Ducks Away

For seven weeks wave after wave of mallards and pintails took off like scrambling fighter planes from their summer bases in Canada. Fanning out over four major flyways (see chart), where great precise Vs of wild geese passed intermittently from dawn to dusk, they headed south. It was the heaviest migration of waterfowl that the U.S. had seen in years. But the shooting was as variable as the weather.

In Colorado, where the water was low in irrigation reservoirs and natural cover sparse, hunters sank steel drums into the barren shores, climbed inside their makeshift blinds and pulled gunny sacks over their heads. Like hunters elsewhere, they were equipped with plenty of shells (No. 6 shot for ducks plus a few No. 2 in case geese came in low); some of them used kazoolike duck calls on which they quacked a bedlam of food calls. Mostly it did little good: the ducks sat on the open water far from the shore line, safely out of shotgun range.

It was almost as bad on Utah's famed Bear River marshes, where "bluebird weather" was keeping the ducks deep in the marshes.

Two-Bit Fines. In the East last week the air seemed alive with waterfowl. One huge flight winged in and spent the night on saltwater bays and coves inside New York City limits, where shooting is prohibited. Elsewhere in New York, New Jersey and Maryland, however, the twelve-gauge guns began barking, though in the East too hunters were plagued with fair weather.

But in Minnesota, Wisconsin and North Dakota, there was no cause for complaint except perhaps that hunters got their daily bag limit (four ducks) too quickly, often in the first 15 minutes. In the most northern lakes and sloughs, when the season was ending last week, connoisseurs had been hand-picking the breed of duck they would gun for, choosing them for flavor. Said one hunter down from Manitoba: "We all got canvasbacks. Had a camp rule that anyone who shot a duck besides a canvasback would be fined two-bits." On recipes there was a wide spread of opinion. Fast cooked, rare duck (20 minutes in a 500DEG oven) was fashionable with gourmets; some hunters were not above slicing off a few fillets and frying them in a pan.

$7.50 Dinners. Southward along the Mississippi flyway, which is traveled by the thickest squadrons of ducks and gunned by almost half the nation's 2,000,000 duck hunters, the shooting was the best in years. Hunters from all over the U.S. began to converge on Stuttgart, Ark., which brags that its flooded woodlands and rice fields make it the duck capital of the world.

It could be an expensive business for visiting gunners. At Stuttgart, guide service plus a fee for shooting on private land came to $15 a day. Transportation, hotel expenses, tips, food-bank freezing and dressing fees put the average day's costs at $30, or $7.50 for each duck if the hunter got the four-duck limit. Even that made no allowance for gear, ammunition or guns--which ranged from ordinary twelve-gauge single-barrels to over-and-under pieces that could cost as much as $2,500. To the habitues it was worth it.

Stuttgart's "Swede" McCormick, who acts as guide to Arkansas Governor Sidney McMath, had a thought for the ducks. Said he: "These ducks live to be five years old at most. We hit them when they're between two and three years old, the governor and I figure, so they don't really miss much of life."

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