The wood duck offers waterfowl hunting in uplands
Wood ducks are not your everyday waterfowl. For one thing, many hunters and birders consider the wood duck among North America’s most beautiful birds. The hen is plain but the drake displays a purple-green head, scarlet eye, chestnut breast, glossy yellow bill and a flamboyant white “choke collar” under his chin. Instead of quacking as you expect a duck to do, wood ducks voice a high-pitched squeal, especially when flushed from the water.
You don’t even find wood ducks in the kinds of places you’d expect to find ducks. They shun big marshes and lakes, preferring slow-moving creeks or little swamps hidden in deep woods. And their favorite food is something you associate with squirrels–acorns.
Wood ducks nearly disappeared into extinction early in the 20th century. The widespread destruction of river bottom swamps and unregulated hunting for the sale of their excellent flesh nearly did them in. Thankfully, conservation efforts have helped them rebound so that wood ducks are now one of North America’s most common waterfowl, though you’re not likely to see one unless you lurk around in swamps, at the upstream limits of secluded reservoirs or along meandering woodland streams.
I like to hunt wood ducks during the October one-week season that generally coincides with the wood duck migration. I don’t often kill one but I enjoy being in the kinds of places that attract them.
Another way that wood ducks are different is that they are difficult to attract to decoys, the conventional method of hunting other ducks like mallards, black ducks and teal.
My way to hunt them is to sneak down meandering streams in my Old Town Predator kayak primed to take them on the flush, which is something like a hunt for ruffed grouse but so much kinder to the lungs and legs.
Four or five different creeks offer me duck floats but I never mention their names. Their common traits are moderate gradient, numerous bends and oak timber for acorn attractant.
This year acorns rained. When I scouted my float-creeks, acorns piled up in the eddies as the “plops” from oak seeds plummeting into the flow sounded up and down the stream. “Wood ducks will just pour into here and stay all season,” I mused.
But when the season opened conditions did not favor my envisioned hunts. Temperatures hit the mid-80s every day through Thursday. Gnats, mosquitoes and biting flies were more a presence than waterfowl. It hadn’t rained in weeks and all the creeks were bony-low. You might float a kayak on the deeper pools but there was no way to pass the riffles without disembarking and shepherding the boat over the ledges, slipping, tripping and making noise all the while.
That was on the deepest, slowest, of my suite of streams. I knew there were stretches that would float me but I hadn’t counted on the current, or rather the lack of current. The flow was so slack that you had to paddle for progress; otherwise you sat there like a rubber duck in a tub.
There were lots of wood ducks on the stream. Twice I flushed squealing flocks of 20 or 30 birds but they were loafing on straightaways, where there was water. So, instead of my gliding silently around a bend and catching them unaware, they spied the continual arc of my approaching paddle and erupted out of range.
Thursday evening brought welcomed overcast and predicted rain, raising hope for later floats. Thursday was the hottest day that torrid week but brought respite from the fierce and searing sun. I decided to bob some decoys in the marshy backwater of a secluded impoundment, conceal myself in my kayak, and hope some wood duck dropped in for the night.
I’d just gotten comfortable when thunder rumbled behind me to the west. Had I been facing that way I would have seen the boiling cloud bank that unleashed the bolt but it was on top of me by the time the treetops whipped. There was nothing I could do but burrow deeper into the cattails and endure the lashing torrent, while my whitecap-tossed decoys dragged their egg-sinker anchors down-lake. I got soaked in a howling deluge that started out tepid but quickly chilled.
When the storm eased I unloaded the gun, chased down my decoys and dragged the boat back uphill through the woods to the truck.
“Hey, it’s worth it,” I rationalized. “This rain will raise the streams and I can float-hunt the rest of the season.”
The rain did raise the streams alright, to suicide levels. I checked them all, and they roared down their tight valleys under milk-chocolate complexions, strewing logs, railroad ties, and discarded appliances across the floodplain. On Saturday, the last day, there was nothing to do but return to the intimate marsh, which was now ringed by flooded timber, temporarily classic duck-country, like on the hunt my son Aaron and I had once made in Arkansas.
Paddling a little way into the suddenly-swamp I flipped out five decoys, pushed my boat onto a grassy hummock, covered it with frost-scorched jewelweed and settled in, hoping for the woodies’ return.
Sometimes, once in a great while, these things we hope for come to be. It’s like when you were a kid and you saw that buck coming through the woods. “Is this really happening?” you asked yourself. It’s true magic, something too marvelous to trust, yet it’s real.
It was like that with the drake. I saw him coming from far down-lake, winging straight for my decoys, low over the water. His red-and-yellow bill looked like it had been dipped in high-gloss enamel, and his purple-green crest lit up the gloom. He streaked over my decoys at jewelweed-height, then tipped up to drop in. That’s when I shot, and he splashed into the coffee-brown slough.
With something so mysterious and unique as wood ducks, even that little bit of success is enough. I count it as one fine season.