A Fowl Mentality

Waterfowlers are the only group of hunters that are constantly referred to as crazy. Deer hunting, by contrast, just makes sense. Big bucks are innately exciting and provide venison, and across most of the country, a deer hunt involves a short walk to a stand, most often in fair fall weather. Elk? Their pursuit is aspirational, with mountain adventures, giant horns, truckloads of meat, bugling bulls in the golden aspens.

Upland hunting? A pleasant late-morning walk, occasionally interrupted by gunfire. Like golf, but with shotguns. Straight fun and exercise, with delicious game treats at the end. Hog hunting? a noble fight against the invading orcs, also great eats when you’re makin’ bacon. Sheep hunters? Obsession spawned by the allure of the unobtainable.

Those endeavors make at least some sense. Duck hunting? Sheesh, where to begin. We have more gear than an Army-Navy surplus. We make freezing runs in blinding fog in expensive boats that are only good for one thing. Dangerous currents, iced-up boat ramps, the misery of the collective nexus of "the colder and wetter, the better." Snotsicles hanging off both your beak and the decoys’. And the perils of hunting for divers or seaducks in layouts appears most bizarre to the outsider (two words: body-booting). It’s flat dangerous, like navigating the Big Muddy in winter.

How can you explain the inexplicable? That fire that burns to chase ducks and geese? You can't.

If you don’t think duck hunters are nuts, check out the boat build this issue (p. 32, which inspired this column). Who builds out a $33,000 custom rig starting with a used boat at incredible personal time and effort…only to drop it in a dry field to kill ducks?

Waterfowlers, that’s who. But there is the thing. There is so much depth to waterfowling, even out of the water.

There is the calling aspect, an avenue in which we can be heavily involved in the sport all year (and the kids, too). We use it to both encourage and berate each other.

The decoys. Both hunting with them and the romance of making and collecting them, art pieces sometimes selling for thousands.

The migration. There is nothing like it in hunting. Imagine if your deer lease was utterly devoid of animals and then suddenly, overnight, it was invaded by herds of trophy bucks from Canada.

Diversity. We have so many waterfowl species, experts still struggle with identification, and even within the subspecies there exists wild diversity. On a single hunt, I selected a bunch of snow geese from a pile and lined them up, and they all looked different due to maturity levels, stains from feeding, and subspecies or color phasing. There are so many differences due to age class, time of year, and sex variation within every species. Then the hybrids! The sex-crazed mallard will breed with a bufflehead decoy if it will hold still long enough, creating all kinds of half-domesticated “bibbed”  turduckens out there.

Boats and mud motors. Mission-specific vessels with a narrow use range that are the definition of specialized and a serious investment. They create their own obsession.

Dogs. Ask any owner. Retrievers are such a central aspect of waterfowling that they are sent off to college just like the rest of the kids. I bet only houndsmen can understand how much we love Labs. I have deer hunted with hounds in the south and it’s so fun and social it makes you want to own a pack of duck dogs.

Blind-building and camaraderie. For most of us, this is the very best part of it all. There is nothing else in hunting quite like a duck blind. This is just little boys building tree forts on the professional level, let’s be honest. Then, it becomes your clubhouse. Why are there so many baseball players in love with duck hunting? Because it’s their dugout after they failed to make the Yankees. And burying layouts to the invisibility level is extremely satisfying.

Conservation. In no other aspect of hunting are sportsmen as rabid about preserving heritage and habitat. The organizations, obviously, but individual efforts, too. Look at Sam Soholt’s 100-mile Duck Ruck adventure this year (check it out on Instagram if you missed it). It was an astounding effort by Saint Soholt, hoofing it across a hundred miles of prairie to raise dollars for ducks.

The Season. Deer and elk hunters have a sensible season of a few weeks. Not us. I chased feathers September through May last year!

The Learning Curve. You never stop learning, and what you’ve learned, you often have to re-learn. Then, what really works changes once you’ve mastered it.

Camo. Just big boys playing hide and seek, an art form, our tribal tattoo. And the classic looks are pure fashion fun. Yeah, fashion, I said it.

The adventure. Waterfowling will broaden your horizons just as far as you want to take it. And just when you think you’ve done it all, you hear about something else. For a FOMO like me, born with my eyes on the horizon, you will always have a new quest to seek out. 

All these ingredients bind together in a big tasty stew that is The Waterfowl Way. That seething passion. It’s sure easy to see why some guys get too serious about it. My wife reminds me every year in January that I still have a family, something us “water-flowers” as she calls us,  can forget in the frenzy and froth of late season. She reminds me of the children’s names and ages; we look at photos of them…OK, I’m kidding. More often they are plucking ducks and she’s scolding me for keeping them up too late playing with feathers on dead birds. Nobody should ever have told her about avian bird flu or salmonella.

And at the end of the day, a big ass honker splashing down in the decoys is like nothing else in hunting. When you cut into a flock, it’s like shooting more turkeys than you’ll kill in a lifetime of spring gobbler forays. 

Don’t apologize for your obsession, water-flowers! Go forth and foray and forage and revel in this life you love, even if others think you’re a little touched in the head, or a few feathers short of a down comforter. Because with us, it was never about comfort, anyway. 

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