms or the dry fields and sloughs in the Dakotas' prairie pothole region are some of the habitats most often topping a mallard hunter’s bucket list. However, the navigable waterways that cut across the Midwest aren’t always thought of as waterfowl destinations but can…

WATERFOWLING CAN BE such a tough, demanding sport, and so dependent on weather fluctuations and the fickle temperament of birds, it seems like we are constantly bracing ourselves for a degree of disappointment. We know each outing can be a long waiting game, and hope in our souls that today will yield one of those great moments we live for. We feel this way deeply enough that it can almost feel bizarre when a waterfowl hunt goes really well right out of the gate, the birds cooperating from the very start. We’d been looking forward to this Oklahoma/Kansas border crane hunt for over a year, and brushed up our blinds in the darkness at the edge of a no-till grain field anxiously. Every crevice in the panel blinds was stuffed…

IN MOST DUCK CAMPS, a pair of birds get all the love, and for good reason. They’re gorgeous! Few sights in the waterfowl woods compare to an orange-feet-down greenhead hovering over a spread of well-placed fakes or the long sprig of a whistling pintail. Both species are cherished by the duck hunrer. The problem is, while mallard populations continue to thrive, the northern pintail has fallen on hard times. It’s these hard times that have forced the USFWS, as well as state game and fish agencies, to reduce the bag limit on pintails in most areas, and according to DU’s Chief Scientist, Dr. Tom Moorman, those bag limits aren’t likely to broaden much in the coming years. “The pintail is the most unique of all puddle ducks,” said Moorman. “The…

THROUGHOUT MY CAREER, I’ve had the chance to film hunting dogs working in the pheasant sloughs, grouse woods, and on the water for ducks. One thing that always struck me after reviewing footage after a day’s work is how often my dogs would have their eyes closed while running or swimming full bore. It stands to reason that if you’re two feet tall and charging through brush, you’d better protect your eyes at all costs. Not only is it a testament to their sheer tenacity to carry forward without being able to see half the time, but also a pretty interesting window into how much their noses must guide them when they temporarily shut down the sense most relied on to physically move. But no matter what a dog does…

FOR THOSE NOT yet on Social Security, we used to shoot lead shot that did a pretty good job of dropping whatever you pointed it at, but it was poisoning ducks that picked it up off the slough and river bottoms. The lead got into their system and either killed them or made them sterile and unable to reproduce, so along came steel shot. Shot pellet killing capacity is measured in terms of grams per cubic centimeter (gr/ cm3). Lead comes in between 10.5 and 11 gr/cm3 depending on the alloy, steel is 7.9, bismuth 9.7 and Apex Tungsten Super Shot (TSS for short) at a whopping 18 to 18.5 gr/ cm3. That’s heavy artillery! TSS is made by blending powdered tungsten, nickel and iron then molding it under extreme…

IS THE AREA you are planning to hunt bordered by a hog wire or a barbed wire fence? If so, a little training on negotiating these type fences could prevent injuries and avoid some costly vet bills. If you don’t want your dog to hit a hog wire fence or barbed wire at full speed and suffer the broken bones or gashes that these fences can inflict, take some time before the hunt to teach your dog to go under wire and stop at a hog wire fence. It is fairly easy to do. For barbed wire, simply heel the dog up to a barbed wire fence, stop him, raise the bottom wire with your hand and cast him through. Repeat on his return. After several sessions, the dog should…

FORTY-FIVE YEARS of doing this waterfowl thing, yet I couldn’t have scripted this one any better. A father and two sons. Dad, a two-tour Iraq vet, a Navy Seabee, 2005-06 and ’08. And the boys, Ben, 11, and his brother, Ryan, 13. New waterfowlers all. The Old Man had killed a few geese, local Canadas, but the boys were brand spankin’ new to the game. So I take the three of them to my go-to farm toward the Washington coast. “No promises,” I tell them by way of disclaimer. “I’ve been having a rough year on geese. Real hit and miss.” I go on with my dark cloud of maybe/maybe not. “Haven’t been to the farm in a while. Sure there’s something around. What? I don’t know.” But they’re new,…