by Wade Bourne

My partners and I were standing next to our vehicle on a Manitoba back road, watching mallards cyclone down a few hundred yards away into a swathed barley field. The large flight circled lower and lower, and then suddenly the birds disappeared. "Where'd they go?" one of my buddies asked. "Did they land in the field?"

I didn't think so. There had been no white wing flash evident from their backpedaling. It was as if the land had just swallowed the ducks up.

Then another flight appeared, and the same thing happened.

"There's something out there we don't know about," I observed to my partners. "Let's go take a look."

We had already talked to the owner of the field and had permission to hunt it. We loaded up our gear and started plodding toward the "twilight zone."

We had walked some 200 yards and were cresting a little ground swell when a third flight appeared. These birds made one big looping circle, and then dropped down. Now we could see where they were going. There was a line of thin vegetation cutting through the field—the border of a gully.

The ducks were landing in a drainage ditch below ground level. When we slipped closer, we could hear the quacking and chatter of birds that were crammed into a sunken ribbon of water that traversed this field. Instead of flushing them, we decided to retreat and return there to hunt the next morning.

Dawn found us back on the road, waiting for the ducks to fly out to feed. We were astounded at the number of birds that took wing. When they had departed, we made a quick move to get set up before they started coming back. We tossed half a dozen decoys in the sliver of water where the birds had roosted. Then we tunneled into some tall reeds growing up the sides of the ditch, and we waited.

The ducks started returning in less than an hour. A single mallard drake came first. He sailed straight in. My partner downed him with a clean shot, but before we could retrieve him, a dozen or more appeared. They floated in after a short half-circle.

Then there was a big flight, and another. All the ducks worked to within 20 yards of our hiding spot. We held fire until they were backpedaling to land in the narrow ditch, and we filled our limits quickly.

Big surprises come in small packages. Some of the best duck hunting can be found in some of the smallest, least obvious spots: a hidden slough, a crease in flooded timber, sheet water in a field, a cattle pond, a tidal pool or a hidden beaver pond. Most such spots won't attract the number of ducks we saw in that Manitoba ditch, but they don't have to. Just a few birds committed to a spot can provide blue-ribbon duck hunting.

Dr. Mickey Heitmeyer, Mike Moody and Joe Congleton are three waterfowlers who specialize in hunting small waters. Heitmeyer, of Puxico, Mo., is a waterfowl biologist with the Missouri Department of Conservation. He studies ducks for a living and hunts them avidly when he's not working.

Moody runs South Dakota Hunting Service out of Onida, S.D., and most of his duck hunting is centered on a series of potholes in the north-central part of the state. Congleton, of Knoxville, Tenn., is a lifelong duck hunter who earned his stripes on the mudflats and bays of his home region's Tennessee Valley Authority lakes.

These three men are aware of how good small waters can be, and each is a pro at locating and hunting these obscure spots. Not surprisingly, their theories and strategies for doing so are similar, and they will work wherever small waters and ducks coincide.