What Could’ve Been
A lesson on reminiscing too much, word of mouth, and hitting the damn target.
“How many they got in the big blind,” I asked Lance, an old family friend, as he launched his bass boat.
“97. We’re back to the good ol’ days,” he replied with a grin on his face.
He was right, too. The neighboring blind they had occupied for the last 11 years on that river had finally produced the number of birds that justified me driving 2 hours every morning for. Those numbers pale in comparison to what we’ve dubbed the nearby “big blind” - a behemoth of a structure that could serve as an AirBnB if its owners threw a window unit in it - typically tallied. I was told in the years before I began hunting there that the number would sometimes eclipse 500 birds for the year.
So, in the good ol’ days Lance referred to, 100 birds in the first weekend was a good omen; a sure sign that the smell of burnt gunpowder and bouts of laughter would fill the blind in the coming months.
So Ashton and I paddled ourselves out to a spot I had brushed the day before, with little-to-no expectation of what was to come. If duck hunting were a video poker machine, this hole was the Two of Clubs; all we could do was hope we picked a Deuces Wild machine.
I could see the whites of Ashton’s eyes widen as the big drake gadwall crashed into the decoys. A wood duck hunter by nature - a distinction I’ve written about extensively - my partner for the morning had already shouldered his Stoeger and flicked the safety off by the time I whipped my head around to witness the comotion.
His first shot came when the bird wasn’t yet airborne, and by the signs of the displaced water, landed squarely above its target. My first shot came as the bird lept from the shallows, but was too far behind. Ashton’s second shot - which arrived at almost the same time as mine - sent the now-airborne gadwall into a short spiral back to the water’s surface.
My first shots with a barrel cam didn’t go as hoped, but I still managed to pick up Ashton’s second volley that folded the Louisiana grey duck. Video by Ryne Berthelot
The first bird of my Louisiana season was bagged, a handsome drake in full winter garb. A parade of teal followed, almost all of which were of the blue-winged variety, in various stages of plumage; some looked as raw as their September counterparts, when drakes and hen are indistinguishable. Some drakes sported their white crescent, but the midnight blue of their head that would make a blue-winged teal melt in to Van Gogh’s The Starry Night was still absent.
A plumed drake gadwall may be the most underrated bird in North American waterfowling, and to harvest one as the first bird of our Louisiana big duck season made it a hunt worth remembering. Photo by Ryne Berthelot
What should’ve been a well-deserved two-man limit turned into a six-bird stringer with the help of lackadaisical shooting and a lack of intuition on my own part. Twice I watched as a handful of birds would drop into the spread, but I refused the shot opportunity in hopes that the rest of the flock would finish on their next pass.
Lance was right, for the moment at least. The glory days of duck hunting in Louisiana - when even a boring old oxbow with no real value to ducks could produce - were back. It’s with mild disappointment that I report the Good Ol’ Days lasted the length of opening week in Louisiana’s East Zone.
Still, my hunting partners and I reveled in between flocks of teal, shovelers and gadwall in the same way a thief would his horde after a bank robbery. The moment wasn’t even lost on Ashton, who, at just 19, wasn’t old enough to remember when Louisiana was a shrine in the temple of waterfowling.
Still, I sat a proud mentor when he held the big drake gadwall up. It wasn’t his first of the species, but you could count the number he’d harvested previously on one hand. I grinned, knowing full well he’d never be satisfied with just shooting wood ducks anymore.
He turned to me, with a serious look on his face.
“It ain’t a wood duck, but it’ll do I guess.”