One Duck Days

A lesson on the dog days of a duck season, good country music, and finding the silver lining.

There’s a song by Brent Cobb, Shine on Rainy Day, that must’ve been written with duck hunters and other gluttons for punishment in mind. 

As he plods through his somber tune about a man down his luck, and sometime at the end of the second verse, he drives his point home for all the world to hear: But laughin’ ain’t a pleasure till you know about cryin’.

Every duck hunter with more than a season’s worth of hunts under their belt knows the sentiment behind that line. For every grip-and-grin picture from the back of a tailgate, there are plenty of One Duck Days. They aren’t just dictated by the harvest of one duck, either. A hunter knows a One Duck Day when he or she’s going through it; It’s the 8 o’clock hour when you realize that the morning flight never really materialized, and the few birds that you did see made sure you knew you weren’t hunting the X. Maybe a few passing shots found the mark, and three or four birds were bagged on that One Duck Day. 

Even a One Duck Day can be worth remembering. Just ask Phillip Detiveaux, who downed a greenhead in the marshes of southeastern Louisiana, where mallards have become increasingly harder to come by. Photo courtesy Caleb Authement

But a One Duck Day it was nonetheless. A string of them in the middle of the season is inevitable, and mine usually begin in late December, when there’s no new push of birds into South Louisiana and the teal and gadwall that have already made their journey know better. There’s a romance to trudging through those woeful days, which seem to go on forever. Perhaps the worst string of One Duck Days I’ve ever experienced came the week of Christmas in 2021, when six consecutive days of hunting yielded three buffleheads, 6 miles of wading and 4 hours of setting out and picking up 12 dozen diver decoys. Weeks like those make even the most dedicated duck hunter question the impending 3:30 alarm clock the next morning. 

Still, the smart (or at least the persistent) hunter knows a change of scenery, routine or strategy can be the trick to mellowing the sting of the One Duck Days. For hunters in the south, that could mean targeting the mostly nonmigratory wood ducks, which offer a reduced bag limit of three birds and a short shooting window, but also allows for better shooting than their migratory counterparts. 

For the hunter with a bit more coin and a lot more gumption, traveling may be in order, with opportunities to hunt waterfowl in different scenes, or with different strategies, for other birds. The ducks that frequent Wyoming’s portion of the North Platte River in October aren’t the same as the birds that spend their winters on Louisiana’s marsh ponds and rice fields in January, despite being the same species. There’s a lack of urgency to the way a duck flies the North Platte, eagerly making second and third passes at even the simplest decoy spreads. The same can’t often be said in Delacroix, where birds have been shot for 3000-plus miles over the plastic duck decoys that look an awful lot like the ones in the ponds they fly over daily. 

Even those trips aren’t exempt from the One Duck Day, although a lack of success seems to be far less important to an extended visit to a new hunting location. 

Eventually, someday, that streak of slow mornings and bad luck will come to an end. You’ll be ready for that low flock of teal that cuts low through the decoys, the lone canvasback that sits down in your spread while you’re not looking, or the hen mallard that announces her party’s arrival with a lone chuckle behind the blind before their final swing.

You’ll stop for a moment and revel about the hunt where everything went right, because you’ll know what Brent Cobb was singing about all along. 

You’ve cried enough. It’s your turn to laugh.