I had a little tip that there were a bunch of Canadas using a frozen irrigation lake where I’ve had some late season action before. The ice was too thick to break with a boat and too thin to walk on but I loaded up a truck full of decoys and a four wheeler and headed down to scout before sunset Friday evening. I found a few geese but hundreds of ducks pouring into a vague area where they really shouldn’t be. I couldn’t tell if they were going into a field or marsh that might or might not be frozen. This time of year I look for waterfowl to go to big water but these were clearly not going to roost on the lake.

The next morning I loaded up the mule with a dog, decoys and the other stuff I thought I might need and headed off hoping to figure out what was going on. What I found was that a small marsh near the big lake happened to have enough current to keep it from freezing. A few thousand snow geese and a couple thousand ducks got out around shooting time and started coming back while I threw my decoys out. The entire area of open water couldn’t have been much more than an acre but I was the only game in town. I stood beside a tree and tried to stretch the hunt out a bit. Unfortunately it just doesn’t take very long to kill a limit in situations like this. I could have been done in 10 minutes but instead it lasted nearly an hour:

Kodi got the call and was nice enough to pose for the picture…

I immediately got on the phone and tried to find a friend or two to join in the action. By 3:00 I’d put up my shotgun and was guiding for a regular hunting partner and a friend of his. A bit of the ol’ 5-quack and the first drake comes in just right, feet down, 20 yards… “Kill him! Kill him! Kill him!”… and Riley is swimming back to me… and I can see a band… My friend had just killed his first banded duck!

Unfortunately what little pressure I’d put on these ducks was enough that they didn’t come back to the marsh to roost. We ended up having a nice shoot, but not the slaughter I had expected and very few ducks spent the night there.

The next morning the three of us wondered if we were pushing our luck. The ducks hadn’t roosted in our spot, or even anywhere nearby. Still, there’s only 9 days in the late season, so why waste one sleeping in? The sun came up, the wind blew, and we saw a lot of ducks.

No one would own up to breaking the weekend all drake streak…

So over less than 36 hours I killed or guided to the kills of almost 30 ducks… both my dogs are worn out and happy… and it was the purest form of waterfowl… no robo ducks, no fancy blinds… just standing by a tree calling ducks into your spread… the way it was meant to be. It’s times like this that make me wonder why I spend so much time chasing deer and pheasants and elk. A good late season mallard hunt will always be my first hunting love.

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