BRRRRRRRRRRRR!! (11/24/10 Duck Hunt)

Holy Cow!  It was cold this morning.  When we got to Burbank this morning, the temp., according to my truck's rear view mirror, was 2 degrees.  There was also a lot of snow on the ground.  That made for some slow walking down to the river.  Once we arrived, we found the water was extremely low.  Lower than I have ever seen it.  Even lower than last week.  We made our way out of the bay, hooked to the left and kept walking right past our "go to" spot.  The big difference between this morning's walk and most others was that we were walking on a solid sheet of ice this time.  We walked on that ice all the way to our hunting spot for today.  This was a new spot for me.  I'm not sure if Eric had been there before.  We finally arrived and after testing the water depth, we threw our decoys out, but not too far.  The river bed dropped off fairly quickly so we had to keep the decoys in close.  After setting the decoys Eric, Jose and I settled in for a little while.  Right on time, the usual suspects showed up a couple of minutes ahead of shooting hours.  The mallards hung around until just before shooting time and off they went.  There was a fog settling in and getting thicker by the minute.

About 7:00 or so, another pair of mallards dropped into check out our spread.  Eric put us on the board by taking the drake.  Put him down with one shot.  The hen flew in the opposite direction.  Just when I thought she was gone for good, she reappeared out of the fog a little to my right.  I raised my gun and shot.  She seemed to stop in mid flight.  As I shot again, I smiled as I heard Eric say behind me "Shoot her again."  She was hit but not dead.  I jumped out of the blind, with Jose right behind me, to get her.  She was still swimming in circles next to the ice.  I cautiously stepped to the edge of the ice, not really knowing how deep the water was under that outside edge.  My foot cracked through the ice and fell 3 inches, so I moved out and tried to snag the hen out of the water.  She sensed that I was close so she took off, swimming as fast as she could.  As I watched her, I knew that I would devastate the bird if I shot it from 15 feet away.  At the same time, I knew that if I waited much longer I wouldn't be able to wade far enough out to get her.  So I finished her off from 15 feet.  Let's just say that size 2 pellets shot through a Patternmaster choke from 15 feet away will leave a body with no head.  Not a pretty sight.  Anyway, I got my bird and Jose and I headed back to the blind.

As the morning rolled on and the fog began to lift, we noticed that there were other hunters to our left and to our right.  Most of the birds that we called at either didn't pay any attention to us or decoyed well for our new neighbors.

With the extreme cold air bearing down on us, it seemed like a half a day had gone by before Jose could get a bird close enough to get a shot off.  A single mallard zipped by overhead and Jose popped off a shot.  Unfortunately, it was a miss.  A little later, a bufflehead hen made her way into our decoys and Jose made short work of putting her to sleep.  We all scored a kill for the day.  As Jose made his way back from getting his bufflehead, another bird zipped into the decoys.  It was coming straight at us.  It juked to my right and I heard Eric say "Take that one," just as I was getting ready.  I had seen the bird come in but didn't want to raise my gun right away since Jose was still in the decoys.  Finally, I had a safe shot and took it.  The blue bill went down.  As I hopped out of the blind and tried to shed a layer of outwear, Jose and Eric waded out and got the bird for me.

We watched more birds pass overhead, paying no attention to our decoys.  The activity dropped to a nonexistent level and we decided it was time to leave.  Another excellent day in the duck blind with and old friend and a new one was complete.