This post is adapted from a story I told onstage at the Wyoming Wildlife Federation's Films of the Feathered on June 14, 2019. -h
My first hunt was a big group pheasant hunt on a drizzly November 2006 morning on a rice farm north of Sacramento.
I was not well prepared. I had taken one shooting lesson with my brand-new Beretta 391 20 gauge, and I had been disappointed to discover I was not a prodigy. I don’t know why I thought I would be – my dreadful hand-eye coordination had drawn relentless ridicule from my peers in elementary school, making me consistently the last to be chosen for any team in P.E. To this day, the idea of participating in any athletic competition makes my stomach churn a little bit.
Hank’s advice for the day was telling me to wear jeans and hiking boots. I didn’t have any real hiking boots, so I wore these cool red suede “hiking boots” I’d gotten at Nordstrom Rack at the Mall of America.
We set out on in a big line walking across a fallow field, a group of total strangers and their marginally obedient black Lab Zeus to our left and Hank and me on the right, with me on the far right. I had yet to learn that the end was both a coveted position and a good place to stick newbies if you want to limit how many people they might accidentally shoot.
It was literally minutes into the hunt that I spied a rooster creeping in the grass ahead of me. I froze. I didn’t even have to think about it – it was a completely natural reaction! I was very proud of that.
At some point, Hank noticed I was no longer walking with the line.
“Hol! Whatchya doin’?”
Why was he yelling when I was clearly in stealth mode?
I looked at him, pointed at the bird and mouthed the words, “There’s a pheasant RIGHT THERE!”
“Well, go get it!” he yelled. He was completely blowing my cover.
I knew that mounting my gun properly was going to be key to making a good shot, so I mounted the gun. Awkwardly. In addition to being new to shooting, I have a really long neck – think giraffe. Then I began creeping forward, hoping to sneak up on the bird, because no one had told me that in pheasant hunting, you actually want the bird to know you’re there so he’ll get up and fly.
The bird, of course, had shrunk from sight, but as I kept walking that direction, he obliged me and flew. I swung the gun, and when the muzzle nudged ahead of the bird, I pulled the trigger, and I’ll be damned if he didn’t fall from the sky!
I stood there, dumbfounded, amid the celebratory hoots.
“Go get it!” Hank yelled.
I looked at the bird. He wasn’t dead. Shouldn’t he be dead?
“He’s not dead,” I yelled back.
“Shoot it again,” he said.
I stepped toward the bird, which was now running from me, and fired two shots that landed nowhere near him. Thankfully, Hank stepped in an ended it. He did it with his lovely Franchi Veloce 20 gauge, Tinker Bell, but in my mind’s eye, it was as if he pulled a pistol from the back of his jeans, turned it sideways and popped a cap in its ass.
And that was my first bird. My mind was a tumble of numbness, shock and shame for having failed to kill the bird cleanly. The thing I remembered most clearly from my hunter ed class – then and to this day – was the instructor saying, “Clean, sportsmanlike kill.” And while I would spend a lot of time in the ensuing years evaluating the “sportsmanlike” part, “clean kill” remains my core hunting ethic. My failure was a moral stain, an asterisk that would never be removed from my first hunt. Of course, I now know it was a miracle I hit a bird with my first shot, but I didn’t know that then.
I wanted a do-over, so with one bird in the bag, I charged back into the hunt with fervor. We hunted for hours, field after field, the weather going from drizzle to sunshine and back again, my jeans soaking wet, my red suede boots caked in mud and grass, until Hank finally called it, because it was clear I would never stop if he didn’t. I would have to get my second bird another day.
The entire experience had been one revelation after another, but the biggest one would come on the trip home. As Hank drove, I stared out at the fields we had passed. Up until that very morning, I had seen most land outside of national parks in one of three ways: developed, farmed or empty. Now, no land would ever look empty again, because I now knew that “unused” land could hide a lot of life. I might not be able to see it from a Toyota Tacoma speeding down Highway 99, but there could be pheasants in all those fields. And now that I was a hunter, that suddenly meant a lot to me. It was as if I was a first-time visitor to Earth, seeing it as it truly is.
Into the Marsh
If upland fields had seemed empty to me, wetlands had seemed less than empty. To me, wild places were three-dimensional – clear, rushing rivers carving through granite in the Sierra Nevada. Wetlands were, by definition, flat, and typically all you could see of them is some cattails or bulrush at water’s edge, then nothing. Anyone could walk into the middle of an upland field and examine what’s there, but not so for a marsh. You needed waders, and maybe a boat, and a lot of motivation to plunge into stinky water often topped by clouds of bugs.
Duck hunters have the gear and the motivation, which gives us entrée into a world that was utterly beyond my imagination.
Six years after that first pheasant hunt, I got an offer I couldn’t refuse: My friend Todd had scored a reservation to hunt the opening day of duck season at Little Dry Creek in the Sacramento Valley – the best public land duck hunting in California, with high per-hunter bird averages and lots of mallards and wood ducks. Already a passionate duck hunter, I accepted gleefully.
But when we arrived at 3:30 a.m. on the opener, something was wrong. Sitting in the parking lot, we couldn’t hear a damn thing. We should’ve been hearing birds. At that hour, the specklebellies and snow geese should’ve been wide awake and making a racket, and we should’ve heard some ducks. Instead, there was nothing but the whine of mosquitoes.
Could it be possible that there were no birds here?
Well, we were there, so of course we were going to hunt. When the check station staff began calling reservations, we went up, picked our blind and headed out. On the walk through the dark to our pond, we began hearing a few geese, which was somewhat reassuring. When we got to our pond and began setting up decoys, we started hearing a few ducks as well. This meant we would likely at least get a shot or two at shoot time.
When everything was set up, we dropped into the blind and waited in the dark. At this point, it was as if God had looked down on us and noticed he’d left the mute button on, and said, “Oops! My bad!” and hit the button. The marsh came to life. We were soon surrounded by the din of geese we’d expected at 3:30 a.m., and suddenly it was clear there were ducks all around us. We heard the quacks of hens, the whistles of pintail and wigeon, the chirps of green-winged teal and the zhweeee of drake mallards on the water all around us. Soon, we could see their silhouettes speeding around us, dropping into the water right in front of us, taking off again.
There were hundreds of birds over us. Then thousands. Every once in a while one would speed by just over our heads, close enough to touch, and we would gasp quietly, enthralled to be in the middle of a display of living art. It brought me to tears. Repeatedly.
Here’s the thing: When upland birds fly during a hunt, they’re trying to get away from you as fast as possible, because they’re sure you mean to kill them. But if you do your job right, ducks don’t know you’re there, so you get to see them in their normal state, which is like winged Hobbits looking for Second Breakfast and some beer. They are social, curious and joyful, and because they have wings, they can go wherever they want. To see them in this state feels like an immense privilege.
And to witness the spectacle we observed that morning is to understand that the marsh is far from a flat nothing; it’s actually just the ground floor of a glorious cathedral of bird joy.
Evangelizing
Though I have not seen a display like that since that day, watching the marsh wake up even with a minimal bird flight is still a beautiful thing, and sharing it with new hunters is a treat. Like me when I was a new hunter, they have no idea what they’re about to see. Walking through a marsh in darkness is a little intimidating, but when we settle down in our seats, I watch them as they catch glimpses of speeding silhouettes, the approaching sunrise revealing what’s around us bit by bit. The look on their faces always says the same thing: I had no idea.
It’s something I’d love to share with non-hunters too, but the barriers to entry – getting up at 2 a.m., needing waders – and absence of motivation are stoppers. One day, though, I got lucky.
For my mom’s 75th birthday, I took her on an Ikea shopping spree in West Sacramento, because she loves Ikea. Afterward over burritos and beer at Chipotle, we talked about what to do with the rest of our day, and I had an idea.
“Hey, wanna see one of the places where I hunt?”
“Sure!” she said. My mom digs new experiences.
We were just minutes from the Yolo Bypass Wildlife Area, a state wildlife area in a bypass that provides flood control for Sacramento. It’s easy to access because Interstate 80 crosses the bypass on a long causeway, and best of all, it has an auto tour where you can see lots of birds without having to get into the water.
Our timing was perfect. It had been raining all morning, and while the rain had stopped, a brisk wind was still pushing purple clouds across the sky, and making the birds restless, so there were constantly birds in the air. It would’ve been perfect hunting weather!
We stopped in a parking lot and I started pointing out what we were looking at.
“See those?” I said, pointing at one flying group. “Those are pintail – most delicious bird out here.”
“How do you know?” she asked.
“Well, they’ve got long necks, and the drakes have a white stripe on their neck and head, and long tail feathers, and if you listen, you can hear their whistle. And did you hear that? That’s a wigeon! Also delicious. Let’s find him…”
At one point, I looked over at her and saw her face lit up with the joy of discovery, the wind gently lifting her hair. She looked so beautiful! I wanted to take her picture, but she hates being photographed and I knew I’d lose the moment if I pulled out my phone. So I committed that vision to memory, and then told her she was beautiful.
What none of us knew at the time was that Mom was in the early stages of dementia. If you don’t know anything about dementia, I can tell you it’s far worse than you imagine. It’s a progressive and terminal illness in which the brain shrinks to as little as a third its original size, and little pieces of you keep disappearing. My sister describes it as a helium balloon that starts at the ceiling, but loses helium slowly until it finally hits the floor, inert.
At some point during this illness, I started calling Mom a lot. I hate talking on the phone, but she loves it, and I knew there would come a time when she wouldn’t be able to talk anymore. By 2018, these conversations had become very shallow and repetitive. The part of her brain that could engage in meaningful dialog was gone, and what was left was the part that could handle social chitchat. “What are you up to today? What are your plans for the weekend? Do you ever get vacation?” She asked these questions in every conversation, often two to four times each because she couldn’t remember for more than 90 seconds that she’d already asked them.
One day that winter, I called her while I was driving to a mid-morning weekday hunt.
“What are you up to today?” she asked.
“I’m going duck hunting!”
“Oh! Where?” she asked.
“Between Sacramento and Davis.”
“Oh! That place you took me that day?”
Whoa! She remembered. I was floored.
“Yeah, Mom – that’s the place!”
“I was so glad you took me there,” she said. “I’ve driven past that a million times, and I always thought there was nothing there, but now I know it’s quite beautiful.”
I smiled.
“Yeah, Mom. I used to think the exact same thing.”
Mom’s still with us! Here’s a story about what it’s like going out on the town with her.
-h
I'm not going to lie; I cried at the end of that. Really well written. Thank you Holly!
That was an absolutely beautiful read, for so many reasons. Thank you for sharing it.