As I mentioned at the end of yesterday’s post, we had another great hunt yesterday morning. While our harvest wasn’t as varied as it usually is (we ended up with mostly ring necks and a few mallards), we got to see some pretty incredible sights. We were covered up early on, unfortunately before legal hour, but it remained fairly steady throughout the morning with ring necks buzzing us like nobody’s business. Remember when I talked about the sound ring necks make? Get’s your adrenaline going before you even see the ducks! Anyways… Around 8:30, we could see 3 ducks working into the pond that didn’t look (or sound) like ring necks. Once they got about 80 yards out, I noticed the unmistakable shape and color of a bull redhead’s noggin. Two drakes and one hen. Oh man, how badly we wanted those ducks. Unfortunately, after a few minutes of trying to work them into our decoys, they got close enough to another blind for the hunters in it to shoot at them, and we were out of luck. Both drakes were knocked down, but then hen got away. Oh how I wish that could have been us! But congrats to the other hunters… I guess…

That wasn’t the last bit of excitement we had, however. Way off in the distance to our right, we noticed a huge flock of ridiculously large white birds. As first, we brushed it off as a flock of cranes, or maybe something else we regularly see around the Lowcountry. Dare I hope it is a flock of snow geese we can take a shot at…? But oh no. Once they got a little closer, we could tell our theories were quite wrong. The giant wing spans and huge black feel made the birds’ ID quite obvious- swans! That’s when we heard another hunter yell, “It’s swans!! Don’t shoot!” Don’t you worry, kind sir. I would prefer not to endure $1000s in fines, potential jail time, and loss of my hunting license. It was still really cool to see such a large group flying over, listening to them honk for several minutes since they were flying so slowly. I was even able to take some video of them flying. (Pardon the quality of the video, and some of the photos- they are just still shots from my video camera.) Enjoy!

Part of our harvest- 4 hunters limited out

Dixie made some great retrieves

Swans!