Innehållsförteckning för August 2025 - Equipment Annual från Wildfowl

WHEN I REACHED OUT TO THE OLD MAN about contributing an essay to celebrate this 40th Anniversary Issue of WILDFOWL, he was thrilled but said it would be tough to make the time because he was busy turkey hunting with Marge, his wife of 50 years. Worth Matheson now lives in a retirement home after moving off his farm, yet at 82 and despite fighting Parkinson’s, is still out juggling deadlines between pounding gobblers (4 so far this year!). How much do we hope we can be like this guy, is all I can say! Proof that ‘fowling keeps you young at heart. Worth is a wing-shooting legend, with 123 bird species under his belt. He wrote in the very first issues of WILDFOWL, August-September 1985, and travelled the world…

BIG MONEY WOOD DUCK DECOY Last April, the first 10 lots of the Guyette & Deeter’s Decoys and Sporting Art auction raised a reported $1.22 million dollars (gross.) The first item auctioned in Lombard, Ill. was an Elmer Crowell wood duck decoy which brought a sales price of $504,000. According to Antiques and the Arts, seven of those 10 lots came from the collection of the late decoy collector Ted Harmon. QUACKERS DELAY MISSOURI BASEBALL GAME It’s rarer than an unassisted triple play, the crazy tale of a pair of ducks causing a delay at a May minor league baseball game. Play stopped when a pair of ducks landed on the field, then waddled along for a walk during the fourth inning between the Springfield Cardinals, a AA affiliate of…

THE IMAGE IN THIS ISSUE OF WILDFOWL is of duck hunters in Alaska in 1899. It was the title—“Here they Come: Duck Hunting in Alaska”—that caught my eye. Sportsmen traveling to hunt waterfowl in Alaska before the 1900s? That would have been an unusual find. But it was not to be. After a little digging, I learned that this was not a wealthy group of intrepid wing-shooters at all. The real story was even better. In the late 1890s, dreams of a fast-fortune lured gold prospectors to the north-central Alaska Yukon region, and photographer Will H. Leigh followed them. Leigh was there to document the “mining camps and icebound regions of the North” for the Pennsylvania-based Keystone View Company, and after a year traveling with one band of prospectors, he…

THE COLD NOVEMBER DAY with winds of 30 mph dropped the temperature to downright freezing. Traveling all the way from Oklahoma, Brian Creed and his companions had made the trip to North Dakota’s farm country. It was the first test of his new trailer blind. “We set up between a cornfield and a beanfield with a rockpile behind the blind to help hide it,” Creed said. “There are lots of rock piles in North Dakota from farmers clearing rocks from their fields. There were between 5,000 and 10,000 specks, Canadas and snows in the area. We began setting up at 4 a.m. and were cooking breakfast before first light.” A few ducks came in early, before the geese started flying. Once the shooting began, it was so constant that it…

It was a New Year‘s Day hunt in Maryland a few years ago when I first ran into them. We had a fairly regular winter to date, but this particular day the rainy forecast was welcome to this native Oregonian. I was joined by a good friend, his wife, along with another wingshooting companion on a guided hunt with a good buddy on his farm. While the day brought some of the usual suspects that you’ll find on the Eastern Shore, what surprised us all was the flash of blue plumage on the wings that came whipping across the top of the decoys in the corn pond. Teal are always a welcome addition, but while we usually see green-wingeds in January, the blue-winged teal that graced us that day were…

AT AGE 82 AND WITH ADVANCING PARKINSON’S—which has a notable effect on what I am able to do outdoors, I increasingly spend time thinking back on the long trail I have been making my way along. Recently I got an email from WILDFOWL editor Skip Knowles, asking me to contribute something for the 40th Anniversary issue. That brought back a flood of good memories. I first started shooting at doves in Florida in 1948 with a BB gun. In 1951 I had moved up to a double barrel .410 and bagged my first game bird, a mourning dove, near Lake City, Florida. Over the years I added 53 more species of native and introduced game birds to my list. If I am correct, that is all but one in the…

Flyway Veteran ❶ BAND: 2167-81716 HUNTER: Charles Kager, Anacortes, WA SPECIES: Mallard (M) BANDED: 8/27/2018, Alberta, Canada RECOVERED: 1/2/2025, Skagit Wildlife Area, WA COMMENTS: A drake mallard that out-smarted lots of hunters until 2025 when he finally came crashing down into the decoys. ❷ BAND: 2257-77946 HUNTER: Spencer Shirshac, Hampton, CT SPECIES: American Black Duck (F) BANDED: 9/19/2023, New Brunswick, Canada RECOVERED: 1/16/2023, Groton, CT COMMENTS: My first ever banded duck after 10 years of hunting. I shot it from a homemade kayak/blind just off the coast. ❸ BAND: 1144-43857 HUNTER: Banks Roberson, Raleigh, NC SPECIES: Green-Winged Teal (M) BANDED: 9/1/2023, Quebec, Canada RECOVERED: 12/20/2024, Currituck Sound, NC COMMENTS: Banks (10-years-old) was on a hunt with his grandad in the Currituck Sound when he killed his first double on a…

IF YOU READ THIS COLUMN in the June/July issue of WILDFOWL, you can tell I’m a fan of preparing dogs for tests. They provide many benefits that make you a more experienced trainer, and your retriever a better hunter. However, I’ve noticed an odd paradox in talking to folks at sports shows, outdoor events and even my own kennel operation. When the topic of hunt tests comes up, I occasionally hear something like, “I’d like to do that, but it’s not that important to me. I just want to hunt with my dog.” To me, that logic doesn’t make sense. Make no mistake, training for a hunt test is training for hunting. Sure, there might be some things about hunt tests that cause frustration. Maybe you think the judges are…

You probably already know of Dale Bordelon and his Bayou Beast company, and he likes it that way. Dale cherishes people, and he’s passionate about Louisiana’s hunting heritage, ironically carrying the old-ways message through modern means—social media, podcasts, and videos. A wooden barrel brought Dale and me together years ago. He wanted to build a shipping barrel like the market gunners did back in the day, and I had some photos he could use. When I called him to accept his long-standing invite for a hunt, I told him I was coming to see that barrel. It was my first duck hunting trip to Louisiana since I lived there in the 1980s. It was good to be back. When I moved to Louisiana from the Chesapeake Bay, it felt like…

I‘m trendy. I‘m not afraid of change; I jump on the bandwagon if something new and exciting happens. Living life to the fullest is how I look at it. Still, many times in life, the “trendy way” has been the wrong way. However, as a waterfowl hunter, the trendy way has, usually, been the right way. Currently, I’m addicted to blends. Give me a box of 3-inch #2s and #4s or #2s and BBs in tungsten/steel or bismuth/steel, and I’m happy. I’ve discovered shotshells that blend two shot sizes, and two different metals extend my effective kill range drastically. You’ll get to read about plenty of blends below, and I highly recommend saving your pennies and buying them by the case, not the box. Regarding chokes, I’m always up for…

I‘m not going to tell you that since 1974 I’ve hidden in it all, but I think I’m pretty close. Ditches. Willows. Snowbanks. Stock tanks. Goose chairs. Layouts. A-frames. Even oak-covered boxes big enough for eight shooters, complete with a full kitchen. I draw the line at Wi-Fi and television, though I won’t turn down a small transistor radio and the Cleveland Indians during teal season. Waterfowl blinds have progressed light-years ahead of what I grew up using in the Seventies. When Ron Latschaw introduced the first Eliminator style layout blind in ’93, the ‘fowling world was forever changed. Since then, hundreds of designs have walked on stage; some, like the A-frame, or Latschaw’s Eliminator, have stood the proverbial test of time. Others, like the infamous Goose Suit, which I…

YOU KNOW THAT SCENE IN JURASSIC PARK where the T-Rex is bearing down on the skidding Jeep, snarling and snapping in the rear-view mirror? Yeah, that scene didn’t scare me. Big yawn and a glance at the watch when I first saw that film as a teenager. Because after you’ve looked in the rearview mirror and watched your own aluminum canoe slipping and flipping and skipping down the interstate like a napkin in the wind between the tractor trailers, few other sights will ever alarm you. Fortunately, no persons or vehicles were harmed by the flying canoe, and somehow the ancient 16-foot Alumacraft emerged from this tumble none the worse for the wear (“Not even a scratch,” my buddy marveled when we recovered the boat on the shoulder of Interstate…

A GENERATION AGO, MOMS AND DADS would often tune in with the kids on a Saturday morning to watch cartoons and polish off bowls of cereal. Everyone, it seemed, was intent on watching the ongoing chase between good old Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny. In the classic Looney Tunes rivalry, Bugs always seemed to have the upper hand over the hapless Fudd, but that didn’t stop the cartoonish hunter from pressing forward with the admonition “Shhhhhhh! Be vewy vewy quiet...we’re hunting wabbits!” Even though crafty Bugs always came out on top, that never stopped Elmer from trying again next Saturday. He was always back at it with his shotgun, somehow finding another opportunity to chase that pesky rabbit. If only real life proved to be so easy for waterfowl hunters,…

AS I SAT AT MY DESK sulking about my six-year-long band drought I’m suffering through, an email popped up from a Vince Sherman. He told me about a 30-year streak of harvesting a banded duck or goose each season. I’m not sure if that made me feel better or worse, but it caught my attention, nonetheless. I emailed back asking for more information and realized that going 30 for 30 on seasons with a band is something that I had to write about. Sherman told me this year he was able to shoot a banded drake mallard in West Virginia after obtaining permission from a farmer with river front access. Sherman says, “We had an unusually cold period, and the small river was locking up fast. This area in West…

I‘m not one for walking around an art museum looking at paint splattered against a canvas and crying because of the artist’s passion. I guess I may lack some sophistication. When I think of artwork, I think of a well carved decoy; the intricate lines of feathers, the subtle hues of paint to perfectly mimic a real duck. That, to me, is true art. If you really want to create a masterpiece—a waterfowler’s idea of the Sistine Chapel—take those decoys and place them in a pattern to look like a flock of birds on the water. As the sun crests over the marsh, and you look at those decoys bobbing on the water, there you have your magnum opus. Every time I stare out at a spread of decoys, whether…

During the half century since my first duck, I’ve been called a lot of things by my fellow waterfowlers—not all of which can be reprinted in this family-friendly publication But what I’ve never been called is a ‘fowling fashion icon. No, sir, I’m nothing of the sort. However, 50 years after my inaugural hen mallard, I’m finding it easy as a duck hunter to dress smart, not only visually, if that matters at all, but from a comfort standpoint too. When it comes to waterfowl clothing, it’s all out there in spades. Battery-heated jackets. Hybrid parka systems that seem more like a minus 40 sleeping bag than they do a coat. Gloves. Head gear. Vests. Base layers. Mid-layers. It’s a hell of a long way from the mostly ripped thermal…