Failure in duck hunting comes from a combination of factors that you can and can't control. But when failure becomes a constant, it starts to feel personal.
Sounds like my last 3 days of the season in Washington, except I got skunked all three days. I do enjoy the experience but sure wish I ended the season with a few ducks! Yesterday the skys were full of ducks and geese, all helbent on some other location than landing in our decoys, and we watched many of them cup up and drop into a field a 1/2 mile away.... on private land.
Holly this sounds very close to my experiences in general, which is why I love your stories so much- you say things I might think but wouldn't necessarily express to my buddies. My season has been somewhat different though- we had I would say maybe excessive success in the Delta, but with geese not ducks. My refuge duck hunts this year were mixed - a few limits but many days with only a couple of birds. I came up considerably shorter than I would have if I'd have shot straps of spoonies, but that isn't how I roll, and now I don't have a pile of spoonies in the freezer to wonder what to do with. It seemed that we waited for ducks to show up, and when they finally did in late December the numbers spiked spectacularly everywhere, then ground to a semi-halt as the storms came and spread the birds out. I also decided to revise my "birds-don't-fly-in-the-rain" and "the storm-blew-them-out" theories (the latter especially as applied to Greylodge), perhaps too late, but it became necessary if you wanted to hunt. And we had some OK hunts in nasty weather - although I don't particularly enjoy it, I'll gladly do it, especially if the wind will get 'em flying. I totally agree that it's real easy to pretend to be OK with getting skunked bc you just want to "get out." The other side of it is that I absolutely loved hunting with my many excellent friends, and by myself too, and I can be happy with quality shots on a sprig and a teal for a day's work. I'm basically just thrilled to be out at sunrise in the beautiful areas we hunt. Many states have nothing that even comes close to our CA refuge system and flyway, so there's that to be grateful for.
Yeah, if more of my zeroes had been quality shots at a couple birds, it would've been much less of a grind! If I get only two birds but they were great shots, that can make me pretty happy.
I suspect I just need to rethink my approach to and expectations of December. Not sure yet how that looks, but continuing to set myself up for misery is NOT an option. (Of course, I will come up with a brilliant plan and then we'll have a crazy freeze up north in early November and my plan will be blown to shreds ... but that's duck hunting.)
I can somewhat relate... although I haven't worked NEARLY as hard as it sounds you have, I have been unsuccessful in obtaining any ducks for two years now. Two depressing, annoying, and chagrined years where every duck hunt I go on, we see hoards of ducks flying into fed ponds on the horizon, or no ducks at all. Most of it has to do with available land/water to hunt on, which there is very little of (that's not private and out of bounds) in my neck of the woods and a lot of that has to do with richer folks obtaining and heavily feeding ponds in the area. Going out hunting is fun, even if you don't get something, until you do it again... and again, and again, and again. It can be SO disheartening. Luckily, I can always rely on a few successful Canada goose hunts to lift my spirits. I am still missing my seared mallard breasts and duck confit though!
Tangentially related, I was scouring the web for tips on identifying ducks in flight and ran across this lovely article on Audobon. I was a third of the way through it when the author started talking about stocks and rendering fat for use throughout the year and I was like, "This has to either be Hank or Holly's writing." Sure enough...the internet is a small world some times.
I haven't missed a single shot this year. Of course, I hadn't duck hunted until New Year's day due to complications of work and weather. This year, I wanted to learn an area in the North Bay that I had hunted successfully with my nephew in his boat last year. So when the weather cleared a bit Sunday, I headed out on a mile long kayak trip to get to the marshes.
As soon as I set up, a spoonie snapped in from the side and dumped right into my decoys. He was perfectly positioned so it would ruin about 5 brand new decoys. He exited the same way. Ah! A sign of hope, though! The day opened up, clear and still. It was beautiful. For a photograph. The ducks lounged in the middle of large expanses of water, the normally complex waterways erased by the king tide. Occasionally a boat would pass by and a huge number of ducks would get up, hover in a whirlwind of possibility, then settle back down. They never came near me, not even distantly, save for an occasional goldeneye or bufflehead that came in to swim in the decoys. Then, one single Canvasback shot by, 'on a mission', to my right. I swung, snapped a shot, and he folded onto the thickly brushed levee. Success! I searched for him for over an hour before I gave up. It was not the ending I was hoping for. My donation to the local scavengers.
I still count it as a good day out, a worthwhile scouting trip, but I wouldn't want to repeat that too many times. Hope springs eternal, and there is next weekend.
Weirdly enough, this has been our most successful hunt year ever. We haven't gone out that much, but we haven't come home empty-handed once. We even had an amazing experience in Sonoma during opener where we figured it'd be a bad duck day, so we went out for rabbits around 10am and ran into a couple of successful hunters packing out. We asked them how they'd done (10 ducks between three of them, I think) and explained we were going out for jacks. It was news to them that jackrabbits are delicious, and they were apparently so excited about learning this fact (I plugged HAGC VERY hard as a recipe resource) that one of them just *gave* us two of his ducks as a gift. We didn't see hide nor hair of a rabbit that morning, but we still came home with what turned out to be two fat, non-stinky spoonies.
Then Dex hit his first-ever limit on the sea duck hunt with you, Holly, and we saw tons of ducks (and the most exquisite sunrise of my entire life) while hunting Grizzly Island (and came home with a few)...it may not *sound* like much, but for us it's been a very good year. I've been so bummed to hear about so many folks getting skunked repeatedly -- both because I want everyone to have a grand time and also because it's spooky to think about what this might portend for waterfowl populations -- but the last couple of years have been pretty unfun and unsuccessful for us, and this year has been exactly what we needed to remember why we love doing this. (And you capture so perfectly exactly that rush of joyful satisfaction that turns UGH THIS STINKS into SHIT THIS IS THE BEST EVER...)
Grizzly Island has been BANGING. Droughts don't hurt Suisun like they hurt the rest of the state. But Yolo Bypass is about to flood, so we'll have much better breeding habitat this spring. Not enough to make up for the mass conversion of Sac Valley farmland from duck-friendly grain crops to wildlife-hating (but wildly lucrative) nut orchards, which is a massive part of the problem. But better than last spring, which was absolutely desolate.
I have SO many feelings about those goddamn nut "orchards". When people are like WOW PISTACHIO MILK SO MUCH BETTER FOR TEH EARTH THAN COWS I want to flip tables. (Also, do the Berkeley vegans know that all the California nut farmers churning out their fancy almond milk are serious Trump supporters? I kinda think they don't.)
I personally would MUCH prefer a world full of wildlife than the privilege of paying $16/lb for pistachios, but sadly I am not Queen of the Universe, so...
Most of the almonds, I'm told, are shipped overseas. In fact, so much of ag is geared toward shipping product overseas instead of feeding local people a diet of healthy things that can grow in their region.
Holly, I can certainly feel your frustration. The season is winding down, and I know there's some urgency around making the most of it...especially since these are generally the prime days. Seems like the flight is finally turning on, just as the season is about to shut down.
But...
I have always said that CA waterfowl hunters are spoiled. I know it's true, because I was right there in it for 20 years or so... after hunting NC for most of the previous 20 years. I recall listening to my fellow hunters moan and groan about slow shooting, or how the birds wouldn't work.
"I only got one mallard!"
"I only managed to scrape down a sprig and a couple of damned spoonies."
A friend cursed the high-flying pintails that would circle and circle and then move off when someone a couple ponds over fired a shot. But watching those same birds always took my breath away.
Simply seeing birds, even at a distance, almost all day long was practically a dream come true for a hunter whose most common experience is a couple flocks of wood ducks just at shoot time, followed by a sky full of nothing for the rest of the day. Maybe a hooded merganser or ruddy duck will pick up and scoot across the water (I don't shoot either, even though mergansers now have their own bag limit). We used to see teal a little bit, but even those little guys are hanging up above the Mason Dixon until the waters freeze right down to the Chesapeake.
Pintails? Mallards? Geese? Forget about it. Sure, they get them up in the northern part of the state, but if you want to see a place with violent competition for the hot spots... just try to grab a prime spot in Pamlico Sound or the nearby river marshes. Unlike the refuges where you can pretty much walk in and find a pretty decent spot, most of the accessible public waters require a boat, along with pretty intimate knowledge of the waterways.
I barely even go anymore. That's the sad truth of it. I fired four shells last year, and I ate no ducks. It's funny, a little bit, that in CA, I thought nothing of jumping in the truck and driving three hours to camp in the sweat line. But at least after all of that, I would see lots of ducks and generally get at least a couple of shots.
Here, I can barely get motivated to wake up at 5 and drive 45 minutes to the boat ramp. There's a branch of the Cape Fear River that is much closer, but it's nearly dry due to the lack of rain the past year or so. I could literally put on waders and hike up or downstream to find a pothole like my brother and his grandson did last Thursday. But for all the sweat, twisted ankles, and climbing over deadfall, they saw three ducks... only one in range (that they missed). The last bird flew over about 5 minutes after shoot time. The rest of the day they stared at empty sky.
But at least we got drawn for swans again this year. We'll be out there for a half hour to shoot our birds, and then we'll watch the thousands more trading from the open water to the fields. I guess I'll stop whining. I'm only a little bit jealous.
Every region has its thing. Ducks are this region's thing. Pheasants have gone to shit. The deer population sucks. And you can have all the pigs and turkeys you want as long as you're willing to pay $500 for a turkey or $800 for a pig, because good luck getting one on public land.
If the duck hunting goes to hell, I don't know what my "thing" becomes here. Dove season is great, but it's only two weeks. Mountain quail leave public land once the snow hits. Maybe my next thing would be a moving van.
I don't think duck hunting is going to disappear, but it's definitely getting to the point where if you don't have a nice club, you're getting scraps for the first two-thirds of the season, because public land doesn't have the resources to grow waterfowl food and keep things green during a drought. And in years like this, that dead period will be followed by a couple weeks of good hunting, then flooded bypasses that wreck the rest of the season, which is what we're looking at in literally three days. Sigh.
I don't want to accept that hard work isn't enough to conquer these forces. But it's just not, and I need to find a way to not even think about ducks until Christmas, or it's going to be the same ordeal every year.
But I've now had two good hunts (Sunday was killer), and I'm going to go out tomorrow and try for one more, because things get really dicey after that. I'm grateful to have had any good hunts - I'd hate to have left it where it was when I got sick.
Not making comparisons here. Just thinking how glad one could be for what one has... at the end of the day, you're a waterfowler in one of the country's premier waterfowling regions.
It could be worse, and most likely it will be. All the more reason to find the joy where you can, while you can.
Thinking on it, though, I think the built-in adversity is what makes hunting so precious. Whether it's the struggle to find the good spots, the physical strain of humping a few dozen decoys through the sole-sucking mud, the psychological strain of working so hard only to see coots and ruddy ducks all day, or the frustration of seeing a storm flood the refuge and close the roads. It's the aggravation of being on the X and having a shit day with the shotgun. It's being down in your back when the perfect forecast blows in. It's sitting through November and two-thirds of December waiting for birds to show up. It's all that stuff that is, basically, duck hunting in California.
It's all that bullshit and all that suck that makes the good days so sweet.
I know that you know what you've got there, and that you appreciate it. But sometimes, it's hard to see that through the grousing.
I have invested a LOT of myself (money, time, learning, exploring) in being a duck hunter in a place where two of the three months of season are well worth the investment. Now it's shifting toward one of the three months being good, as climate change leads to more, and more severe, droughts, and delayed onset of cold temps in the north delaying the arrival of birds here.
No one likes it when the rules change right under their feet, and things that used to work don't work anymore. No one likes the pain of trying to figure out whether the changes are temporary or the new normal, and how to adapt to that. Keep trying? Abandon ship? Spend December in Cabo?
I have an enormous capacity for handling adversity and failure in hunting. I don't need every day to be glorious. Did you hear me bitching about not killing one single mountain quail this year? Nope. The reasons were unremarkable - I was scouting new ground while my burned spots recover, and I had a couple misses. No biggie. THAT is the kind of failure that makes success feel good.
But having beaten my head against the wall for most of a month that's normally good, having experienced the bafflement of seeing really gorgeous habitat utterly deserted - those things don't feel good. And I think if the same thing happened to deer hunting in a Southern state where hunters can and do kill staggering amounts of deer, they'd be grousing about it, and the fact that they could still kill more deer than I can would not change how shitty it feels.
I get it. It sucks when things change for the worst. It just does. Nobody enjoys that.
My hope for you is that this is just an anomalous season. I hope you get lots of rain this year and there's water in the places that should have water, and ducks in the places that should have ducks. I hope your misery is short-lived and that you'll soon be singing, "Happy Days are Here Again!"
We are going to have a great breeding season with the deluges we've been getting and will continue to get. Granted, we'll be starting from a very low breeding population number, but there should be more ducks on the landscape next year.
But climate change is going to continue (drought-deluge cycle, with more emphasis on more drought, and warmer temps). Another huge drag - the de-watering of the enormous Klamath refuges - is highly likely to continue. The conversion of bird-friendly grain crops to wildlife unfriendly nut orchards is going to continue as long as that crop remains insanely lucrative. These are the drivers of what we've experienced this year.
Not just being a pessimist or a whiner - these are all serious problems that conservation professionals have been watching and warning about for years. (And in case anyone besides you is following this thread, I know whereof I speak - I worked in waterfowl conservation until very recently.) Occasional wet years can mask them, but severe drought really reveals them.
Ducks will adapt. Those little buggers have wings and will go wherever the habitat looks inviting. I need to adapt too, if enjoying a long duck season is important enough to me. Maybe that means trying to get rich so I can join a nice club that holds whatever ducks are on the landscape (yeah, ha ha, not really the kind of person who puts energy into getting rich). Maybe it means hunting estuaries more (they hold birds in drought). Maybe it means carving out blocks of time to hunt in Canada or Washington when the skies are empty down here. Maybe it means doing something else in December. What it can't involve is assuming things will go back to what they were, then being despondent when that doesn't happen.
My December felt like failure, and it was. But it wasn't the failure of my hunting skills. It was the failure of my resolve to adapt to forces that I've been watching for years.
I think this is the important part of your story. The changes you're seeing are very similar to what I saw in southeastern NC, from the time I started duck hunting in the mid-70s. Winter seems to be coming later and leaving sooner, and generally not making much of a fuss while it's here. The birds don't have to fly south as soon, and some of them don't have to fly all the way down the coast anymore.
We never had the numbers or diversity of birds that you have in CA, but we had our share of mallards, black ducks, wigeon, and lots of teal. But in the time I evolved from an impatient, trigger-happy kid to a serious and dedicated duck hunter, those birds all but disappeared from our local marshes. At first it seemed like they were arriving later and later in the season, but now I'm not sure when I last saw a black duck dropping into a pothole, or a flock of mallards circling a sweetwater pond... even in February after the seasons have ended. The teal barely even bother to show up, especially not for our "early teal season". Even the wood ducks, year-round residents, appear to be thinning out.
I know that any such change is impacted by multiple factors, but I believe that climate change has exacerbated the whole. I'm also afraid it's happening a lot faster than anticipated.
There are a lot of differences between the Pacific Flyway and CA birds, and the Atlantic, but what you're seeing sounds an awful lot like what I experienced here. I hate it, but there's probably not a lot we are going to be able to do to change it in our lifetimes.
You have a point, in that duck hunting is like fishing. If you get skunked, you're mad, while most days deer hunting you understand you're not going to come back with a buck. But duck hunting is by far, the world's most inefficient means of acquiring protein. It's hard and requires a huge amount of knowledge and study. Identification, for one. And then of course, the spots. I don't have an inkling of refuges and the right blinds or ponds, but you've put that work in and you know. If you applied that to deer hunting, you'd have the same success and frankly, more meat. If you look at the averages for refuges it's pretty similar to the averages for deer hunting as far as who gets what. It's the work. I've gotten 80% of deer in the last dozen or so years off of the same 1000 acres or less of mostly public land. It's shitty, hot, thick, steep land, but it's land I've spent the time to know and love.
There is some irony in this because I got skunked for the second time in 14 years this last fall. It's been a less than productive hunting year. I think the universe was balancing for last year.
It's probably stupid how much I throw myself at the wetlands when the hunting is awful. It's not sustainable.
But the ducks are here now and I'm going to squeeze out every bit of hunting I get before flooding closes everything and the ducks scatter (which will be ... this weekend!)
Can't imagine the COVID improved your shooting or your confidence. Ugh. I have to say that my jaw dropped at $1.25 million for any duck club buy-in. First, those are very expensive ducks. And, second, that's grotesque. What a strange place we're in.
Didn't mess up my shooting at all, knock on wood just my hustle, which is no bueno. I actually got some shooting advice in early December that had a huge impact on me.
Re duck clubs, I can tell you that one in particular costs as much to run as a farm, only there's no product to bring in revenue to pay for it. The buy in, there and for most clubs, is not just a membership but a real estate purchase.
If they limit every hunt day, they can kill 210 ducks a year, so yeah, expensive! But if I were rich, I'd buy into something like that in a heartbeat. I'm grateful for public land, but it's a lot of work that will eventually become too much for me.
Clubs like that are also a huge part of wetland habitat in CA - 60% of managed wetland acres here are privately owned, mostly for hunting. Not all are that ritzy, but duck hunters with money to burn are literally the reason we have as much habitat - and waterfowl food - as we do. Is it self-interested investment? Absolutely. But its value is undeniable.
Hmm... Now I don't feel so smug about the extra I paid for years to have a Georgia wildlife conservation license plate. Seems like a puny contribution in comparison. 😂
Don't get carried away, now - be proud of that! I'm proud of what I contribute, because I give what I can. Not gonna apologize for not being rich. Just gonna be jealous of all the rich people, lol.
Sounds like my last 3 days of the season in Washington, except I got skunked all three days. I do enjoy the experience but sure wish I ended the season with a few ducks! Yesterday the skys were full of ducks and geese, all helbent on some other location than landing in our decoys, and we watched many of them cup up and drop into a field a 1/2 mile away.... on private land.
Holly this sounds very close to my experiences in general, which is why I love your stories so much- you say things I might think but wouldn't necessarily express to my buddies. My season has been somewhat different though- we had I would say maybe excessive success in the Delta, but with geese not ducks. My refuge duck hunts this year were mixed - a few limits but many days with only a couple of birds. I came up considerably shorter than I would have if I'd have shot straps of spoonies, but that isn't how I roll, and now I don't have a pile of spoonies in the freezer to wonder what to do with. It seemed that we waited for ducks to show up, and when they finally did in late December the numbers spiked spectacularly everywhere, then ground to a semi-halt as the storms came and spread the birds out. I also decided to revise my "birds-don't-fly-in-the-rain" and "the storm-blew-them-out" theories (the latter especially as applied to Greylodge), perhaps too late, but it became necessary if you wanted to hunt. And we had some OK hunts in nasty weather - although I don't particularly enjoy it, I'll gladly do it, especially if the wind will get 'em flying. I totally agree that it's real easy to pretend to be OK with getting skunked bc you just want to "get out." The other side of it is that I absolutely loved hunting with my many excellent friends, and by myself too, and I can be happy with quality shots on a sprig and a teal for a day's work. I'm basically just thrilled to be out at sunrise in the beautiful areas we hunt. Many states have nothing that even comes close to our CA refuge system and flyway, so there's that to be grateful for.
Yeah, if more of my zeroes had been quality shots at a couple birds, it would've been much less of a grind! If I get only two birds but they were great shots, that can make me pretty happy.
I suspect I just need to rethink my approach to and expectations of December. Not sure yet how that looks, but continuing to set myself up for misery is NOT an option. (Of course, I will come up with a brilliant plan and then we'll have a crazy freeze up north in early November and my plan will be blown to shreds ... but that's duck hunting.)
I can somewhat relate... although I haven't worked NEARLY as hard as it sounds you have, I have been unsuccessful in obtaining any ducks for two years now. Two depressing, annoying, and chagrined years where every duck hunt I go on, we see hoards of ducks flying into fed ponds on the horizon, or no ducks at all. Most of it has to do with available land/water to hunt on, which there is very little of (that's not private and out of bounds) in my neck of the woods and a lot of that has to do with richer folks obtaining and heavily feeding ponds in the area. Going out hunting is fun, even if you don't get something, until you do it again... and again, and again, and again. It can be SO disheartening. Luckily, I can always rely on a few successful Canada goose hunts to lift my spirits. I am still missing my seared mallard breasts and duck confit though!
Yup. It has finally gotten better for me, bit I still feel like I need to rethink how I do this for next season.
Tangentially related, I was scouring the web for tips on identifying ducks in flight and ran across this lovely article on Audobon. I was a third of the way through it when the author started talking about stocks and rendering fat for use throughout the year and I was like, "This has to either be Hank or Holly's writing." Sure enough...the internet is a small world some times.
https://www.audubon.org/news/a-duck-hunters-tips-quickly-identifying-waterfowl-wing
Hahaha, that's awesome!
This is a timely essay.
I haven't missed a single shot this year. Of course, I hadn't duck hunted until New Year's day due to complications of work and weather. This year, I wanted to learn an area in the North Bay that I had hunted successfully with my nephew in his boat last year. So when the weather cleared a bit Sunday, I headed out on a mile long kayak trip to get to the marshes.
As soon as I set up, a spoonie snapped in from the side and dumped right into my decoys. He was perfectly positioned so it would ruin about 5 brand new decoys. He exited the same way. Ah! A sign of hope, though! The day opened up, clear and still. It was beautiful. For a photograph. The ducks lounged in the middle of large expanses of water, the normally complex waterways erased by the king tide. Occasionally a boat would pass by and a huge number of ducks would get up, hover in a whirlwind of possibility, then settle back down. They never came near me, not even distantly, save for an occasional goldeneye or bufflehead that came in to swim in the decoys. Then, one single Canvasback shot by, 'on a mission', to my right. I swung, snapped a shot, and he folded onto the thickly brushed levee. Success! I searched for him for over an hour before I gave up. It was not the ending I was hoping for. My donation to the local scavengers.
I still count it as a good day out, a worthwhile scouting trip, but I wouldn't want to repeat that too many times. Hope springs eternal, and there is next weekend.
Oh, that is a bummer. I hate losing birds. I hope your next outing brings better fortune! The birds are SO HERE.
Weirdly enough, this has been our most successful hunt year ever. We haven't gone out that much, but we haven't come home empty-handed once. We even had an amazing experience in Sonoma during opener where we figured it'd be a bad duck day, so we went out for rabbits around 10am and ran into a couple of successful hunters packing out. We asked them how they'd done (10 ducks between three of them, I think) and explained we were going out for jacks. It was news to them that jackrabbits are delicious, and they were apparently so excited about learning this fact (I plugged HAGC VERY hard as a recipe resource) that one of them just *gave* us two of his ducks as a gift. We didn't see hide nor hair of a rabbit that morning, but we still came home with what turned out to be two fat, non-stinky spoonies.
Then Dex hit his first-ever limit on the sea duck hunt with you, Holly, and we saw tons of ducks (and the most exquisite sunrise of my entire life) while hunting Grizzly Island (and came home with a few)...it may not *sound* like much, but for us it's been a very good year. I've been so bummed to hear about so many folks getting skunked repeatedly -- both because I want everyone to have a grand time and also because it's spooky to think about what this might portend for waterfowl populations -- but the last couple of years have been pretty unfun and unsuccessful for us, and this year has been exactly what we needed to remember why we love doing this. (And you capture so perfectly exactly that rush of joyful satisfaction that turns UGH THIS STINKS into SHIT THIS IS THE BEST EVER...)
Grizzly Island has been BANGING. Droughts don't hurt Suisun like they hurt the rest of the state. But Yolo Bypass is about to flood, so we'll have much better breeding habitat this spring. Not enough to make up for the mass conversion of Sac Valley farmland from duck-friendly grain crops to wildlife-hating (but wildly lucrative) nut orchards, which is a massive part of the problem. But better than last spring, which was absolutely desolate.
Glad it's been such a good season for you two!
I have SO many feelings about those goddamn nut "orchards". When people are like WOW PISTACHIO MILK SO MUCH BETTER FOR TEH EARTH THAN COWS I want to flip tables. (Also, do the Berkeley vegans know that all the California nut farmers churning out their fancy almond milk are serious Trump supporters? I kinda think they don't.)
I personally would MUCH prefer a world full of wildlife than the privilege of paying $16/lb for pistachios, but sadly I am not Queen of the Universe, so...
Most of the almonds, I'm told, are shipped overseas. In fact, so much of ag is geared toward shipping product overseas instead of feeding local people a diet of healthy things that can grow in their region.
Heh, I didn't know that they're mostly destined for elsewhere. Should do my research before snarking :D
Your snark wasn't necessarily incorrect (I only know two almond farmers personally)!
Holly, I can certainly feel your frustration. The season is winding down, and I know there's some urgency around making the most of it...especially since these are generally the prime days. Seems like the flight is finally turning on, just as the season is about to shut down.
But...
I have always said that CA waterfowl hunters are spoiled. I know it's true, because I was right there in it for 20 years or so... after hunting NC for most of the previous 20 years. I recall listening to my fellow hunters moan and groan about slow shooting, or how the birds wouldn't work.
"I only got one mallard!"
"I only managed to scrape down a sprig and a couple of damned spoonies."
A friend cursed the high-flying pintails that would circle and circle and then move off when someone a couple ponds over fired a shot. But watching those same birds always took my breath away.
Simply seeing birds, even at a distance, almost all day long was practically a dream come true for a hunter whose most common experience is a couple flocks of wood ducks just at shoot time, followed by a sky full of nothing for the rest of the day. Maybe a hooded merganser or ruddy duck will pick up and scoot across the water (I don't shoot either, even though mergansers now have their own bag limit). We used to see teal a little bit, but even those little guys are hanging up above the Mason Dixon until the waters freeze right down to the Chesapeake.
Pintails? Mallards? Geese? Forget about it. Sure, they get them up in the northern part of the state, but if you want to see a place with violent competition for the hot spots... just try to grab a prime spot in Pamlico Sound or the nearby river marshes. Unlike the refuges where you can pretty much walk in and find a pretty decent spot, most of the accessible public waters require a boat, along with pretty intimate knowledge of the waterways.
I barely even go anymore. That's the sad truth of it. I fired four shells last year, and I ate no ducks. It's funny, a little bit, that in CA, I thought nothing of jumping in the truck and driving three hours to camp in the sweat line. But at least after all of that, I would see lots of ducks and generally get at least a couple of shots.
Here, I can barely get motivated to wake up at 5 and drive 45 minutes to the boat ramp. There's a branch of the Cape Fear River that is much closer, but it's nearly dry due to the lack of rain the past year or so. I could literally put on waders and hike up or downstream to find a pothole like my brother and his grandson did last Thursday. But for all the sweat, twisted ankles, and climbing over deadfall, they saw three ducks... only one in range (that they missed). The last bird flew over about 5 minutes after shoot time. The rest of the day they stared at empty sky.
But at least we got drawn for swans again this year. We'll be out there for a half hour to shoot our birds, and then we'll watch the thousands more trading from the open water to the fields. I guess I'll stop whining. I'm only a little bit jealous.
Shall we compare deer hunting?
Every region has its thing. Ducks are this region's thing. Pheasants have gone to shit. The deer population sucks. And you can have all the pigs and turkeys you want as long as you're willing to pay $500 for a turkey or $800 for a pig, because good luck getting one on public land.
If the duck hunting goes to hell, I don't know what my "thing" becomes here. Dove season is great, but it's only two weeks. Mountain quail leave public land once the snow hits. Maybe my next thing would be a moving van.
I don't think duck hunting is going to disappear, but it's definitely getting to the point where if you don't have a nice club, you're getting scraps for the first two-thirds of the season, because public land doesn't have the resources to grow waterfowl food and keep things green during a drought. And in years like this, that dead period will be followed by a couple weeks of good hunting, then flooded bypasses that wreck the rest of the season, which is what we're looking at in literally three days. Sigh.
I don't want to accept that hard work isn't enough to conquer these forces. But it's just not, and I need to find a way to not even think about ducks until Christmas, or it's going to be the same ordeal every year.
But I've now had two good hunts (Sunday was killer), and I'm going to go out tomorrow and try for one more, because things get really dicey after that. I'm grateful to have had any good hunts - I'd hate to have left it where it was when I got sick.
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Of course not.
Not making comparisons here. Just thinking how glad one could be for what one has... at the end of the day, you're a waterfowler in one of the country's premier waterfowling regions.
It could be worse, and most likely it will be. All the more reason to find the joy where you can, while you can.
Thinking on it, though, I think the built-in adversity is what makes hunting so precious. Whether it's the struggle to find the good spots, the physical strain of humping a few dozen decoys through the sole-sucking mud, the psychological strain of working so hard only to see coots and ruddy ducks all day, or the frustration of seeing a storm flood the refuge and close the roads. It's the aggravation of being on the X and having a shit day with the shotgun. It's being down in your back when the perfect forecast blows in. It's sitting through November and two-thirds of December waiting for birds to show up. It's all that stuff that is, basically, duck hunting in California.
It's all that bullshit and all that suck that makes the good days so sweet.
I know that you know what you've got there, and that you appreciate it. But sometimes, it's hard to see that through the grousing.
I have invested a LOT of myself (money, time, learning, exploring) in being a duck hunter in a place where two of the three months of season are well worth the investment. Now it's shifting toward one of the three months being good, as climate change leads to more, and more severe, droughts, and delayed onset of cold temps in the north delaying the arrival of birds here.
No one likes it when the rules change right under their feet, and things that used to work don't work anymore. No one likes the pain of trying to figure out whether the changes are temporary or the new normal, and how to adapt to that. Keep trying? Abandon ship? Spend December in Cabo?
I have an enormous capacity for handling adversity and failure in hunting. I don't need every day to be glorious. Did you hear me bitching about not killing one single mountain quail this year? Nope. The reasons were unremarkable - I was scouting new ground while my burned spots recover, and I had a couple misses. No biggie. THAT is the kind of failure that makes success feel good.
But having beaten my head against the wall for most of a month that's normally good, having experienced the bafflement of seeing really gorgeous habitat utterly deserted - those things don't feel good. And I think if the same thing happened to deer hunting in a Southern state where hunters can and do kill staggering amounts of deer, they'd be grousing about it, and the fact that they could still kill more deer than I can would not change how shitty it feels.
I get it. It sucks when things change for the worst. It just does. Nobody enjoys that.
My hope for you is that this is just an anomalous season. I hope you get lots of rain this year and there's water in the places that should have water, and ducks in the places that should have ducks. I hope your misery is short-lived and that you'll soon be singing, "Happy Days are Here Again!"
Salud.
We are going to have a great breeding season with the deluges we've been getting and will continue to get. Granted, we'll be starting from a very low breeding population number, but there should be more ducks on the landscape next year.
But climate change is going to continue (drought-deluge cycle, with more emphasis on more drought, and warmer temps). Another huge drag - the de-watering of the enormous Klamath refuges - is highly likely to continue. The conversion of bird-friendly grain crops to wildlife unfriendly nut orchards is going to continue as long as that crop remains insanely lucrative. These are the drivers of what we've experienced this year.
Not just being a pessimist or a whiner - these are all serious problems that conservation professionals have been watching and warning about for years. (And in case anyone besides you is following this thread, I know whereof I speak - I worked in waterfowl conservation until very recently.) Occasional wet years can mask them, but severe drought really reveals them.
Ducks will adapt. Those little buggers have wings and will go wherever the habitat looks inviting. I need to adapt too, if enjoying a long duck season is important enough to me. Maybe that means trying to get rich so I can join a nice club that holds whatever ducks are on the landscape (yeah, ha ha, not really the kind of person who puts energy into getting rich). Maybe it means hunting estuaries more (they hold birds in drought). Maybe it means carving out blocks of time to hunt in Canada or Washington when the skies are empty down here. Maybe it means doing something else in December. What it can't involve is assuming things will go back to what they were, then being despondent when that doesn't happen.
My December felt like failure, and it was. But it wasn't the failure of my hunting skills. It was the failure of my resolve to adapt to forces that I've been watching for years.
I think this is the important part of your story. The changes you're seeing are very similar to what I saw in southeastern NC, from the time I started duck hunting in the mid-70s. Winter seems to be coming later and leaving sooner, and generally not making much of a fuss while it's here. The birds don't have to fly south as soon, and some of them don't have to fly all the way down the coast anymore.
We never had the numbers or diversity of birds that you have in CA, but we had our share of mallards, black ducks, wigeon, and lots of teal. But in the time I evolved from an impatient, trigger-happy kid to a serious and dedicated duck hunter, those birds all but disappeared from our local marshes. At first it seemed like they were arriving later and later in the season, but now I'm not sure when I last saw a black duck dropping into a pothole, or a flock of mallards circling a sweetwater pond... even in February after the seasons have ended. The teal barely even bother to show up, especially not for our "early teal season". Even the wood ducks, year-round residents, appear to be thinning out.
I know that any such change is impacted by multiple factors, but I believe that climate change has exacerbated the whole. I'm also afraid it's happening a lot faster than anticipated.
There are a lot of differences between the Pacific Flyway and CA birds, and the Atlantic, but what you're seeing sounds an awful lot like what I experienced here. I hate it, but there's probably not a lot we are going to be able to do to change it in our lifetimes.
You have a point, in that duck hunting is like fishing. If you get skunked, you're mad, while most days deer hunting you understand you're not going to come back with a buck. But duck hunting is by far, the world's most inefficient means of acquiring protein. It's hard and requires a huge amount of knowledge and study. Identification, for one. And then of course, the spots. I don't have an inkling of refuges and the right blinds or ponds, but you've put that work in and you know. If you applied that to deer hunting, you'd have the same success and frankly, more meat. If you look at the averages for refuges it's pretty similar to the averages for deer hunting as far as who gets what. It's the work. I've gotten 80% of deer in the last dozen or so years off of the same 1000 acres or less of mostly public land. It's shitty, hot, thick, steep land, but it's land I've spent the time to know and love.
There is some irony in this because I got skunked for the second time in 14 years this last fall. It's been a less than productive hunting year. I think the universe was balancing for last year.
Duck hunting is insane and inexplicable. And God help me, I love it.
Holly,
Very impressed with your waterfowl hunting dedication!
Damn that Covid!
It's probably stupid how much I throw myself at the wetlands when the hunting is awful. It's not sustainable.
But the ducks are here now and I'm going to squeeze out every bit of hunting I get before flooding closes everything and the ducks scatter (which will be ... this weekend!)
Can't imagine the COVID improved your shooting or your confidence. Ugh. I have to say that my jaw dropped at $1.25 million for any duck club buy-in. First, those are very expensive ducks. And, second, that's grotesque. What a strange place we're in.
Didn't mess up my shooting at all, knock on wood just my hustle, which is no bueno. I actually got some shooting advice in early December that had a huge impact on me.
Re duck clubs, I can tell you that one in particular costs as much to run as a farm, only there's no product to bring in revenue to pay for it. The buy in, there and for most clubs, is not just a membership but a real estate purchase.
If they limit every hunt day, they can kill 210 ducks a year, so yeah, expensive! But if I were rich, I'd buy into something like that in a heartbeat. I'm grateful for public land, but it's a lot of work that will eventually become too much for me.
Clubs like that are also a huge part of wetland habitat in CA - 60% of managed wetland acres here are privately owned, mostly for hunting. Not all are that ritzy, but duck hunters with money to burn are literally the reason we have as much habitat - and waterfowl food - as we do. Is it self-interested investment? Absolutely. But its value is undeniable.
Hmm... Now I don't feel so smug about the extra I paid for years to have a Georgia wildlife conservation license plate. Seems like a puny contribution in comparison. 😂
Don't get carried away, now - be proud of that! I'm proud of what I contribute, because I give what I can. Not gonna apologize for not being rich. Just gonna be jealous of all the rich people, lol.
Dollars! It cost me entire DOLLARS! 😂😂
Hahaha