I got a call a few weeks back during the Kansas late season from a friend who is a fantastic scout. Actually when he called I was scouting myself, maybe 60 miles West of him, but he found a better plan than anything I could glass up. You could tell from his voice that he was excited… He’d found a pile of ducks and geese using a public field in an out-of-the way area that had apparently escaped less dedicated attention. We talked over the details for a few minutes and agreed to meet early in the morning. Because it was on public ground we would need to carry all our gear into the field in bags, in corn stubble and mud.
One of the challenges with field hunting is the nature of the gear itself, it takes at ton! Shells are OK, but they don’t look great. If you’re serious, particularly with geese, you need full bodies. But full bodies are like carrying a whole goose into the field. To set up right you need plenty of the full bodies plus probably an equal number of shells. Then, as in this case, you may need both ducks and geese. Most people who seriously hunt fields have some type of trailer to put all this in, and they simply drive to the spot and unload. For this hunt we had the schlep in something like 5 dozen full body geese, 3 dozen ducks, and 4 dozen goose shells. With the huge numbers of fowl in the field the day before, a big spread was a must. If 1000 ducks look down at a field that had 5000 ducks in it yesterday and they see 8 geese they’ll just go elsewhere… probably wherever the 5000 ducks have gone off to.
And so we hauled gear and got set up in the corn stubble with a nice spread. At shooting time we had ducks working and before long there were ducks on the ground. But we had the classic field hunting problems: 1) too many birds 2) too hard to follow them.
The first problem seems like it would be a good thing right? But once you get by the “wow” factor of it you discover that big bunches take up too much space and have too many eyes. There’s usually that one lead hen that wants in real bad, but the 200 ducks behind her are more cautious and you have to make the call between shooting one or two and educating a couple hundred, or waiting and risking losing them all. Part of the problem is that they can simply see everything, and that was a problem in this hunt. It’s hard to hide in a field, layout blind or not. But it’s also difficult to put 200 or more ducks anywhere. They’ll sit out, or they’ll split up, or they’ll funnel around you so that ducks are in front and behind you… It’s just difficult to get them in tight. At one point in the first 30 minutes of this hunt I had 1000 ducks swirling around us… Perhaps the biggest group I’ve ever worked… And we ultimately killed a few out of that group, but only the 3-4 that finally committed. The rest went on. It’s both frustrating and awesome at the same time.
The second half of problem is something you always deal with on field hunts. It’s hard to follow the birds. You can’t peak out of a blind, and you really can’t move around, so if the ducks are behind you, good luck. My style is to try and keep in contact with them, calling softly, but more often than I normally would. Too many times I’ve had them get behind me cutting hard and looking good and the next thing you know they’re gone from the sky. So I try to stay engaged with them and I wear a facemask so I can at least move my head. Still, it’s tough, especially when you’re dealing with the big bunches and they are all split up and going different ways.
We ended up making out OK on this hunt, but honestly it was a disappointment when compared with the waterfowl we saw. We struggled with the things mentioned above but also with yet another problem with field hunts: They can go anywhere. With wetland ducks you can usually assume that they will go somewhere in the marsh. But on a field hunt they can go anywhere in the area. Put a little pressure on a corn field and they will quickly discover that Eastern Kansas is full of corn fields. That’s part of why you need a big spread. Beyond that, and being an efficient hunter, you need to jump anything that lights out on you. Unfortunately for us, those huge bunches of ducks and geese eventually changed their pattern and found some safety. Once you find yourself competing with several thousand real ducks and geese you might as well pick up. And we did.
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