Who took you...

[tombstone]

me and a couple of more buddies shooting lead at woodies about dark when I was 14 or so He lived out in the country and we had gone to kick some rabbits up on a ditch bank and just about the time we started out, the wood ducks started in. I think we killed one or two.

Blessed by the Lord because I, nor my dad, could have afforded a ticket. Just a stupid teenage kid who really did not know better. I had been a small game and deer hunter since I was 8, but knew nothing of duck hunting since my dad had quit during the point system.

[timbertalk]

I remember my first time like it was yesterday. I went with my father and uncle. I had to have been around six or seven. I remember they let me take my bps 20 guage youth model , but I wasn't quite big enough to shoulder it with enough precision to shoot with them. They are from Greenwood and Saturday they took me to the place south of town. We went on the north side(before they turned it into the refuge side) and I remember as the sun came up looking over lawyer's run and seeing one of the most amazing sites I will ever see as birds funneled with absolute prescision like a bee hive up and down into the timber. This was before the cat was out of the bag on these places and duck hunting was no where near as popular as it is today. We were not there an hour and they had shot their limit -1. They worked a group of mallards into the decoys and let them land. I remember struggling to get the gun to my shoulder and I picked a greenhead off the water(I know, but I was 6). The next day we went to the place north of town, set up in the DM hole and wore them out with the same results. At that point I was hooked. Unfortunately, I thought that everyday was like that. I learned in the coming years that they are not always that easy. But it has been in my blood ever since and would trade the last 25 years of hunting those damn birds for anything. Being able to spend time with Dad and uncle all those years are priceless and now I really appreciate the time we spent out there,good or bad, much more. Especially when you look at the boat that they would haul me and my brother in. We still have it today, a 14/48 with probably one of the first blinds Bert ever made. You look at it today(we still use it some) with all of the dents, and its size and wonder how in the hell did two men, two kids and decoys fit in that thing. Priceless Memories.....

[grnhed]

I remember it like it was yesterday. It was January of 1998, I was 15 years old and a high school freshman. I was at church on wed. night and a man in my church who is younger than my parents was talking about duck hunting and joking around with me about going with him the next morning to sit in freezing water at 5 am. Some how I talked my parents into letting my go in late to class the next morning and go hunting with Mark the next morning. Well he pulled up to my house at probably 5 am. We only had about a 10 minutes truck ride into the swamps in Muscle Shoals. On the way we had to stop at walmart to pick up shells for my 870 20 guage. I sat in his canoe in coveralls and rubber LL bean boots as he walked to the canoe to where we were going to hunt. It was a little flooded swamp with some standing timber, brush and willows. The ducks started to come in right before shooting time and I can still see their shadows to this day when I closed my eyes. Being left handed I was seated on the left side of the canoe. Right at shooting time a pair of ducks was coming right into the decoys we had put out. He told me to shoot the duck on the left and he would shoot the duck on the right. I dropped what turned out to be a mallard hen on the first shot and he dropped the green head. I was hooked from the point. We killed 6 morning. I killed 4 of them with 6 shots. I was hooked from that point on. He dropped me off at school around 9 am that morning and i slept through my first 2 classes.

When I finally got home I told my mom and dad all about it and how great it was and I wanted to go again! Little did I know that my mom had called her older brother who still lives in memphis and asked him to take me to his camp. She is from Memphis and from a family a big time hunters, but especially duck hunters. My uncle took me on the youth hunt to his privately owned camp in the Delta. My cousins and I wore them out and ended up with our 3 limits. My uncle and friend Mark taught me how to duck hunt. I still hunt with them to this day. Mark has access to some on the best spots in NW alabama as we still kill mallards every time we hunt together. I didnt realize at that first hunt, but uncle had one of the top spots in MS. He had a Brake of timber around 1,200 acres. The biggest opening is a 40 acre field that is planted solely for ducks. along with ever other spot on the property being planted solely for ducks as well. We have a saying..."Never doubt the Brake". Since that day in January of 1998 I have been hooked. Dove season is a time to work on my shooting for ducks. I hunt everything, but it all stops and starts with duck hunting. I have hunted 60 days a season, guided in Ark, and in the typical year duck hunt in at least 3 different states.

[jdbuckshot]

I was a lucky kid growing up, i was the middle of three boys, and my dad has always been an outdoor nut, he started carrying us as youngen on quail hunts all over they place. When the quail hunting in MS went to crap. He joined the deer camps we are all 4 memebers of today.

i can remember the day my Dad bought his first farm, a 100 acre tree farm on a creek and it had a nice beaver pond on it. I was only about 13 when we got it and trees were just planted. 40 acres of it was in hardwoods that surrounded the beaver sloo. While deer hunting we always herd duck in there.

My older brother had been going and shooting some ducks, and i decided i would tag along, i was carrrying my dads old browning light 12, we actually went to another farm my dad had purchased, I was 15 by this time. and we shot 3 woodies and there all landed on top of the ice and we couldnt get to the ducks.

Later on we went to our other farm, by then we had some ole decoys my uncle gave us and we had them jokes set out in a perfect V. we shot some ducks and i was hooked from then.

There was an eye doctor in town who was known to lay the smack down on them public land ducks and he called me and asked mei if i would like to tag along, and i did. i learned a style of hunting that was way differnt than what you call your typical duck hunt. Scout, one or two decoys, and shoot at what you can kill. He took me to Delta national and i killed my first limit of mallards. ive since never really changed the way i duck hunt.

The most valuable thing i have learned about duck hunting is this.

"a good duckhunter knows when not to go duck hunting"


JD

the

[crackhead]

I was five when my dad took me on my first duck hunt. That was 30 season's ago!! Man time flies when you look back on it!

[driveby]

I decided I wanted to try it so I bought a dozen decoys and took myself.

[HeKing]

I don't remember my first hunt exactly but kind of high points of the first season. I was probably 14 and my dads cousin had just married a guy that was a big duck hunter. Nobody in my family duck hunted and don't for the most part. Anyway, Eric asked if i wanted to go. So, he picked us up and off my little brother and I went. I remember not even having a camo coat for some reason and a pair of rubber boots that leaked "a little" I grew up in NW Bama close to grnhed and he can tell you ducks tend to be thin up there. I remember the creek behind my house being flooded out into the corn field and standing out about 100 yards away listening to ducks quack. that was as close as I could get without getting my feet wet.

I will never forget my first duck I killed though. We were walking down the same creek later that year trying to put the sneak on a little group of woodies. I was behind my brother and eric carrying the old remington sportsmans 58 that belonged to my great granddad. all of a sudden a gadwall jumped across the creek and I jerked, shot, and killed him stone cold. (had to be an accident, I'd probably miss that shot if I had it again.) well now we had the problem of how to get it. where we were on the creek the bank was about 12 feet straight down to some pretty deep water. so Eric (the only one with waders) goes down stream til he can get in the water and waits on the bird to get to him.

That was 9 or 10 years and many duck hunts ago. I've been hooked every since and could probably count on 2 hands the number of times I've deer hunted since then. So Eric, if you read this, thanks buddy, for getting me hooked on the most expensive habit of my life.

[crow]

January, 1965. My best friend, Hud, and I got dropped off by his dad out on River Road on what used to be Gumbo Acres...Part of the Refuge now. A swag in a bean field was just full of teal and they kept pouring in that hole all day. I think we both shot a couple of boxes of shells that day...even after the moon came up full...we were shooting "at" them as they crossed that moon. We maybe killed 2-3 apiece. Mr. Thomas had come back to get us and told us that he saw where we were by the flashes from out guns...he also told us we were supposed to stop at sundown. We knew absolutely nothing about ducks or duck hunting...we were just killers back then.

Mr. Thomas also gave me my first duck call and showed me how to blow it. It was a handmade cane call (LA style) that he made himself. I lost that call somewhere through the years...I'd give all the calls I now own if I could just have that one back!

I killed my first mallard out off River Road, too...closer to Satartia...on one of the Barrier's place. I jumped it off a swag in a field that was all grown up in weeds. I could hear her quacking and slipped along the edge untill I jumped her. It took me an hour, I bet, to find her. But, I would still be there if I had to...I was gonna find that "big" duck.

Hud and I taught ourselves how to "hunt" ducks and our love of the sport eventually moved us from the "killers" to the "hunters" phase. Hopefully, our children are gonna get there soon...right, Big Easy! Lay off the herons, ok! With the way the last couple of years have been for me, I may now be in the "conservation" phase.

crow

[Splash_em]

Having grown up in West Virginia, leaving for Germany, bouncing around the Middle East and then landing in Alabama was not really indicative to learning about duck hunting at an early age. I personally started duck hunting about 10 years ago with some really good friends. I don' t really remember those hunts as well as the I should but 1 from 3 years ago really stands out now. My father was 58 years old and had never been on a duck hunt when I convinced him to go to Arkansas with me for a weekend.

We didn't kill a double-banded anything, nothing rare, or even extra special. Matter of fact, I'll dig back through my journals tonight to see exactly what we did manage to scratch out that weekend. The one thing I do vividly remember from that trip was the smile on the Ol'Man's face when ducks started circling over the blind at daylight the first morning we were there. Seeing the amazement in his eyes, the grin on his face when birds cupped up, and listening to the joy in voice for something that I had started taking for granted really has stuck with me. I don't think that I have had another morning of duck hunting that I haven't thought about that day.

Hopefully, I can watch the same thing happen again in a few years when my own kids start going with me.

[jacksbuddy]

..on my first duck hunt? Simple, it was my Dad. In fact, he took me on most all of my early hunts.

My first hunt ever was when they were 4 laning Highway 6 in Oxford. The project ran right by our subdivision, and I had a double barrelled pop gun just like Diddy's.

My first duck hunt was on our farm and I had those uninsulated knee-high rubber boots, so I had to walk on the turnrow. Those boots were COLD, WET, and Too BIG. to say the least, I got wet. Oh, and for the record, you CAN hit a duck with a .410 bolt-action. You just have to be real lucky.

[MudHog]

I don't remember much about it, but I was a junior in high school (1996) and went with a buddy from school. He had a blind in Spanish Lake which is not 2 miles from my house. I know I hunted with my Mossberg 20ga pump that my dad had bought me as my first shotgun (still got it too). that was when I first learned about using coke bottles for decoys. Not long after that season they drained the lake to drege some areas deeper for fish and ruined that lake to this day for hunting.

[insman]

Pondman took me on my first real duck hunt in about 1993. I had been on a wood duck roost hunt as a teenager but never a real hunt. I killed my first greenhead at about 7 yards that day and have been hooked ever since. Rob if you read this i want to say thank you and i hate you for introducing me to this obsession. Jk thanks alot bud.