Ep. 21: Reading a Mallard’s Mind and Finding Late Season Duck Success
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As a guide and hunter, I've spent thousands of days in the field. This show is about translating my hard-won experiences into tips and tactics that'll get you closer to your ultimate goal, success in the field. I'm Remy Warren. This is Cutting the Distance. This podcast is presented by Yeti, built for the wild. While most of the big game seasons have come and gone for the year, my guess is your hunting itch is not subdued.

So the question remains, where do you go and what do you do from here? Lucky for you, while the big game season might be over, there's still plenty of waterfowl season to take advantage of. Late season duck hunting can be one of the best times, in my opinion, to hit the marsh. But it also provides a few unique challenges.

This week, I want to give you some tips for late season public land waterfowl hunting, including some tips for planning your day and finding open water, even if it's all iced up. Tactics for locating those birds and just a couple of strange gear ideas that I've come up with over the years, as well as tactics for those cold January days to trick weary birds to committing to your spread.

But first, I want to share one of my favorite late season duck stories with you. Now of all the days that I've spent in the marsh, for some reason, this one mallard stands out.

Now, I think of myself as a hunter. And what I mean by that is I love all forms of hunting, whether it's bow hunting, rifle hunting. It doesn't matter. If I'm out there hunting, I'm enjoying it. Small game, big game. But there's something for me that is special about waterfowl hunting. I just love that experience of being in the marsh.

Now, I love it so much that actually, after I would finish my guide season, I would have a bit of time between my next semester of school and when I had to do anything else. I pretty much lived cheap. So I decided, wow, after the guide season, I'm just going to hunt for ducks for two months straight. And I pretty much would go out every single day chasing ducks.

Now, because I had the time to hunt them so much, it's not like I could physically eat a limit of birds every day. I kind of set myself these ground rules for the hunt. So if I was going to shoot a bird, it had to check all of these boxes in order for me to pull up the shotgun and shoot it.

So my theory was I will only shoot Drake birds of certain species. I would say, call them like prized species or the ones that were, we didn't see as often. The mallards, pintail, every once in a while, widgeon. And so it had to be a Drake bird. And then it would have to be a bird that I tricked and called to. Because of that, I got a lot of interactions with ducks and with waterfowl.

It was really just a lot of time spent in the marsh calling, watching birds. I would have other species land. I would have other birds fly by. And it really gave me a lot of interaction into the minds of these late season ducks. Now, the story that I want to tell is not about the best duck hunting day I've ever had, shooting limited birds. It's about one particular Drake Mallard.

The day was not much different than all the other days I'd been out.

I would say the weather was kind of cold. It was definitely overcast this day, but not precipitating. It was just overcast, light breeze, nothing real standout about the day. In order to get out to the spot, the ice was just thick enough where you could put a little weight on it and then you would break through. So no matter where I had to go, I had to break ice. But it was also warm enough earlier in the week where there was patches of open water as well.

Most of the places that I had to get to, I had to break through some ice, but I was trying to figure out, okay, there's enough open water where the birds are spread out. I didn't know exactly where I wanted to go this day. So what I did was I just got up, waited for the sun to rise in a good part of the day, and then just kind of glassed and looked around for birds that were flying to figure out where the concentrations of birds are in this marsh.

because it was fairly late in the season and most of the birds had already left. Not a lot of birds had stopped by because it was frozen up earlier in the season. So there wasn't a lot of opportunities out there for a lot of birds. So I really needed to know, okay, which spot am I going to hunt this day? So I saw a few birds flying about a mile, probably two miles out. And it's a spot that I actually hunt a lot. So I thought, okay, I'll walk to that one little pond back there.

This is a big wetland area. So it's, it's maybe like knee deep water, muddy, the type of mud where you I'd step my boot in the ground and sink down past your ankles. And then you've got ice about knee level. Then you'd step up again. You put a little bit of weight on the ice and then you break back through.

A lot of work. A lot of work to get out there. So it takes such a long time to get out there. It's part of the reason it was nearly impossible to just hunt the morning. So I spotted where I wanted to go and I made the long trudge into there. I don't know how long it took, but it seems like it took most of the day. I have a little sled that I had my decoys in and a Thule stool. Fully camoed up. Thick insulated waders just because it's so cold.

and marched out to my spot. I came up upon the pond, and the pond that I was hoping to hunt actually was, I would say, partially open. There was a patch of tulies, which is just like some thick cattail-looking plant in the wetlands there, and there was this patch of tulies in the middle, a small patch, I'd say maybe seven feet across. I said, oh, okay, I'm going to push in there, and that's where I'm going to set up.

then I made a little bit more open water right in front of it just by breaking the ice and sliding it underneath the other more stationary ice. And then I set out a few decoys. I didn't want to overdo it. Just a few out past me trying to make it where there's a landing area right in front of me. Because at this time, when I did find the birds that I wanted to shoot, because I had tricked them, I meant that they were pretty much going to land in my decoys.

The ducks that I did shoot at is pretty much a hundred percent shoot. And I was killing that duck. I went through very few shells this season because everything that I shot at was one shot and done because the birds were so close. So I really tried to figure out or set my spread. So the birds would be landing right on top of me. Right after I got set up, I had a few birds. You could just hear that wing tips before you see them.

whiz over top. I called, I was actually a group of pintails. I gave them some whistles. They dropped their wings, circled around one time and then continued on their way. They were within range, but I didn't feel like I tricked those birds. They gave it one look and decided, no, that wasn't it. Maybe they saw me. Maybe I got too impatient, looked up at the wrong time. If I was just trying to shoot birds, I could have shot those birds, but I didn't feel like I tricked those birds.

When I talk about tricked, I mean they have to be wings locked, coming in hot, just about to drop into my spot. So the day was actually pretty dang slow. And then off in the distance, I see this lone Drake Mallard cruising a ways out. Well, that's a good bird to call too.

Gave him a few greeting calls, real light. And I saw him kind of start flying my direction. So at that point, late season, I don't like to over call. I just, I took out my whistle again and I use this. It's actually a Drake call whistle. It's like, I don't have it with me. So I'll just use my voice as a sound. And he's checking it out. I can tell that he is a weary bird.

He's locked his wings and he's starting to circle up pretty high. And he's just looking. He's like doing that thing that a duck does where his neck's out over his body. And he's looking, pinpointing where he might land and checking things out on the first pass. Does his first pass. And I'm just tucked into the tool. He's tight. Face mask on. Trying not to look up. I don't want him to see my eyes. Give him another whistle every time he crosses by. As his back's to me, I whistle as he's coming in.

Lay off the sound just a few calls here and there to just make them make it seem realistic, you know trying to match Essentially ducks that I hear on the water that time of year not going overboard with it But definitely trying to trick him into my spread He makes another pass coming down a little bit lower this time walking his wings and just checking it out same thing little call sequence

He takes it wide, comes back in a third pass. Now I can tell this bird is going to commit. After that third pass, he swoops out to the south, locks his wings, his feet are out. It's just his orange feet up against that dark sky, bright green head, fully plumed Drake Mallard. He's locked in, dropping straight down on top of me. I rise up and shoot the bird just maybe 10 feet off my barrel.

He was fully, fully committed to that setup. And for some reason, I don't know if it was the dramatic effect of the way that that bird looked in the sky, the fact that I knew that I had tricked him and called that bird in late season when most of the birds are wary. For some reason, that duck to me was a trophy duck. It stood out in my mind to this day as one of my favorite duck hunting days ever.

Now, I didn't shoot a lot of birds that day. I didn't see a lot of birds that day. But I knew that all the time that I put into the marsh late season allowed me the skills to trick that bird that probably would not have come in otherwise.

When I talk about late season duck hunting, in order to have a successful hunt on public land, you really have to plan your day accordingly. And mostly weather affects where you're going to hunt. Because unlike fields on private land or ag land, where the birds are coming in, piling into these certain places to feed...

Most public land bird hunting is on wildlife management areas or refuges, marsh style hunting, or big water on public lakes. And sometimes you've got your river systems. So you have to consider the weather and look for places where there's higher likelihoods of open water. If it's a warm year, you don't really have to think about it so much. But on those cold years,

the marshes start to freeze up and you're really going to start limiting where the birds are going to be. And you might be wasting your time just breaking through ice all day if you don't have a plan in place to hunt the weather accordingly. One thing that I do is I first decide, okay, what's the temperature and what kind of ice is going to be where I'm going to hunt? And then I consider that and decide the types of places that I'm going to look to hunt for that day.

So if it's really cold and I know most of the shallow water is going to be frozen up, I'll think about targeting river systems, warm water sloughs, or big water where the wind has kind of kept the ice at bay, as well as doing a lot of scouting to try to find those pockets that ducks themselves have kept open. So late in the season, if I'm just going in blind, a lot of times I'll go to the spot first and

and I won't plan on hunting the morning. I'll use the morning to scout and glass. It's crazy to me to think about duck hunting without binoculars. Now it sounds weird, but I've always taken binoculars with me because I'd prefer to glass over the marsh and try to pinpoint where the birds are before I actually head into the area.

It's key late season too, because there might not be a lot of open water. So to watch where those birds land in the morning when they're most active is going to give me my best opportunity for the rest of the day hunting. So I can spend my time working to get into that spot and then have a good hunt for the second half of the day and potentially the next morning, as opposed to just going in somewhere blind right off the bat and not moving around enough to scout.

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Go to fishingbooker.com today. That's fishingbooker.com. I can think of actually one really good time when I was late season in the marsh, ran into some guys coming out, you know, asked them how I did. Oh, I haven't seen a bird all day. It's terrible. We're heading out. It's like, okay. After he left, I stood up on the top of my truck with my binoculars glassing over the tules and

and saw a group of coots just kind of take off and land. And I thought, "That's about a half a mile away through some pretty bad ice."

I walk out there and sure enough, there was open water. I jumped a couple birds off that, set up, ended up shooting a limit of awesome ducks, including a couple redheads, some good teal, and then a bunch of wigeon. So you just don't know what's out there sometimes just by looking with your eyes. I love to just take out my binoculars.

go into a viewing tower if I'm on a refuge that has them, getting up to a vantage point, and even just glassing the sky and watching birds and trying to pinpoint where they're setting.

Now when I'm talking about finding a spot to hunt on public land, you know, if it's not frozen over, what I like to do is I'll even use my satellite imagery, my mapping software to just find areas that look hard to get into. I kind of take the same approach with bird hunting that I do big game hunting. Get away from the crowds. You know, if it's kind of a pain in the ass to get to, more likely going to be a spot where you can leave some pressure behind.

And it's most likely a spot where the birds are going to be as well. You know, if you don't have a boat, most of the time that I spend duck hunting, I don't use a boat. A lot of times because it's late season, it's too frozen. But other times it's just that if I have a boat and can get there easy, a lot of other people can too. So what I like to do is find a spot that you have to walk to,

that's a pain to walk to through mud, through a lot of cover, or I'll use my mapping software to find those places that look like, okay, it'd be hard to get a boat into there because it's too shallow, but it's just deep enough that you got to wade. And there's also an opening in a bunch of tules and other things that you have to walk through a nice pocket that those are the type of concealed pockets that I know birds hide in, especially late in the year when they've been pressured a lot by other hunters.

When I talk about the challenges of late season duck hunting, what I'm mostly talking about is ice. Now, it's probably the kind of ice that you're post-tolling through. What I mean by that is you stand on it, it takes most of your weight, but not all of it, and then you break through. So you've got mud on the bottom that you sink in and ice on the top that you break through. It's honestly the worst combination for walking.

So this is where some of my interesting gear tips come in. A few years back, I was hunting with my buddy Ross Baker and we'd been hunting all week and our shins were just destroyed from breaking through the ice. So what we ended up doing was getting a pair of soccer shin guards, putting those over our waders and then using those in our knees to break the ice in front of us.

It was the best thing we've ever done. And to this day, I still use those soccer shin guards to break ice to get out into spots that other people don't want to get to just because it is such a pain in the ass. Now, if you are on that kind of ice where you're breaking through, just make sure that you know the area and you're obviously going over something deep.

Another little piece of equipment that I use is like a concrete sled. Now it's not a sled that's made of concrete, but it's just a sled for mixing concrete. They make a lot of duck hunting sleds, but I find that those concrete sleds are a little bit more durable and they're shorter.

But you can also use that, push your weight and then break the ice in front of you. If you don't have a boat or it's that kind of ice where it's just too thick, it would tear a boat up. Most of the time, that late season hunting, it's that kind of ice. It's the kind of ice that you're going to post hole through. So just having a couple pieces of equipment to help you get through the ice without destroying yourself is a great thing to have. It helps you just get into those spots that other people aren't as willing to go.

Because just like any public land hunting, the guys that work a little bit harder have a little bit more success. Now all that time that I've spent just observing birds and just time out in the marsh, I really came up with some good late season tactics and just things that I kind of hold as these are the tips that help you trick more birds.

So the first tactic is if you get out there and it's frozen, create a water hole in the shape that helps funnel birds to a landing area closer to you. So what I'll do oftentimes is I'll break the ice out in front of where I'm sitting and I'll walk around in a circle to make the water hole where I have enough room on either side to set decoys but leave the open area in the middle where I'm at.

If there's ice, it actually gives you a good opportunity to create your own water hole or own open water space where the ducks can land closer to where you're going to shoot. And that actually is to your advantage.

What I do is I'll walk out, I'll pace it off in different directions, and I'm careful where I walk because if I'm going into an area, I don't want to walk right through where I'm going to create this water hole. So I walk around in a circle, I'll break it off a smaller section, and then I'll push that ice underneath the ice that's already there. Because what I'm trying to do is create an area that looks like a bunch of live birds spent the night there and left to the water open.

Now, another thing that I realized is especially late, your decoys have to look right.

So what I do is I don't throw my decoys late in the year because what that does is it splashes water around them. It gets ice built up on them and they just don't look right after that. So I'll actually just walk out and place the decoys where I want them. Oftentimes I'll do a few on the ice sitting like ducks just sitting around the open water and then some birds in the water like they're feeding or whatever.

Another thing that I always have is at least one motion rig in the water just to prevent it from freezing or refreezing. And what that motion rig does, either like a jerk string or one of those vibrating ducks. I even had the ducks, there's three ducks on almost like a little motor system that pulls them down and makes a lot of splashing water. But what that does is the ducks that are flying over, it says, hey, here's open water, not just ice.

The ripples in there are key to showing ducks flying a long ways away that might be searching for that open water that, hey, here's some open water. And, oh, there's already ducks there. Sweet. Let's drop right into that. I think the biggest tactic and secret to tricking late season birds is to not over call. But I also think that you do need to call.

So just calling less and using a lot more single calls, softer understated calls, not big long drawn out calls. Because what you want to do is just sound like a few ducks, but not desperate ducks. I think that the most dangerous weapon I have in my late season duck hunting kit would be a whistle type call. Something, a Drake Mallard call, something that I can make that Drake Mallard sound, something that I can call to Wigeon and Pentails.

Also, if I see a widgeon, a lot of times I'll use a mallard call to call to them and vice versa. If I see mallards, I'll use that widgeon or pintail call. Birds that time you're just looking for open water that's safe. So I've kind of figured that if you're calling to a duck with a call that isn't for that duck, it might still get their attention as to, oh, here's some open safe water to land.

yet you aren't trying to be so direct at them like everybody else earlier in the season has been. Every time a mallard flies by, it's like, okay, they've heard that before. Try something different. Try giving a wigeon call to a mallard, just letting them know, hey, there's birds here, we're happy, and there's plenty of open water, plenty of room for you guys to drop in. Now, if you're a big game hunter or a new hunter and you haven't done much waterfowl hunting,

I think the best way to kind of get into it or just to go out and have a good day, especially later in the season, is to find some places to jump shoot.

Jump shooting can be a great tactic late in the year, especially for guys that don't have the decoy setups or the full decoy setup with the boat and all the... There's just a whole new set of gear that you need for a lot of different hunting applications. So if you don't have all that stuff, honestly, the best way to just go out and have a good day late in the season would be to go do a little bit of jump shooting. And what that entails is a lot of spot and stalk type tactics for the birds.

I use my binoculars a lot if I'm going to do any jump shooting. I'll kind of glass and try to find the birds before they see me. You'd be surprised how good a duck's or goose eyesight is. So a lot of jump shooting is a lot of those spot and stalk tactics that you use on other animals. You just use it in a setting where you're shooting birds.

Mostly that's going to happen on rivers if everything else is froze up. I generally start downstream because most birds will be swimming upstream so they won't be watching you as often if you can do that.

and then I work my way upstream. I'll glass along the shores and the banks, and then when I see birds, I'll make wide paths around and then walk in. If I'm hunting a river with a lot of bends that you actually can't see, what I do is I'll look at my map and see where the holes are, or I'll pre-walk it the first day, and then the next day kind of know where those holes are where birds jumped off, and then kind of sneak into those spots, moving slow and looking.

One thing that I also like to do late season, if you're a bow hunter, spot and stalk duck hunting instead of jump shooting with your bow can be extremely good practice. While this is a late season duck hunting podcast, I just want to make it applicable for a lot of different people. So if you are a type of person that says, oh, I don't really bird hunt much. You maybe don't really shoot a shotgun a lot, but you do bow hunt.

Get yourself some of those blunt tips, some bird tips, and then go out and just stalk the river. Stalk creek bottoms, stalk little ponds. It's an extremely good way to get a lot of shooting in and a lot of practice for next archery season. If duck hunting is kind of new to you, this winter, your homework is to get out, go buy a duck stamp, and go hunt the marsh. Go hunt the river. Get on some ducks.

because it's overall just going to make you a better big game hunter as well. Whether you're just a big game hunter, and if you're just a duck hunter, perfect. I think you can use a few of those tips. Honestly, I think the best tip for late season duck hunting is the type of calling, less calling, light calling, whistle calling. So remember those tactics, and you'll have a lot more success this year in the marsh.

I just want to thank everybody again for tuning in. I know we had a Christmas special where I kind of went over some gear, did some giveaways. That was a lot of fun. I want to thank everybody for the participation in that. That was a lot of fun for me.

This was our first in the small game hunting category. I've done a lot of big game hunting stuff, but man, I'm passionate about all kinds of hunting. So if I can impart some of that to people that might not have exposure or experience with some of these other types of forms of hunting, that's awesome.

You know, if you have some great small game hunting photos or stories, send them to me. Let me know if you're getting out there late season to chase some birds, chase some ducks. I love to hear all that stuff. As always, you can email me at remyatthemeateater.com. So give us some of your questions because we're going to be doing a Q&A coming up probably next week.

If you got some questions, send those in. And then if we don't get to your question, I save a lot of the questions. You can also send questions to me via social media on Instagram. I also just wanted to right now reach out to you a little bit, engage your interest on possibly having a section at the end of the podcast where I answer maybe one or two questions in this closing zone right here.

Some of them might be relevant to the podcast that just happened, but a lot of them might just be your questions. Get a few more questions answered because the amount of questions that are coming in, it's going to be hard to answer everybody's questions. I will also say that a lot of the questions that come in can be answered in previous podcasts.

So if there's some that you missed, definitely go back and check them out. I think some of the titles don't accurately describe all the information that's going to be in those podcasts. So if you missed one, go back and check it out because I think that there's going to be some little things that you might pick up here and there or having listened to some more podcasts, maybe jump back to some of those ones and answer a few of those questions for you.

So that's all I have for you this week. Until next week, let's say keep your eyes to the skies. Hey, we're going to take a little break here and talk about interstate batteries. Now, if you're like me, enjoying the great outdoors, you need gear that is as reliable as it gets. That's why I power my adventures with interstate batteries. I use interstate batteries in my boats. I use interstate batteries in my camper. Great for your truck, too. From Alaska to Montana, they're outrageously dependable.

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