YIPEEEEE!!!
I'll calm down in a second.
Ok I'm good.
Nope, too excited to type again.
Ok now I'm good.
Anyhow, I ventured on up North to the Hackensack MN area where a good friend of mine works at a nature center. He recently moved into a palace of a place smack in the middle of nowhere and invited me and another friend on up for a weekend of bird hunting. We would pursue grouse in the woods and ducks from the waters. I requested time off from my household duties as follows:
Jake: "I'm going hunting with some of the boys this weekend."
{points to calendar at dates in September with this being middle August}
Elli: {rolling eyes, sighs heavily} "Well are you actually gonna shoot something this time?"
Jake: {lips quivering, voice cracks} "Why you gotta cut so deep?"
The weekend finally came and the truck was loaded with excessive hunting paraphernalia, beer, junk food, soda pop (There! I pleased everyone with referring to POP with both the correct term and the hillbilly inbred reference), more beer, and headed up North.
Our plan was simple: We would hunt grouse during the day, and shoot ducks in the morning. Duck shooting ended at 4pm, so we would mostly go during the day. However one of the members of our gang didn't buy his duck stamps, so instead all of Saturday was devoted to grousing. We had good luck, in that we saw and heard plenty of birds. But Mother Nature has yet to signal to the trees to drop there leaves, and as such most of the cover was so dense that you couldn't see the other guy, decked out in blaze orange, more than 10 feet away from you. So we didn't get a whole lot of shooting but we did get a few shots off and I managed to pull a very lucky shot off and bag one bird.
Sunday after the one guy left, my friend KC and I loaded up the duck hunting gear and proceeded to canoe over to a river running off of a lake. KC knew there were ducks holding up in there, and as it was warm and bluebird skies, we both agreed setting up shop somewhere was gonna prove pointless as nothing was flying. This plan with the canoe allowed us to flush birds holding tight in the backwaters. It produced nicely:
There should be two more there (two more wood ducks) but we spent about 20 minutes on each of them looking for them where they dropped only to never find them. I truly hate leaving wounded birds but we literally scoured every inch of the area that they went down for about a 30 yard radius. One was probably my best shot of my career too. Such is hunting. On the plus side KC shot a wall quality wood duck:
KC's woodie. Ha, I couldn't resist!
It was a great way to kick off the season. And the above harvest was only in a little over 2.5 hours (that's including the 40 minutes or so looking for downed birds on top of retrieving all the other ones). Kind of a spoil type of day in that lots of rewards for little work. But we've all earned those from time to time right?
Happy hunting all!
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