I am not sure what got me the most interested in hunting; the excitement of the hunt, the awesome snacks Dad would bring along, or the fact that my older brother Dan didn’t want me to be there. I can remember tagging along with my BB gun as a youngster for a dove hunt after Dan had tried to convince me it would be boring just to watch. Or the night before my first turkey hunt when Dan tried to tell me the recoil of the 20 gauge would be too much as he demonstrated by punching my shoulder. (Let me tell you, the recoil was significantly less than how he described it!)
Nonetheless, for whatever reason, and despite Dan’s efforts, I quickly grew to love the outdoors and hunting. And I like to give Dan a hard time about those early days of hunting, but in all reality, he turned out to be a pretty decent hunting partner.
I feel fortunate to have grown up in Kansas. We have some really unique opportunities for hunting. One hunt, we harvested a goose, duck, pheasant, and quail, all in one day. I have hunted waterfowl, turkeys, doves, deer, and upland birds, but my passion has always been duck hunting.
My very first waterfowl hunt was with my Grandpa in Nebraska. I don’t remember a lot of the details of that hunt, but one thing always sticks with me. We were hunting from a pit blind, and I was tall enough to just barely peek over the edge. I wasn’t paying any attention, and a hen mallard came and landed on the water out in front of the decoys.
I couldn’t shoot down at the water from the pit blind, and so Grandpa was setting up a milk carton for me to stand on. By the time I finally got up and put the gun on the bird, it had swum away from the commotion and was out of range. Still, I was able to watch it for the next few minutes as it swam around and quacked on the water. We didn’t shoot anything that day, but that was a story I told with great excitement over the next few months.
Fast forward a few more years and I was back to Nebraska, and we were hunting teal out of a boat blind. I had been on a few hunts in Kansas by this point and had a small little duck call that I brought with me. A group of teal flew in and I have never seen teal circle the decoys like this, but these guys seemed to fly around the blind just outside of range. I gave a couple of quacks on my duck call. After a few passes they got close enough for a shot and I was able to knock one down. Looking back on it I have no idea how my duck calling didn’t scare those ducks away. But in the moment, I thought I called those ducks in all by myself and I was ecstatic!
That was the moment I was hooked on duck hunting. The good times in the blind, the beautiful evening sunset, plenty of shooting, and perhaps most importantly, the belief that I had called those ducks into the decoys. Grandpa sent me home with a pair of waders and we stopped at Cabelas on the way home and Dad bought a dozen duck decoys. Next hunting season back in Kansas we started hunting public land and I haven’t looked back since.
I owe a lot of my passion for waterfowl hunting to those Nebraska hunting trips with Grandpa, but if it weren’t for my Dad, I am almost certain I wouldn’t still be duck hunting. The early years of hunting in Kansas were tough. Long drives, early mornings, and we were lucky if we even saw a duck. We didn’t do a lot of hunting, as by this time sports and extracurricular activities took up a lot of time, but I am so thankful for all of those hunting trips with my Dad.
There are countless stories of duck hunts with Dad, but there are two, in particular, that stick out to me. The first mallard I ever shot happened on the way in-between fields while pheasant hunting. We just so happened to have a few steel shells rolling around the back of the pickup as we drove past a farm pond my Grandpa owned. I could hear the excitement in Dad’s voice when he said, “Marcus, look!” as there was a small group of ducks sitting on the pond. We kept driving up to the nearest tree row before getting out and loading up.
We spent about the next 15 minutes crawling through the ditch and sneaking up behind a stand of cattails before jumping the ducks up. They flushed right into the sun and I think it was pure luck that I was able to knock one down. We had shot a few teal before, but that was my first mallard. Even the hens are such a beautiful bird, and I was memorized by the iridescent blue on the wing.
The other story takes place during one of those early, slow duck hunts on public land. Dad had gone off mid-morning to take a look around while I stayed and hunted. Even just seeing a duck was cause for excitement back then, so when he came back to say he had seen some ducks landing back in the trees, I was ready to check it out. Today, I can look up that little pond on Google Maps and see it wasn’t too far off, but on that day it felt like I was exploring the wild west. There was absolutely no-one around as we trudged through the brush and trees to an unknown destination.
We finally stumbled across this little hole that had several good groups of ducks on it and I was able to get close enough to shoot one. I can’t say for certain but that may have been my first public land duck here in Kansas. We talked about that for the whole drive home and the week was filled with anticipation of heading back to that spot next weekend. The next weekend we set up there and I shot 3 ducks with plenty more opportunities. I truly couldn’t believe the success; 3 entire ducks, and all with only 1 trip!
There is one last special hunting memory that I want to share. 2015 was the first year we hunted from the teal opener to the end of the season. Dakota and I had built a blind on public land, but as teal season rolled around, I was the only one that could hunt the opener. In all honesty, I had no idea what to expect from an opening day, and I didn’t particularly want to go wade around out in the dark by myself for the first time.
With a little convincing, Mom decided she would join me. Now, this wasn’t the first hunt she had taken me on. We had been on Spring turkey hunts and even a duck hunt together, but this was the first time she had to put on waders and get out into the water. The walk out was a little slow, especially since I had to stumble around in the dark for a bit before finding the blind. But we were eventually able to get set up and settled in for the hunt.
I knew there were decent duck numbers from some afternoon scouting, but nothing had prepared me for the fast-paced shooting of a public land teal season opener. As shooting hours came around, all of a sudden everyone was shooting and the ducks were flying all over the place. I quickly knocked out a limit and we were picked up and back to the truck in less than an hour. That was my first ever limit of ducks, and it was such a neat hunt to share with my Mom.
That hunting season was a blast. My class schedule allowed me to hunt Friday mornings, and so I spent a lot of time in the duck blind. The following Spring I graduated from the local community college with an Associate’s degree in Automation Technology and started my job as a Controls Engineer. I have to admit, one of the deciding factors in looking for a job was location, as I didn’t want to get too far away from my favorite hunting spot. A full-time job definitely cuts down the amount of hunting I wish I could be doing, but I stockpile all of my vacation throughout the year to use during duck season and manage to get in some good hunts.
From the perspective of a non-hunter, waterfowl hunters are an interesting group of people. They see a hunter who wakes up in the middle of the night and goes out on the water in the middle of winter all for a measly duck, and they question why? It is tough to explain to someone who has never sat in a duck blind just how peaceful and exciting it can be, or how fondly we remember the stories of past hunts.
For me, duck hunting has never been about piling up limits of birds, or even shooting ducks for that matter. Sure, it’s great when it happens, but even if I had to go back to those early hunts where I was lucky to see a duck, I wouldn’t hesitate for a moment. “We don’t just hunt ducks, we chase memories!”
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