Border Waterfowl

I spent this past weekend in pursuit of ducks in Bird Hunter’s Haven of Big Stone county.

We hunt NW of the Lac Qui Parle refuge, so I like to watch the survey counts on the refuge to gauge the influx of migration into the area. The latest report we got was there were 5,000 mallards in the area, so we knew the big push south had not started yet. The highest mallard count I can remember was 20,000. When there is that many birds in the area I expect to see a few orange legs in the blocks.

We set out Saturday morning from the landing at 5:00. We had more than two hours before we could pull on the trigger, but we like to ensure we get the first choice of spots. We decided to set up in a bay that would be more sheltered from the wind. The forecast was for stiff wind and personal experience has shown a mallard prefers sheltered water when the wind kicks up. As we picked our blind, we sat in near silence listening to mallard chatter. It was a positive indicator that a few flocks of mallards were roosting on our chosen slough. We also witness a lot of meteor activity. In those couple of hours, we witnessed around 20 shooting stars. I would be interested to hear from someone that tracks astrological activity to know if there was a predicted meteor event occurring last Saturday. One of life’s great pleasures is watching a marsh wake up from the slumber of a night.

When the sun broke, we were greeted with several flocks of teal buzzing our blocks. We like to hold off on the temptations of the early morning teal with the hopes of saving room in our bag for the almighty mallards. We watched the roosting mallards leave unscathed to get their morning meal in the surrounding fields. The hope is the mallards will return mid-morning to wash down their breakfast. As it turns out, we didn’t see the large concentrations of mallards return on this particular day. We did manage to trick a couple small flocks of local mallards to put the landing gear in our blocks. As you can see from the photo, the greenheads we did find weren’t the big vibrant colored mallards that dance around in a mallard hunters head. What was fun was how vocal the hens were in these flocks. It gets the blood pumping when a game of dueling quacks ensues between the duck call and a chatty hen. Brock is the resident duck-calling expert and often his calling is sufficient for most of hunting situations. When we find they want more calling, I will jump into to back him up. On Saturday, Brock noticed how aggressive they wanted the calling. Brock used a heavy mix of hail and greeting calls to get their attention and put the finishing touches on them with steady feed chatter. I am very privileged to hunt along side someone that can read birds and call to them as well as Brock. He has kicked around the idea of getting into competition calling in the past and I have to think he would hold his own in a hunters division.

On Saturday afternoon, we followed up on tip of a walleye bite on Lac Qui Parle Lake. I didn’t pull the boat so we were limited to shore fishing. When we arrived to the public dock, we saw a five-gallon bucket with four pump walleyes and white bass in it. After interviewing the folks on the dock, we got the standard "should have been here a couple hours ago" story. The boats off the dock were stacked up on a short stretch. There were about a dozen boats within 100 yards. The prevailing presentation was a few heavy split shot a couple feet ahead of a plain hook tipped with a fathead. I decided to break local convention and pitch a fathead tipped jig into the channel. We only witnessed a few walleyes caught in the couple of hours we were on the dock. I caught one modest walleye and several white bass. The white bass killer was a wobbler jig presented vertically off the edge of the dock.

On Sunday, there was a steady rain all morning. I normally wouldn’t be so excited for the rain, but it gave me an opportunity to demo a new product to me. I recently purchased a Sou’ Wester hat. This hat exceeded my expectations. I had been using a wide brimmed bucket hat. The missing feature with the bucket hat is neck protecting. When you tilt your head forward, it leaves your neck exposed. That is a non-issue with the Sou’ Wester hat. Some folks like to take cover under a hood. A hood offers great protection from the elements, but at the cost of visibility. Especially in the case of waterfowl hunting, you need to have full spectrum visibility.

Fall is short, take the opportunity to spend some time in the fresh air with friends and family.

Sully