A couple of weeks ago, I had some seminars at the Dallas Safari Club Convention and Expo. While down there, Charles Allen, the owner of Diamond Blades and Knives of Alaska asked me to go duck hunting with him. He has a ranch in East Texas and has been inviting me for years. Finally I had a few free days, so we lined up a hunt. One of his guides, Jordan, was going to be hunting with us. I met him while fishing up in Alaska a year ago.
I arrived at his ranch on Monday afternoon. We jumped on 4-wheelers, and Charles took me out to look at his ranch. He has some flooded timber, which as you know is the perfect set-up for mallards. When we rode in, we jumped 300 mallards. We were pumped and couldn’t wait to hunt the next morning. We threw out our decoys, then he showed me how he’d built a dam with a let-out gate so he could control the water level.
On a side note, I don’t think that the antis have a clue how much the hunters do to enhance habitat for the game that we hunt. Because of superb management, we have more game now than when America was discovered. Think about that for a minute. Even with all of the cities, highways and concrete, the deer hunting is better now. That’s amazing. It’s because we manage our game, environment and habitat.
That night, we sat up a while shooting the bull and having a good time for a while. Charles has a lot of good stories all the way from bighorn hunts in Alaska to his African hunts. I could listen to his stories forever. But being older and wiser, I finally went to bed and left the storytelling to the young men. The next morning, we jumped up, slammed down some coffee and rolls and headed out.
We hid the 4-wheelers and waded across the flooded woods and hid in the edge. Charles told us that at first we could be out on the edge of the woods, but as soon as the sun peeked out, we’d have to get concealed better.
Charles and I set up about 75 yards down from the other young men. Brian let us know it was now legal shooting time and not 20 seconds later a group of mallards dropped down like manna from above. Charles and I lucked out and were in front of where the ducks were flying in from.
We were dropping ducks pretty regularly. I didn’t know how far our shots would be so I’d grabbed some Kent 4-shot. We were mostly shooting mallards but did pick up some wood ducks and gadwalls.
Two small flocks dropped in and did the perfect mallard cupping drop, but they dropped right between us and the other group of guys so I couldn’t shoot. Ugh, I could have dropped six easily. Finally, about mid-morning the ducks stopped flying so we headed back to the lodge to clean birds.
Wow, between all of us we had a pile of birds. We’d had a great morning. I had a weekly knife product review due for AmmoLand Shooting Sports News and wanted to test out the Diamond Blade Pinnacle II for that review, so we cleaned the ducks with it. It worked great.
I wanted to do some crow hunting after the duck hunt, but the electronic call I had just gotten didn’t have the remote control included so we took pictures and cleaned ducks and the day finally came to a close.
Charles has a walk-in cooler so I took some aged ducks and my brother made a French cassoulet dish out of them. If you need a new duck recipe, my brother Eddy publishes an outdoor cooking YouTube on RonSpomerOutdoors. You should be able to view this recipe soon. So as we close, go out and smoke a few ducks and test out Eddy’s recipe. It was good.
Tom Claycomb lives in Idaho and has outdoors columns in newspapers in Alaska, Idaho, Utah, Nevada, Colorado and Louisiana. He also writes for various outdoors magazines and teaches outdoors seminars at stores like Cabela’s, Sportsman’s Warehouse and Bass Pro Shop.
