Let's Try Duck Hunting!: San Juan River Waterfowl

At the beginning of January, shortly after deer season ended without me harvesting a single animal, I was trying to figure out what to do with my hunting and fishing time during this "down" part of the year.  Deer season has ended.  Bear season doesn't start for a few months.  Grouse season ended on the 31st of December.  Rockfishing is closed until spring, most likely.  All the good lakes that I like to fish are at high elevation, and consequently are partially or completely frozen over, but not to the point where you could ice fish on them.  I could go after rabbits, but a rabbit hunt only takes an hour or so; plus, the last time I went up to my rabbit hunting spot, the area was shut down because a man died on his ATV out there; so that's a big-time buzzkill.  So I looked through the hunting regulations for another alternative, and there was the answer: ducks.  Duck season ran until January 20th this year, so I made a plan to go out for the weekend of January 7-8, and camp deep in the heart of duck territory.  The only problem is, I don't know anything about duck hunting, and I'd never hunted them before.  I didn't even know where or what duck territory was.  I figured these were minor points, though.  I've got the trusty Backroad Mapbook: Vancouver Island Edition, and I've seen people hunt ducks on TV, so that's a solid start.  I wanted to find a place not too far from Victoria; I didn't want to drive way up-island somewhere and find that there were no ducks, freeze to death, and have the whole thing turn into a fiasco.  I was perfectly capable of orchestrating a fiasco much closer to home, that I could at least pull the plug on early, if need be.  After checking out the maps, I settled on an area of the San Juan River, near Port Renfrew.  I knew a few stretches of the river snaked through some grassy flats with deep-cut banks and slow currents.  For some reason, in my head, I could picture ducks liking that kind of habitat.  I could visualize the ducks hanging out there.  The fact that there were a few ecological reserves in the area didn't hurt.  I could hunt around and in between them; that seemed like a good starting point.

As with most of my hunting trips, this one started at Canadian Tire, for a gearing-up session.  Item number one on my list was a new rubber boat.  Not having a dog to retrieve my theoretical ducks, I figured an inflatable rowboat would serve the purpose.  I had had one for about two years, that I took on many an unadvisable ocean fishing excursion for rockfish, and I rather liked it.  That boat had finally packed it in a couple months prior, the victim of multiple severe barnacle punctures.  I upgraded for the duck hunting trip to a ten-foot model that looked pretty serviceable.  I also purchased some neoprene gloves and boots, figuring that I would spend some significant time wading in mud and water, and reaching into said mud and water.  I had stopped in at the post office the day before, to buy my migratory game bird permit, so I was ready to go slay some waterfowl at that point.  I memorized all the no-shooting and no-hunting areas along the route, and kept them in mind as I set out.  I drove toward Port Renfrew, stopping at various rivers along the way to check for signs of fowl.  There were none.  In my head, I could picture every time I went hunting or fishing at some out-of-the-way locale, there would be ducks on whatever lake or river I was at.  After I stopped to check out the third or fourth river along the way to Port Renfrew, and there were no ducks to be found, I started doubting the accuracy of those memories.  I wasn't nervous yet, though.  I wasn't at my target location in the heart of duck territory yet.  I did notice that a lot of the rivers were frozen over in large stretches, which made me a little apprehensive.  One of the reasons I had chosen the spot on the San Juan River, was that it was at sea level, which gave me the best chance of finding open, unfrozen water.  I drove through the town of Port Renfrew, which is situated right at the mouth of the San Juan, and continued past it, and over the bridge to the other side of the river.  The road parallels the river for some distance leading away from the town, and they both wind along out into the forest, and away from civilization.

I stopped at a random stretch of river that split into various side channels and flowed very slowly through several hundred metres of grass flats.  This area was situated at least a kilometre from the boundary of the nearest ecological reserve, so I was safe to explore a bit without worrying about straying where I shouldn't be.  At the same time, I thought maybe the ducks wouldn't be so careful about staying inside the borders of their safe zone.  By this point in the trip, it was already about noon on Saturday, and I had been exploring up quite a few rivers on the way to the San Juan, with no luck.  I had set my bar for success very low at this particular point, and would have been pretty happy if I could get just one duck.  I had no dog, no blind, no decoys, no camouflage.  I had a rubber rowboat, a 12 gauge shotgun, and a pocket full of shells.  I also had camping gear so I could stay and hunt a second day if I thought the situation warranted, but the weather called for freezing rain and wet snow overnight and all day Sunday, so I wasn't keen on that idea.  I wanted to have a successful Saturday, and return home triumphant.  I did not have high hopes for this, however.  Imagine my surprise when I got out of the car, walked to the river, peered down over the edge of the steep bank, and saw a whole raft of ducks, right there underneath me.  My heart started pounding like I had just sighted a four-point blacktail or a 6-and-a-half footer black bear.  All my gear was still in the car; my boat wasn't even out of the box that it came in.  I couldn't shoot from the bank of the river that I was on, I had to be on the opposite bank to shoot legally.  And so ensued the most frantic, gleeful unboxing and inflation of a rubber dinghy that has probably ever taken place.  The boat was so big that it took me about twenty minutes to get it ready for the water.  I took it, my shotgun and shells, my backpack, and binoculars down to the river, and officially embarked on my duck odyssey.  The birds I had seen immediately upon arrival were long gone by that point, but I was sure there would be more.  I glassed upriver and down, and could see quite a distance in both directions, probably 150 yards both ways along this main stretch of the river.  Not much time had passed and I sighted a group of ducks rounding the bend upriver.  They were floating straight toward me.  I was so excited, it didn't really occur to me that I had no plan for what to do next.  I just watched them through my binoculars, coming downriver.  Then, they abruptly reversed course and went back around the bend and out of sight.  Had they seen me?  I rowed across the river to the opposite bank and got out of the boat, stashing it up on the bank under some tall grasses.  Squatting down on the bank, and trying to conceal myself behind the grass as much as I could, I proceeded to watch three or four more groups of ducks approach from both directions, each doing exactly the same as the last.  They came around the bend into sight, floated toward me for a few seconds, then reversed, and paddled back out of sight.  They could definitely see me.  From 150 yards away.  While I was almost completely obscured by grass.  I was starting to get a sinking feeling.  Right at that moment, a flock of ducks flew into view overhead.  I thought maybe I could get a passing shot as they went by.  As I was thinking this, the birds made a sudden course correction, veering away to one side of me, well outside of shooting range, and flew in a wide semicircle around me, before resuming their previous course.  Almost immediately after that, I glassed another group of ducks feeding in the river upstream.  Instead of turning around and going back the way they had come, this group chose to fly up out of the river, go around me in a big sweeping arc, then alight back in the river on the downstream side of me, and continue feeding as they floated away.  Ok.  Now I was depressed. 

The situation had led me from wild optimism to disheartened frustration in about twenty minutes.  Apparently all the camo and blinds and decoys and calls aren't just for show.  They might actually be an integral part of duck hunting.  I wasn't ready to concede that definitively yet, though.  Another group of birds came rolling down the river.  This time, instead of reversing course or flying around me, they went off down a side channel, the mouth of which was about 100 yards upriver from me.  I trudged up the bank, and glassed over the grass flats to see where the siding led to.  I figured I could sneak along on land, then pop over the bank at the point where the ducks were, and get off a shot or two before they could get off the water and out of range.  This technique, I would learn, is called jump-shooting.  In this instance, it didn't work.  I popped over the bank at the wrong point, the birds were already well downstream from where I was, and they flushed out of there as soon as they saw me.  I kept following the side channel anyway, hoping there would be another opportunity further along it.  I decided to find a bend in the stream, position myself within shooting distance, and wait there for the telltale ripples the ducks made while feeding to betray their presence as they were about to round the bend.  I thought if I could see the ripples in advance, I could set up the shot, and blast them the instant they rounded the bend and came into sight.  I didn't have to wait long.  The plan worked out exactly like I had hoped it would.  I saw ripples coming from around a hook in the stream, aimed at them, and as soon as a duck appeared from around the bank, I shot it stone dead.  I actually then got one more, as the startled flock tried to get up off the water.  That was a moment of pure elation; in a second and a half, I had doubled the goal I had set for myself that morning, and while my methods were unconventional, I was a successful duck hunter!  These first and second ducks of my nascent waterfowling career were both buffleheads. True; if any real, self-respecting duck hunter had seen me bumbling around, spooking birds, making things up as I went along, and shooting birds off the water instead of in the air, there would have been a 100-megaton facepalm incoming.  That didn't dampen my spirits one bit, though.  I scooped those two ducks up, and admired them with the pride that normal hunters would probably reserve for a trophy dall ram, or a 6-point elk.  With renewed confidence, I walked the birds back to my boat, stashed them in my backpack, and explored the area for another potential ambush point.  

After a few botched attempts at duplicating that first bit of success, I glassed up a nice raft of ducks feeding way downstream from me, about 200 yards away.  I picked a landmark on the bank near the ducks that I could see from up top on the grass flats, and half-ran, half-stalked toward that point, using the steep angle of the bank as a shield against being spotted.  I had to retrieve the boat and use it to traverse a couple side channels on the way, but I made it to the landmark I had picked out after about ten minutes.  I had no idea if the ducks were still down in the river at the same spot, but I popped up over the bank ready to shoot.  They were right in front of me, and by the time the shots finished echoing in the valley, and the feathers had settled on the surface of the river, four ducks were down.  One duck required a follow-up shot, and then I was left in shock, looking at four birds floating slowly downstream.  How lucky was that?  I was fortunate to have put extra shotgun shells in my pockets before leaving the boat and approaching the ducks.  I quickly ran back to where I had last left the boat, tossed it in the water, and set about rowing down to my ducks to retrieve them.  By that time, it was about three o'clock.  Legal shooting light ended shortly after five, and I was starting to think that a limit of ducks, which is eight, might be possible.  I had six, which I had shot in only two actual in-range encounters, so it looked pretty good.  As it turned out though, that last little shootout had cleared out the area I had been hunting; I couldn't spot another duck there; so I had to pack up and move locations.

I rowed my gear and ducks back across the main channel of the river to the car.  I tied the boat to the roof, still inflated, and drove a few minutes down the road to a spot where I knew there was a lake a short hike in.  I carried the boat and my shotgun to the lake, and immediately upon arriving at the shore, I spooked a duck up off the water, and it flew to the other side of the lake, a couple hundred yards away.  I glassed the far side of the lake where the bird had flown, and spotted several other ducks down that way as well.  I left the boat right there, took my gun, and started the slow process of crawling, stumbling, and crashing through the timber along the shore of the lake around to the other side.  When I got most of the way around, I went a little deeper into the bush, trying to stay out of sight, and checked out the ducks just offshore with my binoculars.  There were five of them, about 30 yards out in the lake, and what they would do, is four would dive down to feed, while one stayed up.  Then that one would dive, and the other four would stay up.  They repeated this enough times that I was satisfied they would keep doing it every time.  I guess it's to keep a lookout.  However, I just waited until the four of them dove, then came running out of the forest as fast as I could, right to the edge of the lake.  The one "lookout" beat it out of there as fast as he could, leaving his buddies behind, and as soon as the other four popped up like corks, I aimed as quickly as I could.  They actually popped up and started flying remarkably quickly, and I missed my first shot, but hit one in the air with my second shot, then missed a second bird with my final shot.  I was happy enough with how that turned out, and when I saw that the ducks just flew back across to the other side of the lake, I decided to do it all again, just going in the other direction.  They got wise to that plan, and I spooked them back, once again, to the far side of the lake.  Following an ill-advised foray in the boat to try to somehow get the drop on them from the water, I repeated the "run through the jungle" technique that had worked on the single duck earlier.  It was successful.  At 4:45PM, about 20 minutes from the end of legal shooting light, I shot my final duck of the day, completing my eight-bird limit, and completely blowing my expectations for the trip away.  

By the time I rowed out to retrieve the last duck, and hiked my gear back to the car, it was dark.  I deflated the boat and stuffed it in the trunk, changed my freezing and wet clothes, and sat down in the driver's seat completely exhausted and satisfied.  That's the best feeling there is in hunting.  I drove back to Victoria, and having not eaten since the morning, I stopped for some dinner before heading home to figure out how to dress a duck.  I had dressed grouse before, but never any waterfowl.  When I set about doing it in the garage, I was astounded at the volume of down feathers that came off of these birds.  The eight ducks I had shot were all buffleheads; six hens and two drakes.  Buffleheads are the second-smallest duck in BC, after the green-winged teal, but these eight little ducks produced enough down to fill three pillows, probably.  My kids watched me clip the heads, wings, and feet off the birds, gut them, and then they reveled in creating an unholy mess out of the feathers that I tried in vain to keep in a tidy pile.  A valuable lesson for the next duck expedition:  dress the damn ducks in the field.  You have to keep one feathered wing attached for identification purposes, legally, but next time I'm going to pluck the whole thing except that one wing, and then I can just clip the wings off when I get home, and I'm done.  

In my final analysis, I have to say that duck hunting is an awesome time.  I know I didn't do it the traditional way, but I still had an incredible amount of fun trying to work out ways to get some birds.  I am absolutely going to do more of it next year, and I'm really glad to add one more species to the list of possible food sources I have available to hunt.  The more, the merrier.  I think ducks rank right up there with rabbits as some of my favorite critters to go after, now.  Very tasty, too.  I prepared four of those buffleheads already, in a marinade of lemon juice, soy sauce, and honey overnight, then rubbed with Chinese five spice and roasted just until rare.  They were great eating birds.  Hopefully my new rowboat will survive a season of rockfishing in the spring and summer, and I can look forward to retrieving many more ducks in it come this fall.  Next hunting challenge: the elusive christmas goose.