While mallards were the predominant species taken during the author’s hunt, potholes attract a great mix of puddle ducks and diving ducks.
The first morning we were hunting a harvested bean field sitting at the edge of a cattail marsh too wet to plow for planting. Sheet-water had collected in the shallow areas of the field from rains earlier in the month, and the larger bean field behind us was completely flooded. We had just a handful of full-bodied blocks and a couple of spinning-wing decoys, and the mallards came swarming in at first light. In the fifteen minutes before legal shooting light, there were several hundred birds buzzing our location, landing in the decoys and taking off again. The lightening sky featured a swarming melee of ducks, and the sound of calling birds came from every direction. The five of us were giddy.
Legal shooting light just about corresponds exactly with when you can see colors on ducks against the sky. When we heard a shot in the distance, our guide said that it was time. There was already a flight of forty birds banking to look at our spinning-wing decoys, and as they curled over the bean field and cupped up their wings to land in front of us, I stood up and picked out the only greenhead I could see, folding the bird with a single shot. A second, bigger group of birds was already coming in when the first shot rang out and I picked a second flaring bird out of this group and missed the first shot but killed a different drake mallard with my next shot. With barely time to reload, the third bird was a fast crossing shot, and I never did catch all the way up with my swing, missing it once, maybe clipping tail feathers with the second shot, and a third shot was hurled somewhere in its general direction. The bird flew on.
Stubble fields attract thousands of waterfowl to the Dakotas.
Then the frenzy was over. The birds had quickly figured out that something was amiss on our part of the harvested field, and there were already 2,000 to 3,000 birds just 300 yards away in the flooded bean field feeding and calling happily to all the birds still in the air. We had a few stray groups and flights of two or three birds come to look at our spread, but our shooting was over until the birds started leaving the field two hours later to sit on one of the forty or fifty potholes within a mile of our blind. While I was taking photographs, my hunting partners bagged a few more greenheads but quit when we had our limit of hen mallards, just to make sure we didn’t shoot an over-limit.
The next morning we were on a completely different set-up, with both duck and goose decoys on a deeper pothole. The wind was blowing, and there was ice in the shallows around the cattails. It was a half-inch thick, and the young Labrador lunged through the ice as we set decoys. Dawn was mostly uneventful, with just a single flight of widgeon banking in to our decoys, and we tumbled two distant birds. As the light increased, there were more and more small flights of birds—two here, five there, a trio and then another pair. Mostly there were ringnecks that wanted to stay out in the deeper, open water, only occasionally swinging close enough to offer us a shot, but the widgeon wanted to land on us and we dumped several more birds. Three pintails circled for two passes before committing, but they landed on the water just out of range, and we settled for admiring the big bull sprig with two hens in the first ray of sunlight that managed to momentarily pierce the clouds that day.
