Thank goodness for Teal

We hunted this morning from 6:45-11 on a Walk In Area next to a private residence. It was a narrow slough (20 yards across and a couple hundred yards long). The owner (Teresa) gave us permission to hunt inside their safety zone and to park in their yard. That will earn her a pack of whoopee pies later in the trip! Overall, we brought home 9 GW Teal, about half drakes and half hens. Those little suckers fly so fast there is was no chance to pick out only drakes. Dan was the big winner today, shooting 6 & I shot 3, officially, since it is a 6-bird limit per person. Hypothetically, with a limit of 12 between us it could have been possible for me to only have shot 2 and Dan to have shot 8 (adding up to 10 because we -hypothetically of course- could have both shot 1 of the birds.
Nothing was really decoying, so all of the shots were passing shots. That made for some tough shooting and Dan did well, connecting on 8 of 17 shots. I had a rougher go of it, connecting on 2 of 10. In a lesson on duck blind communication, Dad now knows that when we rapidly say "duck, duck, duck" it means get down so I don't shoot you - not "hey, there are some ducks..."


Mag was more excited (and not in a good way) than we can ever remember her being. This manifested itself with near constant whining and even a couple yips/barks after we shot the first double of the day. The whining was more annoying than harmful, but the barking had me pretty mad. On a good note, she was totally steady on the retriever stand and did a great job finding several birds that dropped into the cattails. She couldn't see the action very well, so most of her retrieves were blinds - although the longest one was about 50 yards. Overall, she was good, and her excitement for birds is probably more a commentary on how little I've trained her this year, and how few birds she's seen (even training birds) in the past 8 months...


We scouted a couple more spots for tomorrow/Monday duck hunting and have now eaten lunch. We're heading out in a couple minutes to look for the huge numbers of ducks we saw on Lake Lily last night then hit 2-3 pheasant spots in that same general area. Jackson will be teaming up with Winnie for pheasants tonight.