Louisiana Duck Hunting:

Doing the Delta

Louisiana duck hunting demonstrates that, although
waterfowl hunting is enjoying a resurgence, with new
hotspots showing up all the time, sometimes the
traditional hunting grounds are the best.

The names roll by coming out of Vicksburg: Bee Bayou, and Bayou LaFouche, and the Boef and Tensas and Ouchita Rivers. The romance of the names suggest a different time---a time when Yancy Derringer ruled New Orleans with an iron hand and five-card stud; when fancy ladies were high Creole or Octoroon, rather than Southern Belle; when the country itself was young and on the move.

It’s all downhill from Vicksburg across Ol’ Muddy. Vicksburg to Delta. Delta to Tallulah…to Delhi…to Monroe…with rice and cotton and new winter wheat just peeking out of the fields. This is the heart of the Louisiana Delta country –the heart of Louisiana duck hunting. And in a normal winter about three million ducks call it home. Ducks like you can’t imagine. Mallards and blacks and pintail. Bluebills down nearer the coast. Woodies (called “squealers" locally, don’t ask me why) and widgeon and teal and ringnecks and gadwall. Further on, in the depths of the rice country, geese by the thousands. Whitefronted and snows and specklebellies and blues. Big ol’ French ducks in the open marsh country and the rice fields around Lake Charles. Smaller ducks in the swamps and bayous. Ducks, and more ducks, and yet still more ducks. Louisiana duck hunting provides birds in abundance.

My first time Louisiana duck hunting was with Phil Robertson. Phil’s a heretic who hunts his own way, bending or breaking all the rules of thumb known to waterfowling. Think you need an ugly, blustery day for waterfowling? Harken to the Word as given by Robertson: “Gimme a bluebird day, with a slight wind from the northwest,” he insists, “and I guarantee you’re gonna kill you some ducks between 10 a.m. and noon.”

Middle-of-the-day, bluebird weather and the man says to go duck hunting. Sounds crazy. Yet, the 36 leg bands on his calling lanyard prove that when it comes to Louisiana duck hunting, his methods work.

But Louisiana duck hunting on the Ouchita River with Phil isn’t the Delta we’ve come to find. That lies further south. If you look for it, it’s there to be had, in all that green-on-the-map area, especially in the swamplands surrounding Lakes Ponchartrain and Maurepas.

Moss-bedecked cypress and tupelo gum stand close sentinel in the dank, tannin-stained waters, forming a miles-wide monk’s tonsure around those lakes. Periodically there’s a plop and ripples as some creature, unseen, slips into the water---water than can be six inches deep or that many feet.

Strange noises and bird calls abound, and imagination places water moccasins and ‘gators on every hummock. The air seems heavy and oppressive. This is every film you’ve ever seen where our hero is lost in the southern swamps.

But nobody is lost. We’re here at Camp Serendipity – looking to latch onto some Louisiana duck hunting with Paul Dubbuisson and Warren Coco on their waterfowl lease out in the swamp.

Airboat and pirogue are the only ways in and out, and civilization might be a thousand miles away instead of the mere ten that it is. Ten miles to the highway. From there it’s 30 minutes to Metairie (don’t worry about the spelling, you say “met tree”) and another hour to the Big Easy.

But we’re not here to enjoy the fleshpots. We’re here to spend a few days shooting out in the swamp, where, it seems, every duck on the Mississippi flyway has taken up winter housekeeping. And if it takes 40 minutes by airboat and pirogue to get there, well, that’s the way we’ll do it.

“Now, Brook, here’s the drill,” Dubbuisson mumbles around a mouthful of his seafood gumbo. “We’ll go out just before dawn, take a limit of ducks, then come back here for breakfast. Shouldn’t be but 8:30 or so when we get back.”

I just stared at him. Was this man certifiable? Or was he merely pulling my leg? Louisiana duck hunting was supposed to be different - I mean I’d driven down expecting to do well. But limiting out in an hour and a half was a bit more than “doing well.”

But what the hell, I’d go along with the gag. “What do we do the rest of the day?” Dubbuisson didn’t miss a beat, “By the time we finish breakfast, and get all them birds cleaned, and putter around with the gear,” he predicted, “it will be going on lunchtime. So we’ll have some lunch, shoot the bull for awhile, and by then it’ll be time for a nap. We’ll get up about 4:30, take a handful of those ducks we killed this morning, and throw them in the smoker.

“Then we’ll make us an evening hunt. Should be back by about dark-thirty, and the smoked ducks should just about be ready. We’ll chow down on smoked duck, then do it again the next day.”

Thing is, he wasn’t kidding. Louisiana duck hunting Delta swamp country style means you only hunt mornings and evenings. The idea of spending all day in a blind is so alien to them that they thought I was pulling their legs when I told them that was how we did it up north. But the plain-dee-fact is, it all happened just the way Dubbuisson said it would.

Up shortly before dawn, a quick cup of coffee, and we’re off in the airboat, following a watery trail only Dubbuisson can see. My two buddies are dropped off at one tree stand with Dubbuisson’s shooting partner, while Paul and I continue to another.

They’re something else, these tree stands for ducks. Fifteen to 20 feet in the air, at the edge of an opening, and camoed to blend in with the background trees, ducks never notice them at all. Toss a dozen or so decoys out in the opening, and wait for the birds to drop in.

So there we stand, Paul Dubbuisson and me, in the early morning chill, waiting for light and wishing in vain for another cup of coffee. We wouldn’t be out here long enough, they’d insisted, to bother taking a thermos.

“We rarely get to shoot at ducks down in the dekes,” Dubbuisson whispers, as the sky turns rosy pearl. “Instead, you have to drop them as they twist down through the timber. Pick a hole in the brush where you figure they’ll be, and be ready to shoot fast.”

Suddenly, like somebody had thrown a switch, the sky is made of birds. Woodies and mallards and gadwall and widgeon and an occasional teal. In singles, and groups of three or five, and large flocks of 20. Birds everywhere you look. Get down on that call, working a small group to the left, and three respond from over your shoulder. Or a singleton comes straight at you through the trees. Or you spook a bunch on the right you didn’t even know was there.

Forget everything you thought you knew about waterfowling gunning. As I said, Louisiana duck hunting is different. This isn’t pass-shooting, but it’s not quite shooting at decoying ducks, either. It’s marsh shooting, and flooded timber, and field gunning all wrapped up in a down-lined package.

Here’s a greenhead, weaving through the trees, wings cupped so tightly the tips almost touch. Rocking back and forth, spilling wind first from one side then the other, as it does an aerial dance. You wonder how come more of them don’t collide with the branches. But they never seem to.

Then, as suddenly as it started, it’s all over. One minute the woods are full of ducks and the next there are none. “That’s the way it is,” Dubbuisson explains.. “In the morning they mill around a lot before leaving the swamps. Most of the day is spent feeding or rafted up out on the big lakes. Then they come back to the swamps in the late afternoon, and we’re there to catch them coming back in.”

It wasn’t even an exceptional Louisiana duck hunting day. “Here in the swamps we get shooting like that every year. Sometimes the birds migrate early. Sometimes they come later in the season.

“But this is the kind of shooting we always expect.”