Duck hunting: The X, the flight path to the X and nowhere near the X

Perhaps you've never heard of "the X," but for duck hunters, it is our Holy Grail, the mysterious force that determines whether we have an excellent day of hunting or we go home muttering, "At least we don't have any plucking to do tonight."

The X, simply put, is where the ducks want to be at any given time. In places where hunters have a lot of room and freedom to move around, the most successful ones are those who can consistently figure out where the X is and put themselves in that spot.

But the X has a crazy habit of moving, and when that happens, the results can be stunning - as I found out last week. Read more...
Thanksgiving is the time for our annual pilgrimage north to hunt the Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge with my friend Brent.

This year, we knew the hunting might be challenging, because a cold snap had plunged the region into single digits the weekend before, and temps were going to drop again on Wednesday. That's the kind of weather pattern that can send most of the waterfowl south. But I was pretty sure we'd still see birds: Brent's a good hunter who makes it his business to know where the X is.

And besides, I already knew the cold-morning strategy from the year before, and I liked it: Sleep in, because the ducks just don't move early when it's that cold.

We headed out midmorning on Thanksgiving and cased an icy field where the birds had been feeding lately - the X! Then we motored over to our chosen spot.

Now, we didn't put ourselves precisely on the X; other hunters had beat us to the spot. But we weren't really hot about the whole layout-blind-on-ice thing anyway, me being something of a wuss about the cold, and the temperature being somewhere around 10. So we staked out a spot at the edge of the field.

And very quickly it became clear we were on the next best thing to the X - the flight path to the X.

It wasn't lights-out shooting, but we had a pretty steady stream of ducks and geese coming in right over our heads en route to the X. By the time shoot time ended at 1 p.m., we'd bagged three specklebelly geese, one Canada goose, a mallard, a pintail and a wigeon. Not bad for a hunt in the middle of a cold snap.

That night after our Thanksgiving dinner, we plotted what we'd do the next morning. That spot had worked really well - so well that it would behoove us to make sure we got there first the next day. Scratch the sleep-in strategy and set the alarms for 4 a.m. - we're going in!

I think it was 15 degrees when we headed out, and the journey in Brent's boat was slow and gratingly loud with three inches of ice to break on the canal. But that's the price you pay when you want to be there first, and it seemed like it was worth it to not only get our spot again, but get there a little earlier.

We settled in, watched the sun rise and waited for the ducks to come.

And waited.

And waited.

And waited.

"Release the mallards!" Brent cried. The gods did not heed him.

We'd seen a few geese here and there, but we were beginning to wonder if all the ducks really had headed south - back to where Boyfriend and I normally hunt.

Finally, around 11 a.m. - after six hours of sitting there playing the kind of mind games one plays to pretend one is not seriously cold - Brent uttered the magic words: "Ducks over the field!"

Game on!

These ducks weren’t near us, but it didn’t matter. We were on full alert now. Ducks could come in from anywhere.

They could.

But we soon realized they weren't.

It took maybe 10-15 minutes to see what was happening:

1. The X had moved a bit. Rather than being near the center of the field, it was now near the corner of the field. Where all the trucks were parked. Honestly, I think anyone with a shotgun hiding behind the Porta-Potty would've gotten a limit pretty quickly.

2. Apparently there had been a change of flight plan that we had not been informed of. Rather than flying over us en route to the X, the ducks were now entering the airspace over the field a good 200-300 yards to our west, flying to the north end of the field, banking east, and descending steadily to the X, only to scatter when the lucky bastards near the Porta-Potty fired their guns.

Honestly, if I hadn't been hoping to kill a few of those ducks, I would've been purely delighted to watch it play out. The precision and consistency with which the birds followed this path would've earned the admiration of the most demanding air traffic controllers. It was stunning.

We just shook our heads.

I understand why the X has to shift - ducks go where the food looks good, and you can't park in the same spot every day and expect the food to grow back.

But that flight path! Sure, there were some flocks that didn't follow it, but easily 90 percent of the ducks in the air did. And while my puny human brain can understand why animal migration paths stay the same for generations, I'd really like to know what happens to make all these ducks abruptly change plans - not just where to eat, but how to get there - then follow the new flight plans with such precision.

When 1 p.m. heralded the end of shoot time, we unloaded our guns, picked up decoys and headed back to the truck with not a single bird on our straps.

Back at the boat ramp, I was talking to the guys who'd been closest to the X, and they said they'd bagged 13 ducks in an hour.

"How'd you do?" they asked.

"Nothing," I said, shrugging. "We weren't on the X, and we weren't on the flight path to the X."

And truth be told, I'm OK with that. To me, witnessing such a spectacle ranks right up there with some of my more spectacular shoots.

As long as it doesn't happen too often.

© Holly A. Heyser 2010