Flock after flock serenaded us with ripping wings, all following the same flight plan. These were big flocks, 50 to 500 birds strong, unusual numbers to see together in mid October. Traveling high they set their sights on us, sailed downward, then picked up altitude again and headed to the northwest. There were twice as many ducks as we had seen in the morning flight. When a smaller, 50-ish group made the error of working us in narrowing circles, we waited, feeling one more pass would have put them in our laps. Instead of the 40-yard shot we had, but hadn't taken, we got no shot. I don't have to tell you how those kinds of decisions feel as the flock fails to make that last turn.

But we saw so many birds. There was hope.

No, actually, there wasn't hope, but we didn't know this yet; or refused to admit it. We felt that with so many birds working fields we had sole permission to hunt, this was eventually going to work. We needed something new for the birds to look at. We hunted the other barley field in the morning, and for some reason, the ducks didn't fly that morning. The few that did returned to our original barley field. Grrrrrr!

For the afternoon hunt, we dug out 100 snow windsocks, deciding to hide in those rather than the big dark geese decoys, and to really fool the birds. The first birds to come off the river in the afternoon were snow geese and a flock of a couple of a hundred descended on us as if they'd never been hunted. But this was afternoon in North Dakota, and you aren't allowed to shoot snow geese in the afternoon in the state. God help us!

Educated Birds
The hunting never got any better for us on that trip. Educated birds, we reasoned, and boy, were they accredited. This shouldn't be new to anyone who has duck or goose hunted for a length of time; it wasn't new to us. What was new to us was the sheer numbers of birds, the fact that they were behaving this way relatively early in the season, and the fact that we couldn't crack the code on any of them.

In Alberta, they have a word for uneducated ducks and geese: "fresh" birds, they call them, and they are right out of the hinterlands. We've hunted Alberta pea fields where mallards have landed in our decoys and walked around our blinds while we sat up and talked to each other. We've had honkers come in to decoys in canola fields where there wasn't a bite to eat and the setup and calling were underwhelming. These birds aren't just fresh, they're totally naïve, likely having never seen humans.

In decoding our North Dakota hunt at the beginning of this story, the best we can figure is that an early cold snap had forced these birds down. Once arrived, which was about a week to ten days before we arrived, they got hammered by hunters still in the popular and busy early season who robo-ducked, decoyed and pounded the snot out of them. By the time we arrived they weren't just decoy shy, they were moving into one-a-day evening flights and larger flocks as an act of self-preservation.

Ducks learn in lots of ways. They learn to avoid danger, and they learn where life is safe. In cities and refuges, life is safe. Ducks learn safe places and safe food sources as surely as they learn to avoid decoy spreads, robo ducks and men standing in fields.

My parents lived on a lake in a city suburb where ducks gathered to spend the winter at the headwaters of a creek that flowed out of the lake. Despite subzero temps, the water stayed open all winter, and neighbors fed these birds a regular diet of yellow corn. I'd often stop to visit the birds to see if I could find a black duck or some other oddity. Frequently, there would be a couple of mallards, new birds, that stayed well away from the habituated ducks and were quite obvious in their fear of people. They hadn't learned, yet, that the food and lodging were free here--but they soon would.

Similarly, ducks and geese quickly learn not to trust things that look like ducks and geese, but aren't, especially those involving loud bangs and hot shot.

Their response can be extreme. By the time the last flights of ducks and geese have moved southward to places like Nebraska in late November, they've seen enough to make them intolerant of hunting pressure. As one serious hunter who lived in Nebraska told me several years ago, "We get good field hunting for about a week, and then the birds go nocturnal." This is extreme behavior, to say the least, but demonstrates the lengths birds will go to avoid hunters and hunting.