Late Show
Field & Stream|December 2019 - January 2020
A sure skunking at an icy pond turns into a winter waterfowl bonanza
Phil Bourjaily
Late Show

YOU CAN’T SHOOT ducks from the couch, but you can’t shoot them with the truck stuck in the road ditch either, so I waited until the plows cleared the roads and finally ventured out around sunrise. Now that I’m here, I can’t even seem to shoot ducks from my layout blind.

The mallards trading up and down the river swing over the half-frozen pond I’m guarding and look down from a safe height, but that’s all. I know they can’t spot me. I dug the blind into deep, fresh snow at the water’s edge with a bank behind, and I tucked grass into the stubble straps of the hide’s snow cover. I even remembered to wear my white beanie and neck gaiter. I’m like the picture of the polar bear eating vanilla ice cream in a blizzard. There’s nothing to see, save a few inches of gun barrel sticking out of the blind doors. I’ve picked an inertia gun, Browning’s Wicked Wing A5, as the semi-auto in my cabinet most likely to shoot three times, every time, on a cold and snowy day.

The spread is my usual smallwater setup, a C of 18 or so mallard decoys. I’ve added five Canada goose floaters for visibility and because there are geese around. I put them downwind of the ducks because the old-time gunners believed that ducks will fly over geese but geese won’t fly over ducks—and I’m happy to go along with that wisdom.

Esta historia es de la edición December 2019 - January 2020 de Field & Stream.

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Esta historia es de la edición December 2019 - January 2020 de Field & Stream.

Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 9,000 revistas y periódicos.

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