On my first scouting run of the trip I had gotten a little discouraged because I was not finding any ducks. There were more snows than I've ever seen anywhere in my 45 years of chasing waterfowl, I found a few groups of honkers that I could start to pattern, but I just wasn't seeing the ducks.
I have a regular route that I travel on the first few days I'm there - just to assess crop types and locations. If there was canola on a particular section of the grid, I knew not to waste fuel going down that road again.
At the end of my initial run I found this pea field.........I was aware of the sloughs tucked in the trees around this abandoned old farmstead because I watched several hundred honkers sneak out of them going out to feed in an adjacent field, LAST year. I never went back to see where or how big those bodies of water were, but I remember being astounded by how many geese came out of there.
So this is a sample of what I saw the first day this trip...........(Note: after viewing the clip, use your 'back' button to return to this thread)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJtDHRwb ... e=youtu.be
I only stayed around long enough to get some video and still shots once I saw this huntable concentration of birds. I wanted to contact the owner and get permission to hunt before I let my excitement build and before someone else beat us to it.
We got permission. As we waited for the sunrise, I had my video camera out in anticipation of the first flight into the field. The South wind pushed the sounds of a bunch of birds behind us and we knew it was going to be a good day. There were also sounds coming from the sloughs in front of us to the North some 500 yds away. I was concerned about shooting in that direction so I picked a spot in the field that was farther away and off line from where I had seen them feeding, to avoid running them off the sloughs.
Then I heard wings.......thousands of them........and hit the switch on the camera and got it up in time to capture this sight. If you can't tell what it is from this media - it's just a sky filled with a continuous cloud of ducks heading to the soughs in front of us............'have never seen anything quite like this - and remains one of the most awesome sights in our 9 years of hunting North.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcXozvMX ... e=youtu.be
That was safely thousands of ducks trying to pile into 3 2-4ac ponds (as I determined near the end of the trip). Other birds from all directions started staging on these sloughs and it occurred to me - the reason I hadn't been seeing many ducks in the area was because they were all HERE.
Here's a clip of some of the staging activity......clouds of ducks falling into these little ponds tucked in the woods next to this pea field.........
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yU6rpLKREaw
Sorry for the quality - cameras have trouble auto-focusing in low-light conditions when you zoom-in without a large distant- object reference.
Needless to say, when they came-out to feed - it didn't take long to get a 3-man limit. We actually broke the spread down and got out of the field before the larger masses hopped the sloughs into the pea field to feed.
I checked this field every day from then-on. We hunted it about every 2 days, careful not to set-up where we would alter usage. While on another scouting run on one of the 'off' days, I caught the birds out in the field about mid-morning. I really wanted to slip into the woods near the sloughs and get some footage of them coming back to water, but didn't want to disturb their sanctuary. Based on how many birds we watched pile into the sloughs and how many passes it took the big flocks to make, to find a spot to land, I imagine the surface looked like wall-to-wall feathers. Maybe some other year - next time this field is planted in peas, perhaps.
But I DID slip into the edge of the woods near their feeding spot and shot this............at the flush, they had fed within about 30 yds of me - I knew they were going to eventually bust me, but I had to try to get some footage.........
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwhA5I2C ... e=youtu.be
This is what it looks like when the ducks decide to leave the staging pond and feed. The staging ponds are about 100 yds in 3 different directions from this spot in the field. I'm pretty sure they feed a little bit, go get some water, then feed a little more, until they've had enough......but there is a constant stream of birds trading back and forth. They will do this all day in a blowing snow just before a big weather event (before they high-tail it Southward)........and that's always a goood day to hunt 'cause you can sleep late.
We had several good shoots in this field - so when our possession limits were reached, we concentrated our efforts on honkers as freeze-up approached.
These are just a few of the images I see when I close my eyes at night. We've seen pea fields that had large concentrations of birds just before freeze-up........but these videos were shot prior to any significant 'bird mover'.
