Sport: A TIME FOR DUCKS

When you have shot one bird flying you have shot all birds flying. They are all different and they fly in different ways but the sensation is the same and the last one is as good as the first.

—Ernest Hemingway, Fathers and Sons

ALL the sensations of that good last shoot come back to hunters with the turn of the season. Memory rides south with the migrating waterfowl on the first clear days of fall. Then the wind veers into the northeast, the barometer drops, grey clouds scud into rain, and that old feeling returns. It is fine duck weather—time for a man to be paddling out into the marshes in the predawn cold, waiting with frostbitten impatience for a long V of honkers, watching them wing into the breeze and flare out as they drop down to feed.

Cold beyond help of padded clothing or any flask of liquid warmth, a hunter can still come alive to the heart-moving sight of “White Wavys” (snow geese) settling into range or the whisper of duck wings in the reeds just before the birds take off. Last week, as wintering waterfowl beat their way south, hunting seasons were opening along the ancient flyways: the Atlantic seaboard, the Pacific and mountain states, down the Mississippi Valley and south across the Great Plains. Everywhere the birds stopped, they matched wits with well-equipped adversaries. Guns belched bird shot from cramped duckboats and drafty duckblinds, as hunters tried every trick in the book to bring home the legal bag limit.

Dangerous Decoy. Near Utah’s Bear River Wildlife Refuge, where the bleak shadows of the Wasatch Mountains stretch toward Great Salt Lake, hunters could hardly shoot fast enough. Fat from a summer in the grainfields of western Canada, great flights of geese and fresh-water ducks made tempting targets (see color pages following). Bright, bobbing decoys lured the flyers down toward danger; artificial calls quacked to them as they passed; shotguns (usually 12 gauge) blasted broad patterns of destruction across the shallow reaches of the river. The miracle was that so many birds survived.

But game birds are a tricky breed. As old Hunter Hemingway says, they all fly different ways. A man who can plug a teal zigzagging upward out of marsh grass may have a tough time sighting in on a flight of mallard drumming toward him. Learning to lead a speedy pintail is another trick entirely from following a wood duck through trees. For all the instruction a hunter may have had, all the trapshooting he may have done, lining up a wing shot, says one expert, “is something like learning how to balance peas on the edge of your knife, or kissing your wife. Only practice and a species of intuition will make you successful.”

In some areas, so much shot has been fired at elusive ducks that birds have actually died of lead poisoning without even being hit (diving for food in shallow water, ducks sometimes swallow astonishing quantities of soft-lead pellets).

Sturdy Protector. Aside from their hunters’ ineptness and their own evasive skill, migrating waterfowl have another sturdy protector: the game laws of almost every country that they pass over. Unlike the fisherman, the duck hunter cannot throw back the one he takes just for kicks; carefully calculated hunting seasons and bag limits guard the birds from overenthusiastic sportsmen.

Fortunately for the duck hunter’s friends, they seldom have to listen for long to the fat glories of “the one that got away.” Most of the time, a beaten, bone-weary gunman will simply explain: “That big mallard I missed had most likely been stuffing himself with fish. He would have tasted terrible anyway.”