Canadian Invasion

A cold, gusty northwest wind moved the reeds of the duck blind to and fro as I leaned in close, peering upward with only my eyes. Overhead, a group of fat, red-legged Canadian mallards circled, looking over the decoys. They wheeled once, set their wings and began their feet-down plummet toward the water. I reached for the walnut forend of the Remington . . .

I didn’t know it then and clearly didn’t appreciate the good fortune, but I was privileged to be born and raised in a place with a marsh right out my back door. I also had the good fortune to come of hunting age at the tail end of the golden era of duck hunting. In the South Jersey hunting community, ducks were the thing then. Everyone duck hunted. There weren’t many deer around and they were a novelty that a few folks pursued for a week in the fall but the main focus was ducks. South Jersey has its own duck lore that includes unique styles of boats, decoys, and blinds. Many of these traditions are on life support here in 2024 but back when I started hunting in the 1970s they were strong, and full of vigor.

Dad introduced me to duck hunting at a young age and to the wonders of the marsh when I was even younger. Some of my earliest memories include paddling silently through walls of wild rose mallow, the green algae on the water’s surface parting before the canoe and closing in behind it. Big carp wallowed in the shallows. Turtles, precariously perched on fallen limbs and stumps to sun themselves, would plop into the water and disappear into the gooey mud until we passed. Teal, bitterns, green herons, squawking great blue herons, and snowy white egrets would leap from the shoreline as we coasted by. Our marsh was young then and teeming with wildlife throughout the year.

My first trip to the duck blind was some 49 years ago. My Dad, brother, and I were to set out just before first light. Until the day before, I don’t think I had really considered duck hunting or hunting in general but found the idea intriguing. I remember shuffling through a chest of drawers searching for “appropriate” clothing though I had no idea what that was. We would be hunting the October opener so it wouldn’t terribly cold. I rummaged and found what I would call my “lucky hunting shirt”. It was a 1970’s style pull over that was mostly a pale orange with patterns reminiscent of Aztec culture and was, as I know now, completely inappropriate for duck hunting providing neither protection from the cold nor camouflage from the prying eyes of wary ducks. It didn’t matter because Dad provided one of several nondescript brown or green retired lab jackets to wear over top. I’m certain the jacket was way too big for a 9 year old.

There was a lot of shooting that first morning. Ducks were very plentiful back then as was foretold by the huge numbers we rousted from their overnight roosts as we paddled to our blind. Dad was in the rear, David up front and me sitting on the floor in the middle with nothing better to do than get more excited with each passing moment. I was hunting with a single-shot Savage 20 gauge. Dad doled the ammo one round at a time with perpetual and important reminders about gun safety. The action was mostly teal that day save for one big pair of mallards that surprised us. Dad knocked down the drake with his 12 gauge. As for me, I’m not really sure I hit a thing. I believe my Dad let my brother and I do most of the shooting and we did wind up with a fair number of ducks so maybe . . but maybe not. It didn’t matter. This duck hunting thing was pretty cool!

While the duck hunting was new, the marsh was not. In fact, from an early age I learned to paddle the canoe by myself and spent countless days paddling, fishing, plinking with an air rifle, and catching turtles in the marsh. By observation, I learned the cycle of life of the marsh. I knew when and where muskrats dug, the best places to fish, when blackberries hung juicy and fat over the water, and the best places to catch giant bullfrogs. Not more than a day or two passed that I wasn’t in the canoe.

No man is closer to the beginning of things and the eternal motherhood of the outdoors than when he is familiar with a marsh.

Gordon MacQuarrie

After that first exposure to duck hunting I became obsessed. We were members of “Ducks Unlimited” and I read each magazine cover to cover learning everything I could about ducks, their habits and habitat, their lifecycles, the magic of migration, and all the things that went into whether a given season would be “good” or not. This was a life before the internet so one simply didn’t “Google” Mallard and start clicking links.

I went to the library and read books and encyclopedia articles about ducks. I read hunting literature from magazines and famous outdoor writer’s articles about duck hunting. Somewhere along the line I was gifted a trilogy of books by Gordon MacQuarrie. I didn’t know it at the time but he was one of the most influential outdoor writers in history and was really the first person employed full-time as an outdoor writer. I wish I knew this and payed a lot closer attention.

MacQuarrie (or “Mack” as he was known) wrote eloquent articles about his hunting and fishing forays in the northern reaches of Wisconsin and nearby midwestern areas. He wrote about windblown points on far away lakes. He wrote of long and hazardous drives to get to good duck country in a storm. There were many stories of the massive flights of bluebills (scaup) that invaded Wisconsin as winter pushed south from Canada. There were tales of fighting the bitter, cold end of the season on potholes in the desolate Wisconsin sand barrens. MacQuarrie’s descriptions of moonlit decoys waiting the dawn while the last of Wisconsin’s native wolves howled in the barrens made me dream of far away places and “real” duck hunting in “real” duck hunting places.

In a classic case of “The grass is always greener”, I had no appreciation for not only how great the duck hunting out my back door was, but how easy it was. Dad and I would sit at the kitchen counter sipping coffee and having breakfast. I’d stare anxiously at my watch and look at Dad to see if there were any signs of being ready to head out hunting. If I had it my way the decoys would have been splashed and we’d have been sitting in the blind a full hour before daylight. Dad, on the other hand, would wait until the eastern sky began to turn pink before we left the house. He was right of course. Aside from youthful enthusiasm, there was no reason to rush. We didn’t have a 100 mile drive over icy roads to get to our duck waters nor did we have to spread dozens of decoys to fool sociable bluebills. Our small duck water had plenty of mallard and black ducks and anything more than a few decoys looked unnatural. Still, I longed to be the main subject in much of the hunting art I saw or to be with MacQuarrie at “The Hole in the Wall” with bluebills .

Dad’s last duck hunt was sometime in the mid to late 1980s and corresponded with the severe drought that struck most of the United States and Canada. The drought was not only devastating to farmers and food supplies but more so to waterfowl populations. We watched the duck numbers behind our house dwindle from hundreds to a few pairs now and then. The spectacular springtime pintail migration that for years featured thousands upon thousands of pintails disappeared to not so much as a single pintail. Having lived through duck hay days, I guess Dad could no longer bring himself to put any of those few remaining mallards on the dinner table. Ducks were not gone altogether and numbers would recover with conditions, though never to pre-drought levels. This was mostly due to lost habitat.

Sometime in that late 80s period, Dad and I were returning from Christmas shopping. Our route home took us past our marsh where we could see for hundreds of yards and get a feel for what was happening. After years of empty skies, we were amazed to see hundreds of big ducks circling the marsh. A massive frontal system had moved through the day prior and, despite the bluebird skies, had obviously brought an influx of ducks from the Canadian nesting grounds.

It was late in the afternoon for December. It was probably pushing 3:30 by the time we got home. I couldn’t talk my Dad into going out, be he said rather urgently “I think you should get out there”. I couldn’t have agreed more. After a couple years of staring at empty skies to once again be in a duck blind with hundreds of ducks circling was more than I could stand.

An experienced duck hunter knows things go better if he ignores the overhead whistle of eager mallard pinions and sets to work properly placing decoys. If one is to stare upward whilst tossing decoys overboard he is likely to have, at minimum, a telltale anchor cord around a head, or worse, a tangled mess when finished. But I was young and excited and somehow managed to get my decoys set despite the ongoing distraction of dozens of large, circling ducks. Mallards mostly. Big, red-legged Canadian mallards.

With the decoys set, I slipped the canoe behind the reed wall that was my duck blind, loaded Dad’s old Remington 1100 and warmed up my duck call. I don’t think the call was even necessary. Those naive northern birds couldn’t wait to land in the decoys. They hadn’t been hunted and shot at the way the local birds had been and decoyed willingly. The first flock came in and I picked out a fat drake as he hovered briefly. The 1100 boomed and the duck fell lifelessly into the decoys. The scene repeated itself quickly and just as quickly my limit was reached. With the effects of the drought, limits were very restricted to maybe 3 birds total. Once my 3 ducks were down, I unloaded my gun and sat until dark watching flock after flock set their wings and pitch into the decoys. It was absolutely glorious and the scene plays in my head still to this day.

Somewhere along the line my passion for duck hunting evaporated. Maybe it was because I so readily gave up the way of life of my childhood and moved away from ducky places. Maybe it had to do with my duck hunting partners dwindling. Unlike the solitude of the deer stand, the duck blind is best enjoyed with friends. Where Gordon MacQuarrie discovered duck hunting relatively late in life and enjoyed until his premature death in 1955, I foolishly let that passion slip away in the throes of the modern world.

Gordon MacQuarrie often wrote about the mystical wonders of migration and how one of the greatest attributes of duck hunting was that the game comes from the sky and may have been hundreds of miles away just yesterday. My pulse still quickens when I’m near a marsh and I hear the whistle of duck wings overhead. I can still pick out the rhythmic flap of duck wings when I spy a flock over the river near home. Perhaps this will be the year when I dust off Dad’s old 1100 which is probably older than me and once again wait in a marsh for a Canadian invasion.