Duck Hunting and Waterfowling

Duck Hunting truly raises the question “Is there such a thing as collective nostalgia?” Can a group of unrelated people, most who have never met each other, jointly remember a time and place they never experienced? If so, waterfowlers suffer this sort of déjà vu more than any other sporting group.

Sure, the gear has changed. And the guns. And the ammo. Lord has the ammo changed. But the fact remains, when it comes to waterfowling, hunters use methods and techniques whose traditions go back well into the 19th century. Maybe gramp’s way is no longer the way it is, but it’s the way we want it to be. Thus, we lay out our decoy spreads just so, and build the blind a particular way, and perpetrate myths and legends that are different than the duck hunting reality.

Every island in the OBX, and the mainland towns that anchor the chain, had it’s own style of blind, and preferred decoy spread. Despite their proximity, there was little overlap of traditions. When hunting at Okracoke, we hunted out of duck hunting blinds that swung open in the front, rather than overhead, which leaves you half-blind to incoming birds. In Pamlico Sound, off of Morehead City, the duck hunting blinds were merely plywood boxes on stilts, and you shot downwards at birds that were setting into the blocks below you. Meanwhile, up at Oregon Inlet….well, you get the idea.

Each of those duck hunting styles followed an inviolate local tradition stretching back time out of mind. And each of them, to the local duck and goose hunter, was the only right way to do it.

Even our laws are part of the collective memory. It’s been nearly a century since the Migratory Bird Act of 1918 made market gunning illegal. And for sure and for certain, one of the saddest parts of our history is the excesses committed by outlaw gunners in the wake of that law.

What’s that got to do with sport hunting? Far as the Fed is concerned, all waterfowlers are, by nature, outlaws. And we have to be strictly controlled or we’ll destroy the resource.

You don’t think so? Why, then, are you limited to a ten gauge as the largest permissible shotgun? Logically, if the bag limit is, say, five mallards, it shouldn’t matter what size gun you use. Nor is the number of shells in the gun important, so long as you stop at five.

But the boys at Fish & Wildlife are afraid if they don’t limit the size of the gun, we’ll be punt gunning and battery gunning like they did in the ‘20s.

Hmmmmmm?. Punt-gunners got to take only one shot. And they did so under moonlight. At ducks sitting on the water. How this connotes to using, say, an antique 8-gauge, in the daylight, at flying birds, is anybody’s guess.

Ever gunned on a national refuge? I try and avoid public lands, so don’t know the current rules. Used to be, though, if you were drawn for a hunting blind you were limited to ten shells. Ten shells for a limit of two or three geese, depending on the year.

Why? If it took you 23 shots to down two geese that speaks to your competency. But not your sportsmanship.

The morass of rules and regulations that govern duck hunting and other waterfowling can be directly traced to outlaw gunning. If the Fed believed otherwise they would clean up that confusing mess.

At any rate, the traditions of waterfowling are many and varied, differing primarily by location. Check any decent decoy collection and you can almost pinpoint where the blocks came from based on material used, size, sophistication, and paint job. The hand carved dekes of the Susquehanna Flats, for instance, are radically different from those used in the western basin of Lake Erie, and little resemble those of the upper plains.

The term “waterfowling” covers a lot of ground. Mostly we think in terms of two groups: ducks and geese. But there’s more involved than that. Among ducks we can subdivide into puddlers and divers, so far as inland gunning goes. But we don’t want to forget sea ducking, with a venerable tradition of its own.

Among geese there are Canadas, which are hunted one way, and snows, blues, and specks, which are hunted another. We should probably include brant among the geese, for yet a third hunting style.

Tundra swan hunting, after being closed for 80 years, reopened on a limited basis back in the 1990s. Somewhat like goose hunting, swans present challenges of their own.

And, while the Migratory Bird Act essentially made shorebird hunting illegal, there is still some available in the form of snipe and rails.

I came late to duck hunting and waterfowling in general. For reasons I thought good at the time, I used to say I would never knock another man’s sport, unless he was a duck hunter. Then, as part of a sporting agreement with a neighbor, I stepped into a Midwestern duck hunting blind.

I’ve never come back out. And have been trying to make up for lost time ever since.