Every year for damn near 20 years, my life takes on a weekly rhythm from October until the end of January. This, you see, is our duck season, and I hunt ducks and geese more often than any other animal.
Most years, I hunt twice a week, on average. This year I am hunting less, in no small part because, well, Holly and I have been quite successful on our hunts during the Pandemic, to the point where our freezer is closer to full than to empty.
But still, I cannot ignore the call of the marsh.
If you’ve never done it, soaking in the dawn in the middle of a marsh is like nothing else. If you’re there long before first light, you will not hear too much of anything, other than the wind through the tules and the gentle lap-lap of water against mud.
Stars shine bright some nights, other times you are enveloped in a gray gauzy fog that muffles everything and may well lure you to nowhere you intended on being.
You pick a spot, toss a few decoys here and there in an array you suspect might look just real enough to trick a duck, settle into the reeds on a swamp seat and, maybe, drink some coffee and eat an energy bar.
And then it starts. Peep! Peep! Peep! Quack, quack, quack, quack. Lilip! Lilip! You hear the teal and mallards and specklebelly geese come to life. A maniacal, high-pitched laugh tells you a hen teal is nearby. Drake spoonies stage whisper “stupid, stupid, stupid.” A family of gadwall chatter in their nasal “net net net.”
Unseen wings whir over you. You strain to see if they are moving in any consistent way. If they are, you move your position so as to better intercept them.
It grows lighter. You check your watch. Almost time.
Splash! A duck lands in your decoys. You hope it remains there for five more minutes, but you know damn well it won’t. It flies off two minutes before legal shooting time. Alas.
And then, thunder at dawn. It always starts with that one guy — and I always assume it’s a guy doing it — laying into those birds that are likely still in his decoys, somewhere here or there. The early bird. Then, a minute or two later, the world explodes as hunters all around you start blazing away.
That first hour is exhilarating, nerve-wracking, glorious and sad and loud and wet and sweaty as you try your best to at least have a few birds on the ground before it ends. For we all know that on calm, clear days, which is the norm where I live, that first hour can be everything.
If it’s a Saturday or a Wednesday, I hunt as long as I like. If it’s Sunday, I usually pull out no later than 11 a.m., for there is football to watch, and, well, priorities, man.
On a normal day, I will check anywhere from two to my limit of seven birds into the check station before leaving for home. Even before that moment, my mind begins to turn toward what’s next.
Some ducks are best skinned, with all fat removed. Spoonies and sea ducks spring to mind. However, most ducks, at least here in Northern California, deserve a richer treatment.
Pintail, wigeon, mallards, canvasbacks, wood ducks, specklebelly geese, most gadwall and all green-winged teal get plucked. They will normally sport a well-upholstered layer of sweet fat under their skin, and that fat is liquid gold.
If it’s only a few birds for the day, I will simply sit in my garage over a trash can, plucking the birds by hand, dry. But if I’ve been lucky, I’ll fire up a big tamale pot full of water, drop a pound or so of paraffin wax in, let it melt and wax pluck my birds.
I learned this technique back in 2004 from the boys at the Salinas Club in the Grasslands, south of Sacramento. It’s brilliant. The wax strips pinfeathers and down easily, leaving you with what looks like a store-bought duck… except for the shot holes.
As I pluck, I survey the damage of the hunt. What I call “a well shot bird” is one that I’d killed cleanly, with a head shot or with just minor damage to the body. I am surprisingly good at this, oddly, since I have only been shooting roughly 20 years or so, but admittedly things go sideways sometimes.
Maybe I center-patterned the bird. Maybe a friend’s dog mauled it. Maybe it is terribly skinny, for reasons various and sad.
After plucking comes the gutting and pruning.
I remove the “flats” from all the birds; this is the second digit of the wing. In waterfowl, unlike chickens, this is a marginal food item. Except for mallards, these will go into the soup pot.
Next come the feet, always removed at the joint. Why some people hack a duck’s leg off to leave a jagged bone mystifies me, when you can remove a webbed foot easily by slipping a knife between drumstick and foot through the bird’s “knee,” or what passes for it. These too go into the stock pot, hacked a little to open up the skin, which releases gelatin, which makes your broth better.
The neck must go, too. This, I freely admit, is aesthetic. Leaving it on is perfectly fine, but to me it looks like the “red rocket” of an overly excited dog. Necks go into the pot, but the skin around them stays.
On to the stinky task of gutting the birds. The grand champion of foul odors, at least in the waterfowl world, is the Canada goose. I suspect it is because he loves to eat grass, which ferments in his innards, releasing a putrid stench when you break into them.
Gadwall love green things, too, and when they are eating these, they are, justifiably, called “gag-walls.” I’ve suffered through gadwall innards worse than cat shit. Not very nice.
But gutting must be done, for hygiene as well as to collect the little treasures within.
First I slice off the Pope’s nose, the fatty tail. This can be the main source of duck fat, so I slice through to the cloaca and remove the various poop chutes and penises that are in my way. Yes, ducks have penises, at least the males. This makes them rare in a bird world full of bumping cloacas.
Next I’ll hook two fingers around the gizzard to pull it out. This is my first indication of the health of the bird. Good gizzards will be partially encased in fat. I pull this off and rinse it, setting it aside as the start of the “fat pile.”
A quick two slices with a knife and meat is separated from the weird, gritty, grinding sack in the center.
Now I jam my fingers into the dead bird’s cavity to secure the heart. Pulling this will pull the liver along with it. This is the Big Reveal.
Sometimes, often in December, you will pull a liver that is pale, and slightly enlarged. If you are thinking wild foie gras you are correct. Yes, wild ducks and geese will gorge themselves into steatosis, giving them fatty livers that are one of the great glories of gastronomy. Just be sure to carefully remove the Nyquil gel cap that is their gall bladder, lest it spray you with green, bilious ink.
Wash out the cavity, use your fingernails to scrape out the kidneys at the back of the back and the bird is done.
This is often it for the day because I prefer to let the ducks chill overnight before breaking them down. This allows them to dry a bit and sets the fat hard.
Each sort of giblet gets stored individually, allowing me to make lovely dishes with my collections, like confit of gizzards or duck heart tartare. I will even keep the tongues off mallards and other big ducks, because I have a soft spot for crispy fried duck tongues.
Many years ago, a magazine writer wrote a profile of me, noting that I eat everything but the quack. Challenge accepted, and so now I eat even that.
When it comes time to break the birds down — and I do this to most birds, except small ones like teal and wood ducks, and even then only if they have been well shot — I have my system. You might have your own.
Legs come off first, curving the knife under the back, like the keel of a boat, to get every last bit of meat. Don’t forget the “oyster” in front of the ball-and-socket joint.
Next I slice through the back on the outside of the bird’s saber bones, down to the wing joint. I take quiet pride in the fact that I almost never miss this joint, having made this cut 1000 times.
A few deft slices up and around the body and the wing, attached to the breast, is free — at least on one side. I repeat the process on the other, then turn the duck upside down, letting the breasts and wings hang. I slide the knife under the trachea, over the wishbone and along the keelbone to free the whole shebang.
Odd? Yes. But I like the drama.
I can then trim off the wings and excess fat with precision, leaving little “tails” at the head and tail ends of the breast because I know full well how much the skin will shrink when it hits a hot pan later.
When it’s all done, I am left with a pile of legs, a pile of wings, breasts placed meat-to-meat, giblets, carcasses and gobs of fatty skin, trimmed from the various cuts or from the Pope’s nose.
That skin then gets sliced into little squares, which I render into glorious, pure duck fat. Fat that I allow to rise to 350F to crisp up the cracklin’s which then get simmered in a Mexican salsa verde, making one of the great tacos of the world.
Munching such a taco, I sip a beer, sit back and watch SportsCenter, admiring my handiwork for a few moments before turning off the light, falling asleep so I can wake up and do it again.
This is so well written I could see the whole day unfold in my mind and it was like reading along an auto generated script of a well produced short film. Thank you for the experience.
Thank you. The written word inspires so many thoughts and memories. This is your memory but it triggers mine for a double experience.