Happy Monday, friends! Can you believe tomorrow is Christmas eve? Where have the last 5 days gone since our last hunt?! My apologies for the lack of posts lately – it’s not for lack of hunting and activities! I promise there is some good stuff coming your way :).

But! In the meantime, back to last week’s hunt. I will be honest, it was fairly uneventful in terms of crazy shots made (read: I missed… a lot…) or hilarity that ensued. The night before was a full moon, as you’ll see in the photos. Although it made for such a beautiful morning, it did not make for any early ducks, so we did a lot of hanging out in the blind. That’s always OK by me though – you don’t know if you don’t go, right? It was nice and breezy and chilly, and I probably could have taken 500 pictures of the sunrise. Don’t worry, I didn’t. I also made fantastic use of the GoPro, using both the gun mount and the head mount. Don’t worry, I did capture some great footage, as well as some epic misses. More on that in the video at the end of the season, though.

And then something very interesting happened. As we sat still, waiting for a group of ring necks to decoy, a pair of bull red heads circled us. Needless to say, we forgot about the ring necks and concentrated on those beauts. After one pass in front of our blind, they slid onto the water about 80 yards from us. Too far to shoot, but just close enough to tempt us. Now, I’m not a big fan of swatting birds off the water (unless they’re wounded, of course), so we sat patiently in hopes that they would take off towards us when they decided to move. I kid you not, 10 minutes went by, and they just sat there. Not a care in the world that 4 guns were anxiously awaiting their move. And then. A shot from across the pond. Not at these ducks, of course, but it was enough to make a stir. At last! One took off, but unfortunately headed away from us. The other one? Stayed put. Weird, right? After another few minutes of watching him, his head just flopped over and he went belly-up. Tony and I looked at each other with confused expressions… “… Did that just happen…? Did you just see that?” He headed out to make the retrieve, and came back with one of the prettiest drake red heads I have ever seen. Like, how-quickly-can-we-get-that-guy-mounted pretty. We figure that someone in another pond shot at him, and when he kept flying, assumed they missed. But still pretty neat for us, huh?

We ultimately all limited out with mostly ring necks, a few mallards, and a blue bill. I’ve got those quackers in the freezer, just waiting to become a deliciously tasty dinner once Christmas is over.