November 7, 2022: A new season, same old haunts. I had been looking forward to a rematch with this stretch of water all year (especially those crafty pigeons under the bridge) and it was a perfect day for our loop even if it meant staring blindly into the sun for a couple hours after it crested the hills.
The first thing that became obvious on this trip is that I have zero understanding of the vagaries of duck migrations. Puddles and eddies packed with ducks last season were all abandoned. At 10 years old, Oak was not impressed that we walked over three miles without a shot fired (not even at the pigeons who got wise and migrated themselves). I pointed out that he did get to pounce on a couple hen pheasants who were holding really tight. Having your heart stop as the ground explodes is one of my greatest joys but he is much more interested in a mouth full of feathers. Our luck didn't turn until we were blocked by a wall of cattails/phragmites and turned away from the water to head overland to some even more remote ponds.
The first thing to pop up was a lone rooster and we were on the board! Not too much further and we stumbled into an unbelievable number of mallards. Hundreds of white bellies taking off just out of range in what was easily the biggest flock I had ever approached outside of a city park or golf course... There is always hope for laggard birds so I committed to flooded boots and started wading across the main pond for promising side spurs. In an almost epic result, I got soooo close to my first triple. Three mallards up and then falling back into the marsh. But the joy of using the new semi-auto quickly turned to frustration as I had never realized firing that third shot requires pressing an extra button to reload. While I cursed how a middle aged hunter couldn't know how to operate his single tool, one of the mallards very slowly climbed up and out of my life unchallenged.
Its 5 months later and that one still stings. Yet we had three birds in the bag which made the long, squishy walk back to the truck feel like a victory parade. The five miles were uneventful with just a single missed opportunity on a wood duck, frustrating to miss but par for the course.
Oak was looking pretty chipper so we tried one of the little pockets on the way home that often escapes attention from other hunters. Everything was going according to plan with a couple hens in the reeds but as we snuck up on a large pond (2 acres), it was completely dry. More confusing to me was that it appeared that it had only been a max of a foot deep when I have clear memories of Oak swimming on retrieves and in particular a diver duck giving us the slip.
Trying to figure out what happened was making my little brain hurt. I checked for a demolished beaver dam but there was no obvious clues to the mystery. I kept pondering it as we tried a couple other marsh areas at the edge of the public land but they were similarly bone dry, not great for ducks.
The story didn't come together until the walk back when we crossed a couple massive dry washes that I was pretty sure were brand new. It was very odd to imagine a stream of any size coming out of the very modest Frenchman Hills. I was thinking a freak, flash flood until I remembered a little news story I saw in the spring about a canal failure. As you can see it was a pretty serious breach and it dumped thousands of tons of sediment and some asphalt into a couple of my favorite spots. Mystery solved and back home to clean the birds!
December 2nd, 2022: A big shift in the weather, an embarrassing show on roosters, but a pretty similar outcome to the November trip with a duck and rooster in the bag (plus a bonus decoy). We did a much wider loop this round to see some new ground and it paid off with 4 roosters in range while the ducks had disappeared... Rather than lose my last couple readers with a play by play, I'll just share some pictures:
Just a couple random notes - 1. Oak really tore his eyes up in the first hour in hot pursuit of pheasants in the reeds. While it makes me feel terrible, he didn't seem to notice and the bitter cold helped seal him back up for the rest of the morning. 2. As we approached the canal for the first time, a group of diver ducks came up right under Oak's nose and from that moment on, he kept his nose glued to the edge of the water. 3. The decoy was of the fancy variety and had both Oak and I fooled until Oak tried to retrieve it. It also had been shot by a couple different types of pellets so maybe that is how it ended up floating downstream from its original spread. 4. Normally dropping pheasants is the one thing I can do right but it just wasn't happening for me on this day. Need to spend more time at the range this summer so we can have our birds in hand and call it a day early! Cutting down the hours Oak spends on his feet is going to be key if we are to sustain a season in the field next year.
January 6, 2023: Not a good sign to see ice fisherman out and about when hoping to find puddle ducks... This general area is the lowest elevation in my stomping grounds, 600' above sea level instead of the usual 1,100-1,200'. The forecast was claiming 35°F for the low but in this particular valley it didn't clear 24°F and the hills were too tall for the sun to reach us. That turned out to bite Oak hard as the snow that remained was crystallized into ice shards that never softened up. Unlike the eye scrapes, this is something that did start to slow him down and was a major failure on my part.
But we didn't know that at sunrise. Instead, we had a duck in the bag before I was even fully dressed! The master plan for this trip was to find a spot on the creek that looked safe to wade so that we could walk both banks as the surrounding landscape is too barren (due to a recent fire) to hold birds. At least it seemed like a good plan looking at OnX. We parked and walked down to the creek to check the feasibility in person when a duck came buzzing under the bridge just a foot above the water. To Oak's surprise, I got him and he dived in for a frigid swim before the sun was up (bonus points if you can spot Oak chasing him to the far bank).
Most of the walk was pretty quiet, not a single pheasant. We chased a small flock of scaup for a couple miles and flushed a lot of quail. I almost pulled off a slick plan on one of the scaup who couldn't be bothered to fly away but swam just out of range - at a decent "U" in the creek, we hustled across to cut him off. Only problem was we had too much hustle and when we crested the dune, he was too far upstream and finally flew away.
While I had hiked miles in my rubber waders (warm but still not pleasant), the creek crossing plan was a bust. The bottom of the creek was full of very deep, sucking mud which is maybe worth battling in early fall but too risky for me in winter.
To keep Oak off his feet, I shifted to scouting mode including going down to look at Columbia River and the different species of ducks on the big water. It was not their first rodeo and they were very comfortable just paddling a little further out whenever I peaked around one of the cool looking rocks. The only game harvested was a cottontail that paused for just a little too long. I'm always a little skittish around rabbits and all their parasites but I thought the winter weather was supposed to take out the little blood suckers... Nope! I hadn't made it 10 yards before I became the next target and my hand was swarmed by fleas. I was feeling phantom creepy crawlers for days and many showers later...
For the final act of the day, I decided to try an ambush. I could tell a lot of the ducks were moving up and down stream as they were feeding so I flushed the coots and ducks away from a promising bay and then snuggled down in the bushes to wait to see who returned. Must be a popular spot because my perch also came with a free Sitka glove, it smelled slightly of skunk but was a big upgrade for me.
When I finally was too cold to wait any longer I popped out to try for the couple ducks hiding with the coots. As I should have known, the ducks are more armored and I ended up with nine coots and zero ducks. I ran back up to the truck and brought Oak off the bench to make more retrieves than he normally does in a full season followed by a well deserved rest on the long drive home.
January 24th, 2023: The final hunt of the season and with the pheasant already closed, it made sense to head straight back to the Columbia to experiment more with hiding in the bushes. I wasn't sure if it would help but the recovered decoy was thrown out in the darkness and I bundled in about 7 layers to see what daylight would bring. In that first half hour I got to observe a couple different varieties of diver ducks (will bring binoculars next year to get beyond everything looking like little, black ducks), a big merganser out in the rocks and a smaller raft of coots. Seeing no sign of the bigger, tastier mallards, widgeons, etc I tried for and got one of the divers (Oak retrieving on the right).
I waited a couple more hours but with the locals wise to me and not a single duck flying, it was time to move on. Yet, in one of those cruel little quirks of timing, as I had my hands full on the walk along the shore two honkers had already set their wings and were almost on top of me before they figured out their mistake... If I had set tight for another 5 minutes, I would have had a goose or two which would easily outweigh a bag limit of ducks.
I tried a few more locations but nobody was convinced by my lonely duck presentation. With things warming up we moved south and switched back to our duck jumping routine which yielded a tiny diver and some cool ice crystals. I also found a salmon which was the first time my favorite pursuits crossed paths.
The very last chance for protein was at the lake below. I had a good vantage to watch almost 100 ducks and seagulls interacting on the opposite bank, about 200 yards away. While I read a novel, more and more ducks came buzzing in and as they set their wings it sounded surprisingly similar to miniature jets. That alone would have been worth it but then the lake became crowded enough that some of the ducks began doing a slow loop around the bank. They eventually got within range and I botched it, not a single duck dropped. Not the memory I wanted to dwell on until October but so it goes.
PS - This post was intimidating me into silence but making a big crock pot of bbq birds legs and rabbit brought back a lot of good memories and got me back to the keyboard.