Keep Your Eyes To The Skies

Have you ever watched a flock of ducks or geese disappear over the horizon only to scratch your head and wonder where in the world they could have gone?

Or, have you ever spent an uneventful day telling yourself there aren't enough ducks or geese around to expect good hunting. Then you get a call that night from one of your hunting buddies telling you that he knows of a group of guys that shot their limit of ducks by 9:00 a.m. that day and they had been doing this all week long.

Amazingly, the place the group of hunters was doing so well at was the very location you saw a group of ducks disappear into the horizon a week earlier.

Just Lucky?

Did those hunters just happen to stumble across some hidden hot spot and just get lucky? No, they were just more observant than most hunters and put their time in scounting versus sitting watching TV at home.

First Hand Experience

With few birds down from the north and mild temperature forecasted for the next 30 days, it looked as though it was going to be a long wait between our duck and goose hunting opener and the arrival of new birds sometime later in the fall.

On only the second day of the season, our much anticipated waterfowl season appeared to be a dismal failure. By 7:30 a.m. Sunday morning what few ducks there were in the area disappeared. At 9:00 a.m. the temperature was already reaching the mid 70's and by 10:00 a.m. we called it a day.

About 200 yards from the boat ramp I looked up just long enough to see a group of 30 mallards disappear behind a row of trees. I stopped the boat to see if there might be more ducks in the area. Within two minutes, another sizable group of ducks disappeared into the same area.

No one could figure out where those birds would be going. They had disappeared into a 20-acre sea of grass that was suited for deer and upland game hunting. At the coaxing of my hunting buddies I began to fight my way through the chest high grass to the spot where I thought they had went down.

After stumbling around through the grass for more than 15 minutes, I was covered with sweat and felt stupid and dejected. But since I was already in the middle of the field I decided to go a few hundred yards further.

I walked less than a 100 feet when I happened to look up and see three mallards land less than 20 yards in front of me. I slowly crept the next 20 yards and there in front of me were over 300 mallards, pintail, woodies, teal, and other puddlers.

As I stood there in utter amazement, I saw what was attracting the ducks, a 100-yard long and 15-yard wide trough of water that was less than one foot deep. The water had flooded a patch of foxtail and smartweed and it seemed every duck in the county knew where this little piece of heaven was.

After kicking up the birds, I followed the shallow trough of water towards its origin where I found a plugged drainage culvert. The plugged culvert was backing up water into the field of grass.

By the time I got back to the parking lot the ducks were already coming back.

For the next month we hunted that "hidden treasure" by ourselves and had one of the finest early duck seasons any of us could ever remember.

The Key Continues To Work

That experience happened over 20 years ago. Since learning Key #1- Keep Your Eyes To The Skies, we have kept my eyes to the sky trying to catch a glimpse of ducks or geese that just disappear into trees, standing corn, tall grass, or any other of a hundred places you wouldn't expect waterfowl to be.

During that period of time my partners and I have consistently taken limits of ducks and geese on public and private land with little or no pressure simply by watching the sky and finding the location where the ducks and geese have disappeared to.

Keep The Good Thing Going

When using Key Number One to pinpoint the spot where the duck or geese went down you'll often find these are secluded areas that offer safety, seclusion, and/or food.

We recommend that once you find such an area, get in and get out. Take your limit as quickly as possible. By doing so, your chances of burning the spot out are not as great and you can enjoy the spot for many additional days during the season.