No Ducking The Truth: Hunting Hasn’t Been Hot

Ducks can be as wary as a magpie and as gullible as a spruce grouse. They will drop into a hunter’s decoys when his back is turned or zoom by the decoy spread at 40 miles an hour.

They will ignore a veteran hunter’s highball on his $50 duck call and then turn toward a couple of dozen decoys after hearing a novice’s squawk on a $2 call.

In short, ducks can be unpredictable, frustrating and exasperating.

Al Stier and I experienced about everything ducks can do to frustrate hunters during a three-day hunt last week near the Potholes Reservoir and the Columbia River.

We were gung-ho when we arrived at Potholes State Park and, carrying guns and backpacking shotshells, decoys and lunches, hiked up one of the wasteways.

The wasteway was in near flood stage. Spots where ducks could rest, drink and socialize were few and far between. Finally, we located a backwater and put out a dozen decoys.

The Columbia Basin is temporary home now to about 300,000 ducks, mostly mallards, and more than 30,000 geese, but we didn’t see any more than a few flocks of mallards and some goldeneyes, teal and merganzers.

However, a few mallards came our way. When a small flock dropped down for a look, I picked out a drake and fired. The greenhead dropped on the far side of the wasteway. Stier’s Chesapeake Bay retriever, Rusty, jumped in the frigid water, swam across, found the duck and bucked heavy current, even white water, to return and deliver the mallard to his boss.

Stier killed another drake a little while later. Then the only ducks we saw were goldeneyes and teal. Goldeneyes are great table ducks and teal test a shooter’s ability, but I wanted mallards. We picked up our decoys at 3 and hiked back to camp.

We left our sacks at 4 the next morning and drove 65 miles to Ringold Springs on the Columbia River. To our amazement, the Columbia was so high that even the bushes along the shore were under water.

We set out decoys in a pond created by overflow from the river, pulled tumbleweeds and brush around us and settled down to wait for a dense fog to lift.

Finally, about 11 o’clock, the fog dissipated and the ducks started flying over the Columbia.

We saw only a few flocks of mallards the next 3 hours, not the thousands we expected. The movement to the south Basin hadn’t started.

The build-up of ducks on the Columbia starts only after Moses Lake, the Potholes Reservoir and other big waters are frozen over. The best time to hunt the Columbia - and the Snake, for that matter - is after still waters are ice-covered.

Some of the few mallards that flew to the river after feeding in harvested corn fields heard us call or saw our small decoy spread and came over for a look. We knocked down a couple of birds. Too often we were standing or moving around when the ducks flew over and then flared.

Ducks are good at determining when a hunter isn’t paying attention. Stier left the blind for about 30 minutes. For 10 minutes or so, I sat and waited. Finally, I stood up, bent down and started to get a can of vegetable juice out of my bucket.

That’s when two drake mallards chose to land among the decoys. I heard the splash, stood up quickly and saw the ducks. The drakes saw me and jumped. Too late, I reached for my gun.

The temperature was down to near zero at 5 the next morning and the wind was blowing out of the north at 15-20 mph when we started up the wasteway in the dark. The wind factor must have been 20 or more below zero.

Ice was flowing down the wasteway when we set out the decoys. For the next 4 hours, we shivered and stomped the ground to restore circulation to our frozen feet.

We saw only a half dozen mallards, all far away. However, goldeneyes flew by every few minutes.

Shivering and discouraged we finally picked up our ice-laden decoys and trudged back to camp.

When the weather is incredibly bad, duck hunters joke that they must remind themselves periodically that they are having a good time. So, were we having a good time? Hell, no. We were a couple of bone-cold, disgusted dudes.

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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Fenton Roskelley The Spokesman-Review