Late season duck hunts

The Great Outdoors

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By Ryan Rhodes

If you hand the West Zone, then your season is about to come to a swift end Sunday. If you hunt the East, you have one more week, but no matter where you’re duck hunting in Louisiana, the season is winding down. You’ll probably be scrambling to get those last couple of duck hunts in before the season ends, but at the same time you’re noticing what happens every year at the end of the season: the ducks seem to have gotten a hell of lot smarter. Not only smarter, but just plain craftier. I can’t tell you how many times in a late season hunt I’ve watched an untouched duck fly away thinking, “How the hell did he just do that?” I’m not kidding when I say that I’ve seen a duck literally anticipate my shot, dodge to the side in what seemed like slow motion, then look straight at me and say, “There is no spoon.” If you don’t get the Matrix reference then go rent the movie immediately.

There’s no denying that duck hunting towards the end of the season is different. By this point in the year, ducks have been shot at coming from Canada all the way to Louisiana. Imagine if you were driving from Canada to Louisiana, and at every other rest stop or gas station you stopped at, some dude would pop up from behind a sign or bush or something and throw rocks at you. By the time you got to Louisiana, you’d probably be a little skittish at gas stations and rest stops.

In order to remedy this, you have to change things up a little bit on your hunt. For starters, you need to concentrate on catching birds’ attention more visually than audibly. This means changing your decoy spread up a bit. Use more colorful birds species in your decoy spreads, like more mallard drakes than females. Green heads stand out better than all brown females. Putting the decoys in a different pattern could also catch some attention. If you’re in a boat blind try putting a few decoys in a crescent shaped pattern between you and the wind direction. This should get you a few more close passing shots on the opposite end of the decoys. Flying close between the structure and the decoy spread is a tactic that most hunters have noticed in late season ducks. Changing up your methods like this will give you the upper hand against this tactic.

Another thing you can do to aid you hunts is to stay mobile. A lot of people are more comfortable in permanent or very bulky blinds when duck hunting. The problem with those, though, is that they don’t leave you with a lot of flexibility should the situation suddenly seem to change. My last hunt during the holidays I was set up in a permanent blind with the wind paralleling my face. Logic says this should lead to passing shots. But for some odd reason, birds had the tendency to come in from behind right over my head leaving me all of a half of a second to react and shoot. Had I been in a more flexible situation, this probably wouldn’t have been a problem.

One thing you will hear a million different tips on is calling. A lot of hunters think that in the tail end of the season you should call until your lungs reach up through your throat, slap you in the face and yell, “Cut that out!” This is a bad idea. Hunters have this natural tendency to want to call more now because they want to keep the ducks in their sight and keep the outcome in their hands. The problem is it’s not in your hands; it’s in the ducks hands, and they don’t even have hands which just makes the whole thing weird. It’s the end of the season. Everybody is calling, and if you just go ahead and call a whole bunch too, the ducks won’t know what to do. They’ll be more confused than a third grader trying to do Chinese algebra. Lay back on the calls a little. Do different calls until you figure out what they respond to, and then give them what they want to hear.

You also could be surprised by what they want to hear. If you see a group of mallards circling your decoys, you’d automatically think “ok, hen calls and mallard drake calls.” While this would probably work on opening day, at this point in the year these particular birds could have a completely different mindset. It’s like how some of us might have been at home with our family for a good portion of the holiday. You love your own clan and all, but eventually they’ll all start to drive you crazy, and you want to get as far away from them as possible. You could blow a drake call and that greenhead could be thinking, “Oh no, not another one of those jackasses.” But then blow a pintail call, and he could think, “All right! New guy.” It’s all about finding what they want to hear.

I hope this helps you find success in your last few duck hunts this year, and good luck in the new semester. It’ll be my last one here at LSU, so of course that’ll just make it even more stressful. Perfect timing for the hunting season to end, huh? I’m still going to have that shooting itch the whole time too. I better take up goose hunting soon, or I’m going to start going after cats.

Originally Published: Issue 750 - January 14, 2009

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