Indholdsfortegnelse for December/January 2025-26 i Wildfowl

THERE WAS A TREE TO MY immediate right on the edge of the pond where we were shooting doves, and the guy to my left kept shooting over my head and blasting away at birds behind the tree that I could not see. Normally, I would have quickly had words with him, due to the muzzle blast. But there was no need. We were shooting the new BANISH shotgun suppressor, and while it was annoying because we were blasting away with Winchester Magnum Dove loads, at 1,400+ fps, the noise was not bad. The aptly named BANISH silencer actually banishes that loud crack. Not “Hollywood” quiet, but tolerable. I was on a field test trip with Shaundi Campbell of Browning and mostly running A5s with the new silencers, and everyone…

❚ DUCK CREEK DECOY WORKS DUCK CLUB DOUBLE A terrific motion decoy now gets even better. The Flashback from Duck Creek Decoy Works combines traditional side-to-side ripples with an innovative tip-up feeding design to create a decoy just shy from a living breathing mallard! And now with the Duck Club Double (DCD), you get twice the movement in the spread. Each DCD includes one drake and one mallard, two carry bags, two wall chargers, and two PowerAnchors. Weighing just 14 ounces, the rechargeable PowerAnchors double as both decoy weight and power source, providing up to 10 hours of run-time in all types of ‘fowling scenarios. $500 | duckcreekdecoys.com ❚ MOJO OUTDOORS NEW DABBLER Do the innovators at MOJO Outdoors, the same outfit that introduced the MOJO Mallard Spinning Wing Decoy…

Just when you think you understand duck seasons in the South, everything has changed. We were in the land of MOJO and Phil Robertson, country where these superpowers made duck hunting fun and cool again. Northeast Louisiana. Having grown up hunting in south Georgia swamps and on the mighty St. Johns River in north Florida, my dad told me that our habitual haunts on the Florida-Georgia line were not in a flyway like Louisiana. He’d fallen ass-over-tea-kettle for chasing ducks in South Texas, hunting the mysterious marshes near Corpus Christi Bay back when there was nobody to speak of on them, and his old double barreled Stevens Fox fired nothing but #4 lead shot unless one of the muy grande whitetails or wild hogs wandered off the ranches down into…

TO SAY THAT wildlife and sporting artist Ralph McDonald has made a name for himself in his chosen field would be an understatement. The now 90-year-old artist from Tennessee has been to the peaks of grandeur in the world of wildlife art where prints are auctioned off at conservation fundraising banquets. Formerly trained at the prestigious Harris School of Advertising Art in Nashville, McDonald originally was a commercial illustrator for the Methodist Publishing House. But a few years down the road, he moved to his life’s calling as a wildlife and outdoors artist, a career move that propelled him from illustrations to paintings of game animals and fish, beautiful outdoors landscapes, and more. But for all the success on McDonald’s artistic resume, there’s one subject that endeared him in the…

I SUPPOSE IT WAS THE MEN’S FACES that drew me to this image. Dressed as they are in dapper attire, both seem to have a look of compassion as they feed the great white bird. I wondered who these men were and the story behind the swan. The photo caption provided me with their names—Dr. Albert T. Gainer (left) and Dr. George R. Mayfield (right), and that the story unfolded at Radnor Lake on the outskirts of Nashville, Tennessee. Although trumpeter and sometimes tundra swans were common in Tennessee along the Mississippi River, they were rare near Nashville. Only a single flock was observed between the 1910s and 1950, and the next sighting wasn’t until 1951 on Dale Hollow Lake, northeast of Nashville. It might have gone unreported had a…

“LIKE BUTTER.” That’s what my good friend, Clay, used to say when we were cleaning limits of honkers and greenheads. This was back in the day when you could legally sling lead at migrating fowl. The Federal 3-inch #2s carved deep, devastating wound channels; it shattered bone and exploded internal organs. We loved it. Like many of you, we took our steel-shot lumps. Early steel shotshells sounded more like a maraca rattle, and their lethality, especially on big Canada geese, was terrible. I geek out about shotshells. Mostly because my quest to find the ultimate duck/goose load means I get to shoot a lot. Over the years, I’ve had fantastic luck with HEVI-Shot’s HEVI-XII, HEVI-Bismuth, and others. Recently, my hunting partners and I have been making it rain with two…

THE SOUND OF HEAVY FOOTSTEPS stumbling through dry leaves snapped me from a daze. “Young man, you better catch up to your group or you’ll be disqualified for play delay,” the marshal stated in a stern voice. When I stood and slung the golf bag over my shoulder, half my irons fell out. “You alright?” The man sarcastically asked. Shaking, I wasn’t sure how to respond, so I was honest. “See that duck over there?” I said, pointing under tree limbs on the opposite shoreline of a pond. “That’s a Eurasian wigeon. It’s the first one I’ve ever seen. Do you know how rare they are around here?” The man wasn’t a duck hunter. I caught up to the group, wasn’t disqualified from the golf tournament, and played anything but…

❶ BAND: 1188-02453HUNTER: Joel Ritsema, Paw Paw, MISPECIES: Canada Goose (F)BANDED: 7/23/2016, Ontario, CanadaRECOVERED: 9/27/2025, Glendale, MICOMMENTS: It was a slow morning and all the geese using the field kept landing 200 yards behind us. Then one single came right into the spread and gave it up perfectly! ❷ BAND: 1078-89038HUNTER: Tim Phillips, Oxford, MSSPECIES: Canada Goose (M)BANDED: 6/3/2013, Salt Lake City, UTRECOVERED: 9/4/2025, Lone Rock, SaskatchewanCOMMENTS: We had a group of three birds come in and downed all of them. I was lucky enough to win the draw for this band. We knew it was an old band with the wear and tear, but had no idea it was over 14 years old. This was my 25th band and by far the oldest duck or goose to ever harvest.…

There is no need to get out before daylight at Siltcoos Lake on the central Oregon coast. Eli Brown, his 11-year-old son, Buck, and I watched guide Josh Farsworth launch his boat in the clear morning of Dec.15, 2023. Our plan for the hunt was simple. We would motor slowly around the lake’s edge until we saw a decent number of lesser scaup flying off, go in, set the decoys, and wait to see if any returned. If, after an hour, none did, we would pull the decoys and try another location. On Siltcoos one frequently needs to do that three or four times throughout the course of a morning. As we stood, I looked down the west shore of the lake to a small, wooded island. I told Buck…

Thumbing through an equivalent of WILDFOWL Magazine 100 years ago or more, you’d have seen snappy black and white images jump from the pages of articles on a variety of long-gone hunting practices, such as battery guns, sink boxes, ways to use corn and other bait, and informative tips on hunting over live decoys. I was first introduced to live decoys in Harry Walsh’s seminal 1971 Outlaw Gunner, and was mesmerized by the tale of “Old Pete,” a Canada goose toller. Decades later, I researched a piece on Texas live decoys, but admittedly, at the time, I didn’t grasp just how big live decoys were in America. Until now. Live duck, goose, brant, and swan decoys, or tollers, were a staple in every flyway across the US and Canada. Properly trained…