Cupped Wings: Greenhead Magic

There is a moment when you just know. It’s mostly a heart thing at first, at least for me. The empirical cues—the dark line between grayish belly and chestnut chest, the querying soft quack of a hen—only confirm what my heart felt a half-second earlier: Those are mallards.

There are plenty of places where the greenhead is the duck du jour, the expected quarry, the bird that typically hangs from the strap. If that’s where you hunt, then good on ya. But a greenhead isn’t a given on my home waters, the beaver swamps and river sloughs of central North Carolina. On your luckiest days, there are mallards galore. But most of the time, a flight of mallards overhead seems like an offering. Even a single greenhead will tighten the chest.

Those are mallards! That’s not my brain at work, but my heart. I pull the hat brim a bit lower. I steady the dog. Suddenly, things get a bit more serious. I’m not knocking the wood duck—I would never diss the wood duck. But there’s something about a mallard.

The birds circle out front and begin to turn, and I see one duck on the outside of the flock check her flight, a little hesitancy as the birds bank, a subtle shift as she lifts her head and gains a foot of air. It happens in a split second, but the heart knows it could all go south right now. It only takes one nervous duck to pull a flock off course and suck the entire kit and feathered caboodle back into the sky. But she settles back into the group, and my heart finally lets itself think what it hasn’t been quite brave enough to think quite yet: This might happen.

The heart knows. The sight of greenheads registers in the feels. It’s like a good dog watching the sky, its eyes fiercely intent and steadfastly ignoring the beeline of a mourning dove or the dipping flight of a kingfisher. Then its gaze suddenly locks onto a smudge of ducks on the far horizon like a tractor beam, as if it could draw them in through the sheer power of its will. That comes from the heart.

New hunters are often astonished when experienced duck hunters identify birds flying half a mile away or when they catch a glimpse of a few silhouettes through the trees.

“Gray ducks coming in.”

“Those are wigeon. Get ready.”

What? Those specks? Are you serious?

I suppose there’s an argument that identifying ducks at a distance is a learned skill, that once you see a couple of decades’ worth of birds on the horizon, it comes naturally to sort through a matrix of wingbeat speed, belly and tail profiles, subtle wing markings, and head shape without even thinking. But there are times when it seems even more deep-seated. Even primal.

Electrochemical impulses in the human brain can travel up to about 270 miles per hour, but that’s poking along in the slow lane compared to how quickly the heart registers the slender, gull-like silhouette of a pintail at 300 yards. Or the oh-so-subtle difference between a black duck and a hen mallard in the sooty gray light of a cloudy dawn. The gun comes up and the bead finds the bird and the trigger finger tenses when suddenly, Holy moley, that’s a black duck, the heart says. You don’t think it; you feel it. And you lower the gun. Not today. The season isn’t in yet.

How do you know? How could you figure it out so quickly?

I don’t know. You just know.

That’s those duck feels again. 

I’m no brain surgeon, but I think there are other inputs the duck hunter’s heart picks up before any of the five senses have time to alert the parietal regions of the brain through both myelinated and unmyelinated neurons. The mingled scent of bacon and stale beer. Your piriform cortex doesn’t have to tell you you’re at duck camp. You know it in the feels. Brine of old sock. Brew of swamp muck. The thud of a tail on the far side of the door. That stuff hits you in places you can’t describe. In places so deep you didn’t know they existed.

By the time these birds have circled the decoys twice, they’re close enough that the head overtakes the heart. That’s when I see the flash of blue on the wing, the color line on the chest, and hear the soft murmur of the drake’s buzzy DWEEP. The hard data comes rolling in, fact-checking the feels.

Yep. Mallards, for sure.     

Then the gun comes up, and I push the muzzle toward the birds. Neither my head nor my heart is working the buttons now, but repetition, muscle memory, and instinct. Think about the shot, and I’m sure to miss. I give over to whatever is at the controls, swing without swinging, track without tracking, and pull the trigger without ever consciously deciding to squeeze. That’s a sensation I’ll never truly understand.

And when I lift the greenhead from the water, its back flecked with duckweed and beads of swamp water glistening on its wings, I can’t help but think: What a treat. What a gift. What a way to spend a morning.

What a feeling. There’s nothing quite like it.