Long lost friends! Holy moly, did the holidays take anyone else by storm? I feel like Christmas was yesterday, and I’m not even sure if New Year’s Eve actually happened. Toss 5 days of the flu in there, and I need to extend my apologies for the lack of posting over here! Yikes…
Well, the last hunt I was able to go on was Christmas Eve morning, and it was a cold one. Honestly, it probably wasn’t as cold as I thought it was, but that morning began the flu fun so I am sure my fevered brain was a little out of whack. But, did that stop us from hunting? Heck no! It does mean that I didn’t take many photos, and I didn’t even bring the GoPro in the blind with us, though. So my apologies in advance for an uneventful post. Except! I need to vent about ring necks. Remember those guys? You can hear them before you see them, and they are really sporting to shoot when it’s windy. It is beyond me how they can move so fast. Inevitably, you can make some really spectacular shots on those fast birds, whether its a ring neck, a teal, or some other super-fast little guy. That’s such a good feeling, isn’t it? I have found that those shots – the ones where you don’t have a second to think about what’s happening and your natural instinct takes over – are great ones to make. The dog sees the bird fall, and it’s off to make the retrieve.
And then, it happens. The dog is 5 feet from the duck – the same duck you watched fold up and splash and not move for 45 seconds while the dog was swimming to it – and damn if that thing doesn’t find one little ounce of life left and it DIVES. What?! I will admit, it can be pretty comical watching a dog swim around in crazy circles and figure eights while a wounded duck swims underwater in inexplicable routes trying to get away, only to pop up right beside the dog. But there are those squirrely rascals that dive and never come back up. Ugh, that’s the worst! Where do they go? Why do they do that? Come on, man! It’s the worst feeling when you know you’ve made a great shot, only to lose the duck one minute later. Well, that’s what happened to me on our hunt. Twice. Twice! Two ring necks – gone. One dove just before Dixie got to him and never came back up, whereas the other dove almost immediately and Dixie never stood a chance at getting there in time. I guess it just wasn’t my morning, huh? Thankfully, we found one of them with the boat when we were coming out of the pond, but still! I guess a coyote or a hawk found an easy meal if the duck did actually resurface somewhere. If he did, we never saw him!
All in all, ring necks made up the majority of our limits, even with the ones who went MIA. A handful of mallards and 2 blue bills rounded out the crowd, and our hunt was over. Not too shabby, I’d say!
We’re ready to hit January full-force with the duck hunting. Are you excited?
