Closing Day: Ducks, beer and ... regret?

Alison, Darren and I were safely ensconced in the only open table at Granzella's last Sunday afternoon - beer and burgers on their way - when my phone made that magic-wand sound that heralds the arrival of a text message.

I didn't even have to look to know who it was and what it was going to say.

Charlie Peebles (1/31 2:59 pm): One grhd jumped him.

I shook my head. I knew this would happen. I'd called it. I shared the news with Darren and Alison. "Charlie just got a greenhead." Read more...
The day had started 11 hours earlier at the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge check station with pretty much zero hope.

It was closing day of the 2009-10 duck season. My favorite place to hunt, the Delevan National Wildlife Refuge, was still closed due to flooding. The ducks seemed to have vacated the entire area ever since a big storm had come through two weeks earlier.

I'd hunted Sac the day before with Charlie, my new duck hunting buddy who'd been showing me the ropes at Delevan for the past month. Charlie can hunt - he's a been-doing-it-forever, get-limits-almost-every-day kind of guy - but he and I had walked out with just one duck between the two of us that day. We would've been skunked if a wounded pintail hen hadn't dropped into our pond just as we'd decided to pull up our decoys and go.

At least we'd had fog in the morning that day, so we'd seen ducks, even if it was just for a microsecond at a time as they emerged from, then just as quickly melted into, the gray mist. But today for the closer? At 4:15 a.m., the sky was clear and bright, just coming off a full moon. We were screwed, and we all knew it.

It was a shame. This was my first hunt with Darren, a new hunter I'd met in November at the wild-duck cookoff in Sacramento. It was his reservation that was getting us on the refuge. But the only thing that was likely to make the day memorable for him was the fact that it was his first closer.

There were five of us hunting that morning - Charlie, Don (another veteran Delevan duck hunter), Alison (another new hunter), Darren and me - and we headed out in two groups to the place Charlie and I had been hunting lately in free roam. It was nothing like Charlie's proven spots at Delevan, but we'd seen enough ducks there to know it wasn't a dud.

We began setting up decoys in two holes about 100 yards from one another, hoping we'd get ducks to work between our two spreads. As we did we could hear a vast flock of snow geese lift from some rice field to the west and head our way, their ridiculous barking coming closer and closer. At one point, I think we all just stood there, faces up, mouths agape, decoys in hand, as the silhouettes of the geese passed in front of the moon.

These are the moments that make you glad you're there - glad you got up at 2 a.m., glad you worked up a sweat trudging down a dark and muddy road in big old clunky waders, glad you'd joined the manic fraternity of duck hunters.

At some point, I clamped my mouth shut, grateful that a goose hadn't crapped in it. I went back to throwing the decoys out, knowing that we'd just seen what would probably be the only noteworthy flight of the day.

* * *

Our cynicism was warranted. Charlie got off one futile shot at a pair of spoonies that circled just a bit too high over the patch of tules where we hid. Alison and Darren had a lone teal fly right over them, but they saw him too late to shoulder their guns. That was it.

Well, we did have a flock of ibis work our spreads. As they flew over Alison and Darren, I turned suddenly to Charlie. "Uh oh, we put the two new hunters alone there together..."

We watched to see if they'd shoulder their guns, but they didn't. They'd been hunting enough to ID the birds correctly. Whew!

Not long after that, Charlie and Don wandered off to see if they couldn't find ducks. I went over to Alison and Darren's spot and we all sat on a little island there, making no attempt to hide because all we were seeing was ibis, blackbirds and the little marsh wrens that flitted through our tules.

The sun felt heavenly - end-of-season warm. Spring was coming. The wild mustard was already flowering all around us. We basked in the sunlight, scanning the horizon in futility.

Don had left us for good - he'd spend the rest of his day wandering free roam - but Charlie came back with two spoonies, a crip he'd found, and another one he'd jumped. Alison gratefully accepted them. It's her first year of duck hunting and she wants all the ducks she can get.

We went back into our respective hiding places, but it was clear we were all getting bored. "Wanna go hunt snipe?" I yelled in Darren and Alison's direction.

"Yeah!" Alison yelled back.

Having just hiked all over creation in his waders, Charlie sat this one out. But I met the other two on a dike where we stripped off as much gear as we could and set out for the field where Charlie, Alison and I had hunted snipe the weekend before.

As we dipped into the field, we spotted a small herd of deer working one edge. That would constitute most of the wildlife we'd see in that field, because the snipe just weren't flying.

Well, one or two did. I downed one with one shot, and Darren and I bee-lined to the spot, only to find nothing there. Damn. After searching for a while, we all sat down in the grass, grateful for a rest.

"Somehow," Darren said, "I never would've imagined that I'd be spending closing day of duck season in a dry field surrounded by two women and a herd of deer."

Yep, that pretty much summed it up. We walked to the end of the field and back, then returned to our duck blinds to see if the action had improved there.

It hadn't.

* * *

Normally, I hunt until sunset on closing day. I like saying good-bye to the season at the last moment I can be out there. That's what Boyfriend and I usually do, at least. But Boyfriend was home on the couch, recovering from surgery on his ruptured Achilles tendon. It was my first closing day without him.

I'd told Charlie that morning that I had alternate plans.

"I need three more ducks to get more ducks than I did last year," I said. This is still important to me - it's my fourth season, and I still have this expectation that I'll do better every year. "If I have two more ducks by 2 p.m., I'll stick it out to try to get that last duck. But if I don't have anything, I'm probably going to bail."

Charlie's a die-hard sunrise-to-sunset duck hunter, but even he had to acknowledge my plan seemed reasonable.

At 1:30, I looked over to Darren and Alison's blind and saw them sitting in plain sight on the island. One look said it all: They were done. And there was no reason to believe the next 30 minutes would bring any flurry of activity.

"Wanna bail?" I yelled.

"Yes!"

So we pulled up our decoys and headed back to our cars.

When we hatched our plan to go to Granzella's, I turned to Charlie, knowing his answer would be no. He was going to hunt to the bitter end. "I know you'll be texting me at the end of the day saying you got your limit," I chided him.

I knew this because Charlie is just flat-out charmed. If I left a hunt early, he'd text me later about how many more ducks he'd gotten. On days when we couldn't hunt the refuges, he had this slough he'd stop at after work, and he'd always text me telling me about the ducks he killed there. "Got a canvasback." "Got two greenheads."

I was totally jealous.

But today I resolved not to be. There were no birds flying. And this was my chance to take two new duck hunters to a legendary Sacramento Valley restaurant - a cavernous place filled with the mounts of all variety of game animals. A restaurant where you could stroll in wearing muddy camo and stinking of the marsh and no one would think twice about it.

Once we were at the restaurant, the feelings of futility began to recede with each sip of beer. I brought in my book of hunt area maps and we all showed each other where we'd hunted at various refuges, and where we wanted to hunt in the future.

Alison and Darren swapped newbie stories, and talked about how they'd been preparing their ducks. We talked about gear and guns we coveted. And we plotted what we could hunt in the months to come: wild turkey, wild boar and ... pigeons! No need to wait until the Sept. 1 dove opener to resume wingshooting.

Alison and Darren's eyes lit up, and I saw in them what I had discovered in myself just three short years ago - that intensity that still hasn't worn off. It's what bound us, and almost every other duck hunter I'd met. We were three people who'd have no reason to know each other if it weren't for this insane shared passion for duck hunting. Now we were friends.

Staying until sunset and to try getting a duck or two would've been nice, but this camaraderie was priceless.

If only my phone would stop making that noise.

Brrrrrrrrrrreengggg!

Charlie Peebles (1/31/4:10 pm): One sn6w more 2 come

He doesn't have a full keyboard like I do, so his texts come in choppy like that. But it wasn't hard to figure out what he was saying: He was cleaning up. Wherever he was, the snow geese were piling in.

Me (1/31 4:11 pm): We are all laughing in our beer. And we're dry and clean and thppppppdt!

Charlie Peebles (1/31 4:15 pm): Yeah but I got ducks.

Alison, Darren and I had finished our meals and paid up. We said our good-byes - the real end of duck season - and headed back down I-5 in our respective cars.

And my phone kept making that sound.

Charlie Peebles (1/31 4:44 pm): 2 snw shoud b 3

Charlie Peebles (1/31 4:45 pm): One pin

Charlie Peebles (1/31 4:51 PM): Add gad

Right about then Charlie called me. "This is unbelievable! I never would've expected this. I wish you could be here ... uh ... gotta go!" Click!

Charlie Peebles (1/31 5:01 pm): 3d 2sn on way out

So he'd gotten five birds after we'd left - three ducks and two snow geese, four of these birds literally in the waning minutes of the season. Unbelievable.

I had to laugh. I was jealous. I couldn't help but second-guess my decision to leave the refuge when I did.

But not for too long.

I'd hogged Charlie to myself for the better part of a month, hungry for the deep duck hunting knowledge he'd shared, eager to see the ducks he'd take me to, grateful for the new friendship that had grown between us. Spending time with two brand new duck hunters - and only slightly newer friends than Charlie was - had been the right choice.

And besides, Charlie had found us a primo spot to go next year.

© Holly A. Heyser 2010

Question du jour: What's hunting got to do with respecting animals?

I did a radio interview last week with Radio Netherlands Worldwide about hunting as an alternative to buying factory-farmed meat, and after I left the studio, I couldn't stop thinking about this one word that I'd kept saying in reference to meat and animals: "respect."

In particular, I talked about how much more I respected animals since I started hunting. I've said that many times before, but in this interview, I also talked about how I grew up in a family that raised animals for meat.

Afterward, that left me wondering: Taking responsibility for killing animals that provide your meat increases your respect for the food they provide. But why was it that hunting increased my respect for the animals themselves? Read more...
I'd answered that question for myself before: When you hunt, you see animals at their full potential - most often doing their best to evade you, but also exhibiting playfulness, resourcefulness and - in the event you wound one - sheer will to live. Sometimes you win. More often than not, they do. Wild animals are not the defenseless, cowering Bambis so many non-hunters think them to be.

So why the hell hadn't I respected animals when I raised them for food? Suddenly, the dots connected: Those animals weren't free. They could be playful, or even manipulative, but they rarely showed resourcefulness or cunning because they didn't have to. They simply waited to be fed every day. Or milked. Or slaughtered.

I didn't respect them because they weren't free to be what they really are meant to be. They were just slaves.

This was an interesting little revelation in light of the fact that I also mentioned during this interview that hunting connects me to what I truly am - what my species and its antecedents have been for 2 million years. What I am meant to be.

And the more I hunt, the more I look at non-hunting people around me and feel sorry for them, because they don't even know what they've lost.

This revelation also struck me because one defense I have heard from some people who eat meat but hate hunting is that domestic animals were meant to be eaten while the wild animals I shoot would be running around happy as a clam if I just didn't pull the trigger.

That defense has always pissed me off because it sounded so much like one of the rationalizations for for black slavery in America: They're meant to be slaves. They're born into it. So it's OK to eat captive animals. But wild animals weren't born for that. It's not OK to eat them.

Of course, the fact is, we're all destined to become food for something else, whether we're eaten by sharks or mountain lions or we merely feed grass and trees and mushrooms wherever we're buried. And I have no problem eating animals, wild or domestic.

But it bothers me that people - some people, at least - value captive meat animals so much less than wild ones. I believe it's why we have allowed some of the more grotesque practices of factory farming to take place - crowding, mutilation, genetic manipulation. And now I'm thinking the reason for that is that we see them as nothing more than slaves.

This discussion could go a hundred different directions from here - Hutch, I can already hear your fingers tapping on the keys. So have at it, folks. I'm interested in hearing what you think.

© Holly A. Heyser 2010

The F&S Booth Babe saga continues

When I wrote a blog post Wednesday about being irritated with Field & Stream running a photo gallery of SHOT Show Booth Babes, I thought to myself, Hell, there goes your chance of ever writing for Field & Stream!

So when I woke up the next morning and saw the name "Anthony Licata" in my inbox, I must say I just about pissed myself. I know that name, I know that name... That's the editor of Field & Stream. The editor!

I clicked on every other email before I summoned the courage to click on that one. Reminded me of my old days as a reporter when my blood would run cold at the sight of the blinking red voicemail light on my phone the morning a controversial story ran.

Click. Read more...
"I really liked your post calling us out on our annual booth babes gallery. You make a lot of great points.

"Would you be interested in writing a guest post our our Field Notes blog that takes on this topic?"

Uhhhhhhhhhhhh. Yes!

So I did. And you can see it by clicking here.

The comments actually start off eerily supportive, but they quickly turn into pretty much what I expected.

WA Mtnhunter: Let's see a photo of the author. That could explain a few things. Just a thought.....

crm3006: WA Mtnhunter- Follow the link to her blog, click on her picture, enlarge it if you dare, ALL IS EXPLAINED!!

Well, gentlemen, it's hard to argue with your incredibly intelligent rejoinders. You're right: It's jealousy. When I was young and cute, I thoroughly enjoyed having chicks dressed as sluts for my role models. But now it just pisses me off. Drat! You've figured me out!

Yep, it's a little rough making my debut in Field & Stream by attacking readers' sacred cow. (And, why no, I didn't say that to employ udder imagery at all!)

But I've had some great conversations with Licata now, and this whole thing has stirred up a pretty lively discussion both on the F&S website and here. Never hurts to get people thinking. So I guess I can't complain.

Have a nice weekend, folks. I'm goin' duck huntin'. And I'm gonna look sexy doing it! Because that's what matters, right?



© Holly A. Heyser 2010

Ahem, there are GIRLS in the room!

Oh, lord, I hate writing about this subject because the last thing I want to do is come off sounding like a shrill feminist. I personally am not fond of Feminazis, and I cringe when I see bumper stickers that say, "Think women aren't leaders? You're following one." Barf. No, effing barf.

But...

The venerable Field & Stream has just posted its annual SHOT Show Booth Babe Roundup - a photo gallery.

In case you're not familiar with SHOT, it's an enormous hunting and firearms trade show where vendors pitch their products to merchants and media. Hunting and firearms industries being dominated by men, many vendors hire hot babes to stand there and make sure all the passers-by can see their abundant cleavage so maybe some of them will come in for a look-see. At the product, of course. Read more...
It's basic marketing. We see it a lot.

Personally, I don't get my undies in a twist about it. I know men are biologically driven to open their wallets more easily in the presence of nice tits.

But I'm a little irked with Field & Stream.

My problem is this: Hunting is not a men's locker room anymore.

While male hunters are losing numbers, the number of women hunters is holding fairly steady. And the number of girls ages 6-15 who hunt has nearly doubled since 1991, according to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service's most recent National Survey.

What's my point? We know that boys and young men have traditionally loved hunting mags like Field & Stream. It stands to reason that this growing number of girls who hunt might also like and read such magazines and their associated websites. And if they subscribe to F&S's email newsletter, as I do, what they saw in their inbox this morning was something touting the Booth Babe Roundup as the top story.

Niiiiiiiiice.

Why does this bother me? It's about the messages this is sending. One is that this is what girls are supposed to look like. Of course, the rest of the media already shoves lots of bad messages down girls' throats, leaving them feeling like they must be rail thin and have a huge rack in order to be acceptable, leading to a whole lot of anorexia and - for those with money, anyway - boob jobs.

It just makes me sad that it's not only Cosmo and other fashion magazines where they're getting this message. They're getting it from a hunting magazine too.

Another message is that this is the kind of women male hunters want to see in their hunting mags. Well, of course it is - men like hot babes. I don't begrudge them that. But could we just remember that there are young female readers too?

It's not just F&S that forgets; I see this in hunting forums all the time. Last year some brain surgeon posted a joke in the "Campfire" section of an Internet hunting forum. The question was, "Why can't women work on cars?" The answer was a photo of a woman so incredibly busty that she couldn't roll under the front of a BMW.

Most guys wouldn't share that joke directly with a 12-year-old girl, yet they forget that there are girls in the room when the room is an Internet forum.

I expect that of the oafs on some of these forums.

I do not expect it from a venerable magazine.

End of tirade. I've got work to do.

© Holly A. Heyser 2010

Extreme(ly weird) duck hunting

Saturday was the third time I have hunted the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge in my four seasons as a duck hunter, and for the third time in a row, I came home from that refuge duckless.

But it'll probably be among the most memorable duck hunts I'll ever have, because it was marked from start to finish by the unexpected.

The fact that I got no ducks was not surprising. The ducks had largely cleared out of the area the previous Sunday, the day before a huge storm came in. There was a break in in that storm this weekend, but that didn't help.

But here's what did make the day a delight: Read more...
1. Good friends. I got to hunt Sac's free roam with three of my newest duck hunting friends: My Delevan free-roam buddy Charlie, his hunting buddy Don and my new huntress friend Alison.

2. Strange visitor. While we didn't get many ducks coming through our little pothole, Don alerted us all to the most unusual visitor I've had so far on a duck hunt: A little blacktail deer was tromping through our water about 20 yards from us.

When he saw us staring at him, he jumped a little more vigorously through the water. But he could only go so fast - the refuge had plowed a bunch of this area when it was a dry field, so walking in the thick mud was a challenge - even for a nimble little deer.

3. Scream Like a Girl Part I. I got to hear Alison scream. Here's how that went:

Boom! Boom boom boom! from the tule patch where Alison and Charlie were.

Scream! (of joy)

(Plop goes the wigeon.)

"(Bleep) yeah!"

Love that girl. She is enthusiastic and eager to learn and a joy to hunt with.

4. Still no ducks, but... When we were all looking off into the distance for birds, we spotted a herd of six deer working through a flooded field to our north. Dang. Lots of deer here!

5. Diversion. At one point during the lull (well, OK, the whole morning was actually a lull), Charlie wandered off looking for greener pastures and found them.

"I jumped some snipe over there," he said when he returned from his walkabout.

Oooooooh. Boyfriend loves snipe and has been begging all his hunting friends - including me - to get him some ever since surgery on a ruptured Achilles took him out for the rest of the season.

Well, hell, there were no ducks flying lower than 500 yards, so we might as well check out the snipe. Don opted to stay in the duck blind - he'd be leaving for the day soon - and Charlie, Alison and I headed to the boggy snipe field.

6. This is actually fun! I've never hunted snipe, and I've never really been that excited about hunting snipe, because when duck season is on, I want to hunt ducks. But I found that hunting snipe was really fun.

Once Charlie pointed them out, noting the sound they make when they take off (skaip!, or at least that's how my Audubon book describes it), they were easy to spot. And really challenging to shoot, the way they zig-zag. A lot of them were lifting in front of us, then flying back between us. (Isn't there a comedy routine that involves just such shooting peril?)

But the key here is "a lot." There were a lot of snipe in this field, so after having fired just a few futile shots all morning, we were suddenly shooting a lot. And we had confirmed for Alison that snipe hunting is not, in fact, a practical joke.

7. Woot! Woot! Wah. Charlie got the first one. I got the second. And I couldn't find him.

We were walking in a field of bunch grass, so when my bird went down, I couldn't see him on the ground. But I made a bee-line in that direction, never taking my eyes off the spot. That's what I'd done when Charlie's bird went down - we triangulated to the exact spot it fell. But in this case, I couldn't see my bird lying there.

He could have run, still alive. Or he could have plowed into that grass, dead, but speeding like a long-beaked missile and just burrowing into some spot where we couldn't find him. The three of us combed the area, parting bunches of grass, for a good ten minutes before we had to give up. Hell.

8. Rabbit anyone? After we gave up that search, I looked up on a dike 20 yards ahead of us and saw a jack rabbit speeding away from us. I raised my gun and...

"You can't shoot them here!" Charlie said.

... and lowered it, watching as the jack flattened his ears on his back, running flatter than I've ever seen a jack rabbit run. That in and of itself was pretty cool.

9. Finally! We resumed the snipe hunting and I dropped one. I charged to the spot and as I was charging, another snipe lifted in front of me - skaip! - and flew straight down the line I was walking toward that other snipe.

It would've been an easy shot. I could've dropped him probably five feet from my bird. Get the downed bird first, Holly. Don't risk losing two. So that's what I did. One bird found, another now hiding in the grass a safe distance from us.

10. Other denizens of the bog. We were walking our line through the field when something rustled maybe 30 yards in front of us. Our eyes widened as two beautiful specklebelly geese lifted in front of us and flew away.

We were, unfortunately, in California's Special Management Area, where speck hunting is limited to half the bag limit for most of the rest of the state, and it ends in mid-December. So we held fire on the closest specks I'd seen in two months. (Why the limits? Long story - read here for the details - you'll find them about halfway down the story.)

11. Scream Like a Girl Part II. After a quick break - wow, it was hot walking that field in full duck gear - we turned back to hunt all the birds that had flown between and behind us.

I heard a quick rustling five yards in front of me and prepared for a super easy shot at a snipe.

Unfortunately, it was a hen pheasant, which for some reason scared the shit out of me.

I screamed.

Charlie laughed his ass off.

12. Duck? After shooting at and missing several snipe on the return trip, we finally returned to our duck blind, two snipe richer, many shells poorer and exhausted from the long walk.

Not too long after we settled in, a hen mallard came diving down from the stratosphere and actually worked our spread. Charlie hit her. She landed a good 75 yards away, and Charlie and I both went after her, though we were pretty sure she'd fallen dead.

Groan! Walking through that soft mud was brutal. We cursed whoever had decided to disc that field.

But yay! We had another duck!

13. Beauty. Saturday was the big break between storm systems and the sky was beautiful. A stiff south-southeast wind kept engineering scenery changes, alternating between stunning blue sky, enormous white thunderheads and dark, black clouds.

For a while, there was a thick, thick rainbow rising from a distant line of trees to our north. A grind of snow geese lifted in front of it and the geese made their way across the bands of colors, like glittering confetti blowing in the wind. If a duck had flown by when we were watching that, we probably never would've seen it.

14. Oh for the love of Pete... When we finally pulled out at 4 p.m. and made our way back to the parking lot, we jumped two more deer in a little canal about 20 yards ahead of us. Can you tell they don't let you hunt deer here? Or jack rabbits. Don't forget that.

15. Ow. As we neared the cars, I became convinced I had a blister on my right heel. We had walked that much. (This set of waders has never given me a blister.) When we all changed at our cars, I found not only the blister, but an enormous hole in my sock on the same foot. My socks were in perfectly good shape that morning. I've never put a hole in a sock duck hunting. Or even upland hunting. Wow. That's one hell of a hunt.

The three of us sat there shooting the breeze for a while in the parking lot, watching the other hunters come in as the sun began to drop to the horizon. And finally, it was time to go. We made tentative plans for our next hunts, hugged each other good-bye and made our way out of the refuge.

What a hunt. It was probably the happiest I've been going home without ducks. I'd seen cool things, I'd made good use of a lull - trying something new - and I had a present for Boyfriend that I knew he'd be really happy about: two snipe.

Back at home, I regaled him with the tales of the day, my legs stretched out on an impromptu ottoman (read: folding chair) and a glass of whisky in my left hand when...

16. Scream Like a Girl Part III. ... a series of the most ferocious cramps I've ever felt coursed through my quads - the parts I'd used to lift my wader-weighted legs as I high-stepped it through the boggy bunch grass hunting snipe.

The cramps hit over and over again. It was like I was being electrocuted. I screamed. A lot. I writhed on the floor, trying to make it stop. I begged for a massage from my boyfriend, whom, you might remember, was laid up on the couch with a healing Achilles. God bless him, he said yes.

Dang. That was one hell of a hunt. The cramps were an unexpectedly painful reminder. But I still wouldn't trade that hunt for anything.

© Holly A. Heyser 2010

Cripples: The search for answers

Duck scavenger. Cripple Queen. Crip magnet.

That's me this season. Usually when I count my ducks for the season, I include a count for the ducks I've hit but lost. This year, I should add a column for other people's crips I've shot or picked up, because there have been so many. It's been downright freakish.

Sometimes they're the duck that's shot elsewhere and happens to come to my pond to die. A gift from the sky.

In one case, though, it was a bull sprig handed to me by a pheasant hunter after his dog found him. The bird was alive and looked "fine" - I had to finish him off. But when I plucked and dressed him, I was so disheartened by what I saw: A good 15 shot holes. An angry red wing wound, maybe the result of marsh critters picking at a shot wound. And when I opened him up, the horrifying stench that revealed his guts had been shot up and had been leaking for days.

I wanted to cry. I had to throw his poor carcass away because the meat was obviously tainted. That's something I hate to do, but that's not what upset me; it was the thought of him living like that for who knows how long. I am willing to accept that animals must die for us to eat meat, but I'm hard-pressed to feel good about the ones that are shot for nothing because we can't recover them.

This bizarre streak I'm on has raised lots and lots of questions for me, and answers have been hard to find. Read more...
The most obvious question was asked by our token vegan/non-hunter Hutch in the comment thread on my last post: How can you reconcile this - the fact that so many birds are wounded and not retrieved by the hunters who shot them?

Well, honestly, Hutch, it sucks. I reconcile it because I acknowledge that pretty much every breath we take as humans does incidental damage - we cannot walk through this world without leaving a wake. No animal can. Lots of animals die as unintended victims of the quest to produce vegan food too.

The fact that I'm a hunter means I face this fact pretty directly. Many people have no idea what the incidental cost of their grocery-store food was - from rodents killed by plows to eggs crushed by farm machinery to hawks smacked by the semis that delivered the food to our local markets. With my hunting, I know all too well the incidental cost.

That leaves two other questions: What is the magnitude of the situation? And what can be done to minimize it?

Now, many anti-hunters have quoted statistics on the wounding loss rate in bird hunting - anywhere from 30 percent to 50 percent or even worse. But sorry, I'm not going to trust that until I see who did the studies, and it seems they never provide links to these studies.

(And I have seen first hand how anti-hunting organizations like HSUS will just make stuff up - like the "fact" that hunters don't eat doves because there's so little meat on them. Please. Note the photo on the left. Don't lick your computer screen.)

Then I came across a page on "reducing wounding losses" on the South Dakota Game & Fish website. Here's what it said:

So, what is the magnitude of struck-but-unretrieved waterfowl in the U.S. and Canada? U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) harvest survey results show that hunters reported an average annual wounding loss rate of 18 percent from the 1930’s to the present time. However, hunters do not see all the birds that they wound. Numerous U.S. and Canada research studies have been published involving trained observers that record the harvest efficiency of thousands of duck hunters in the field. These studies document wounding rates of more than 30 percent. Therefore, if you reconcile hunter and trained observer reports, the wounding rate on ducks is at least 25 percent.

First of all, this came from a source I trusted - South Dakota does not have a vested interest in making hunting look bad. In fact, that state invests quite a bit in hunting tourism. You know, the pheasants there are as thick as mosquitoes in a Minnesota summer.

Second, the hunter-reported wounding rate of 18 percent wasn't too far off of mine - I'm at 14 percent for my entire four seasons of duck hunting. It was 18 percent last season, and it's 10 percent this season. (Though having lost four crips and picked up 10, I feel perhaps I should have a negative wounding rate in the cosmic accounting of such things.)

But I still have questions about these studies: Do they in any way account for what happens to the bird after it is hit, but flies off (or, as is often the case with me, hides in tules where it can't be retrieved)?

This season I have gotten many cripples that were obviously shot the same day, so if trained observers were watching the loss but didn't see me get the bird, would that still count as a loss?

Then there are the other birds that heal and just keep on living. I got one on Sunday with my friend Charlie: A Ross's goose came flying at our blind so low I thought it was a seagull. Until we realized it was a goose.

We shot. He fell.

"Did you see his leg hanging down?" Charlie asked me as I went to pick him up. "I think he was wounded."

When I dressed the goose, I indeed found that his leg had been wounded - it hung strangely, and I could feel a piece of shot in it. But I couldn't find any evidence of the wound - it had completely healed over. Would that goose have counted as a wounding loss, even though he continued to live until Charlie and I brought him down for good?

Unfortunately, I have not gotten to look at any of these studies first-hand, so I don't know the answers. (Anyone know where I can find 'em? Please tell me.)

But in all honesty, this is quibbling. Everyone who hunts birds knows that we lose some of them. We don't get to use scoped rifles on standing birds; we use shotguns on speeding birds, and you have to be a really good shot to kill them instantly every time. And even big game hunting where you do get to aim scoped rifles at standing animals has wounding losses. It is a fact of life.

So the more important issue is what can we do to reduce wounding losses?

Kansas Wildlife & Parks has a nice brochure detailing 15 causes of, and 15 solutions to, wounding losses.

The key causes? Poor shooting skills. Poor distance estimation. Using the wrong load or choke for what you're hunting. Taking shots with a high likelihood of the bird landing in dense cover.

The part about distance estimation is interesting. Somewhere in my research on this subject, I read that many hunters will estimate that a bird is at 40 yards when it is really 30 yards away. I know I do that - I routinely pass on shots I later realize are 30 yards because they feel too far for me. I want them closer. When they're closer, the birds tend to drop a higher percentage of the time. And while sometimes people will chide me for not taking shots they thought were achievable, doing this research has made me feel good about my conservative bent on shooting.

Now, the part about the shot we use. There's a respected hunter and ballistics researcher named Tom Roster who has done extensive studies on this subject, and he has produced the "Steel Shot Lethality Table" that lays out exactly what you need to use to be most effective.

The Holy Grail! Something I could analyze with respect to the type of hunting I do and make the best choices.

But good luck finding that thing. It's copyrighted, and for the life of me, I haven't been able to find it on the Internet - not even in a place where I could pay for it, which I'd gladly do. (Hey, as a writer and photographer, I totally respect copyright.) At least one state game agency includes the table in its hunter guidebook. I found a PDF of that guidebook online, and the PDF included a reference to the table, but the table itself was not in the online version.

I have seen references to the table though. The South Dakota page I mentioned earlier says steel No. 3 shot has shown the best all-around performance for taking ducks. But what choke? And I shoot Hevi-Shot, which has different properties than steel - where does that fit in the equation? And does it matter that I shoot a 20 gauge - is this table geared toward people who shoot 12 gauge?

I've seen other people quote this table saying No. 4 is better, or even No. 6. So clearly, hearsay is not doing anyone a great deal of good here.

I've called Roster because I'd love to talk to him about this, but I haven't heard back yet. I'll keep trying.

In the meantime, I'm going to keep working on reducing my wounding losses. I've spent good money to have my gun fitted to make my shooting more accurate. I do practice with skeet and sporting clays when I can, though I know the predictability of clays doesn't do justice to the unpredictability of live birds. I use Hevi-Shot at a freakin' $2.40 per shell because I believe it's more lethal, even though there are only three shot sizes for 20 gauge (2, 4 and 6 - I use mostly 4s).

I've even given serious thought to whether I should get a 12 gauge. Pride makes me want to perfect my shooting on the 20 gauge - to be accurate with the smaller number of pellets I get in my shells. There's a faction out there that sees the 20 gauge as a more honorable way to hunt. But would I knock them down more consistently with a 12 gauge?

In the field, I continue to do what I've always done - and what I see many other hunters doing as well: I look long and hard for ducks I drop, and believe me, I have done some epic searches - with success, even without a dog. (Oh yeah, dog. But a well-trained dog is an expense I can't afford right now, and I refuse to take a poorly trained (i.e., self-trained) dog into the field.)

And I gladly pick up other people's cripples. Even if they're not the best-tasting birds. Even if they might be emaciated from having sat out there for a few days before I finished them off. Because I don't believe any bird should be shot for nothing.

Not if I can help it.

© Holly A. Heyser 2010