Field Perspectives: You Won’t Know Unless You Go

It is safe to say the Pollmanns evolved from land-dwelling mammals.

I have to give my teenage son, Miles, some credit. It’s a pretty funny line, even as I’m down on my knees in a slough after stumbling in the muck while setting out decoys. He doesn’t miss too many opportunities to give me some grief, but truth be told, moments before, he had almost done the same thing. It has become a running joke of sorts between us that when the waders go on, one of us is going to go down. We’ve gotten pretty good at getting wet while duck hunting.

And if you measure a hunt by the number of birds in the bag, Miles and I have also gotten pretty good at balancing out the bad days with the good. For every hunt that has us coming up empty-handed, there seems to be another one that ends up with ducks and geese on the strap. As I take my place on my marsh stool against a backdrop of willows and trees, I wonder just how this day is going to go.

Our decoys are set on a one-acre slough in east-central South Dakota. It is the day before Halloween, but the jury is out on whether the morning is going to be more trick than treat. A gracious landowner reached out to me out of the blue to offer access to the ground (that does not happen very often), and while I saw only a few ducks on the water when I scouted, I felt it was at least worth a try. We are probably an hour south of where larger numbers of waterfowl are congregated courtesy of a recent calendar migration of gadwalls, green-winged teal, and mallards. There’s a chance some new birds rolled in overnight to this area. As I told Miles after the so-so scouting report, “We won’t know unless we go.”

Shooting time comes and goes, and we wait. And wait some more.

I take my phone out to grab a picture of Miles, only to hear the unmistakable sound of a drake mallard landing just outside our decoys. Shots ring out, the drake flies away, and Buddy, our yellow Labrador, gives us the look.

And how the morning progresses. First, a hen pintail lands on the opposite side of the slough; then a flock of five mallards completely ignores my calling and drops in even farther away than the pintail. Miles and I make enough noise laughing at my coffee and doughnut problem that those birds fly off, which is probably a good thing, only to have a hen mallard quack her way down from the sky and again land with the wind one hundred yards away from our decoy spread.

Miles has hunted enough with me to know that this is just how things go sometimes. We talk and laugh, and Buddy waits impatiently for something to retrieve. A bufflehead buzzes overhead. A flock of white-fronted geese angles across the sky. The sounds of Canada geese and ring-necked pheasants can be heard in the distance. We sit and wait amid the trees lining the slough, which are wearing beautiful shades of yellow and red.

Through hunting with my son, I’ve come to discover that I no longer need to measure the success of a day by the number of birds in the bag, and to his credit, Miles already seems to be figuring that out. In the evolution of a duck hunter, that’s a pretty important step to take.

FIELD FOOTAGE: THE HUNT