Perfect storm of ducks is a sight to behold

[h2ofwlr]

By Gary Clancy, Rochester Post Bulletin
Posted: Friday, October 17, 2014 7:47 pm

Three times in a long career of waterfowling, I have been lucky enough to see it rain ducks.

Of course, it does not literally rain ducks, but when it happens, the birds cascade from the sky in such numbers that "raining ducks" is the only way I can describe the event.

The fall I entered kindergarten, my father took me with him early one morning to hunt mallards in a picked cornfield in northern Iowa. Although in his later years Pa and I spent a lot of good days hunting ducks in places like Upper Twin, Minnesota Lake, Bear Lake and Walnut Lakes, field hunting was always Pa's favorite way of hunting ducks.

This November morning was frosty-cold, with a pretty good northwest wind to boot. Pa built me a little nest out of cornhusks and covered me with leaves. I'm sure I was asleep before daybreak.

The hiss of a few hundred wings whistling just over our heads woke me up just as Pa sat up and started shucking his old 97 Winchester. It seemed to me like a thousand ducks were trying to land right on top of us. I'm sure it was not half that many, more likely only a hundred or so, but to this 5-year-old boy, it was raining ducks.

When Pa got done shooting, three of those ducks — all three big drakes with those distinctive dark curly-tails and bright red legs, which are a sure sign to any serious duck hunter that the northern flight is in — were tumbling from the pewter sky for the last time. Pa let me lug all three of those mallards back to the car. It was a proud moment for a little boy.

No need to shoot

I was 30-something before I saw it rain ducks again. Back then I used to stay down at a hunting shack on Bear Lake, southwest of Albert Lea, and trap for a couple of weeks each fall. The forecast was for a hard freeze overnight, so I had spent all day pulling my 100 muskrat traps. I had made the mistake of having them all get frozen in once before. If you have ever done it, then you know that chopping traps out of the ice is back-breaking work.

It took me all day to collect my traps. Tired to the bone and with only a half hour left before sunset, I almost headed in for the evening. But since I always had a shotgun in the boat and kept a half-dozen old Herter's decoys stashed on a rat house for just such occasions, I threw out the decoys, loaded the gun and settled in for a very short evening hunt. There were a few ducks flying, but nothing came near my meager spread of decoys, and it looked as if I would not be having duck for supper the next evening.

But just a few minutes before the end of legal shooting hours, more mallards than I have ever seen at one time in my life descended on Bear Lake, and all of them seemed to want to land with my six beat-up decoys. It remains the only time I have ever had ducks actually land on the grassed-over deck of my duck boat. Had I wanted to, I could have reached out and grabbed ducks on either side of the gunnels.

The mallards had obviously been flying a long time. As soon as they hit the water, they began to drink. Again and again they dipped their beaks, tipped their heads back and let the water run down their parched throats.

I can honestly say that I never even considered shooting. Spoiling a moment like that would have been sacrilege.

Soon it was dark. Individual ducks blurred into one solid, black blob on the water. The chatter and chuckling was like nothing I had ever heard before or since. I believe I would have sat there in that cold boat all night, just listening and taking it all in.

Then the moon came up. Moon beams danced across the water, and I could tell by the murmuring that the mood of the mallards was quickly changing. As one, they exploded off of the water and into the night. It was one of those privileged moments in the outdoors, and all these years later, I can remember the sights, sounds and smells of that evening in perfect clarity.

In the timber

A few years later I was lucky enough to fulfill a lifelong dream of mine by hunting the flooded timber around Stuttgart, Ark.. Anyone with waterfowling in their blood has heard about Stuttgart. I had been reading about it since I was a little boy.

Locals claimed that there were not many mallards around yet when some friends and I arrived a week before Christmas that year. Well, maybe what we encountered was not a lot of mallards to them, but it sure seemed like a lot to me.

On our second morning, everything was froze up, so we broke ice in big sheets, shoved it under the remaining ice and made a nice open, hole in the flooded timber for any mallards that might still be around. Again, I don't know how many mallards there were in the flock that twisted, turned and floated down through the naked oaks that morning. Hundreds, for sure. All I know is that if we had let them land, they would not all have fit in that black hole we had punched in the ice.

I don't remember how many ducks the five of us took out of that flock. But then, numbers like that are not important when a spectacle such as that is taking place right in front of you. In the years since, whenever I meet up with any of the hunters who were with me that December morning in Arkansas, the conversation always turns to flooded timber and raining ducks.


.Gary Clancy is a full-time outdoors writer from Stewartville and is the author of nine books.

[get-n-birdy]

Thanks for sharing. I really like Clancy. He offered one of my kids the pick of all his turkey calls after a seminar. There was a cherry wood box call that was top on my list for the kid to grab. The kid took a primos plastic owl hooter. We talked and he signed a book to my oldest kid who was maybe in kindergarten at the time and is now at the U of M studying to be an engineer. Clancy has a great writing style imo.

Thanks fowler!

[Bailey]

Cool stuff.

[Swampcollie]

Love reading Clancy's articles! No nonsense old school. His whitetail articles are even better.

[lanyard]

You mean, people enjoy reading about someone that goes out and actually kills things... on his own?

[h2ofwlr]

And with no black hoodie sweatshirts or "team XYZ" emblazoned on the side of their truck? Blasphemy!

[lanyard]

.... And without replacing Avery as brand most likely to claim all things previously invented as their own....

[Fish Felon]

Clancy is great. There are very few outdoor writers like him left.