North Dakota Trip

Craig F

Craig F

Well-known member
After many years of invites I finally gave in this year and tagged along with a few other DHBP members on their annual early October trip to North Dakota. A completely new experience for me field hunting ducks, geese, and sandhill cranes where I don't need to worry about the tides, the sea conditions, my boat, etc. North Dakota is an entirely different world than what we are used to back in New Jersey. Open plains, friendly locals, and incredible amounts of birds.

With the area we hunted still rather dry and part of our trip having temperatures into the 80s it was tough some days to stay on birds, but we managed as best as we could. Over the course of the week we hunted we had a few world class hunts with limits of puddle ducks, specklebelly geese, and cranes. I wish we had huntable specks and cranes back east because I haven't had a better eating wild bird before. I am very jealous of you central and Mississippi flyway folks.

The trip also allowed me to get back into what I haven't been able to do at home in recent seasons: film our hunts and actually share them with the public. I still film most of my hunts for my own sake but in today's day and age it is just shooting yourself in the foot to post productive public land areas to other hunters via YouTube. That's a whole other discussion, but it warranted mentioning since I get so many inquiries looking for more NJ hunting content.

Between myself and one of the other friends on the trip we ended up with about 500 gb of video footage. So far I have edited our day one hunt into something passable. We had giant flocks of pintails (giant for us NJ folks) working us all afternoon but with the amount of juvies and hens we let most pass by.

I've almost completely converted my other gunning buddies over to 20 gauges. Three out of four of us shot them exclusively this trip and the fourth bought one when he got home.

Much more to come as I finish edits but figured some members here might enjoy following along.

 
Craig

Finally, a dry field video that isn't indiscriminate shooting into flocks the whole time. That first footage of the group bucking strong head wind right out in front was excellent. Looking forward to the next installment.

Did you guys get turned away when asking for permission? Did you see other groups of hunters? I'd love to get your thoughts on the hunter numbers in the area.

Eric
 
Eric Patterson said:
Craig

Finally, a dry field video that isn't indiscriminate shooting into flocks the whole time. That first footage of the group bucking strong head wind right out in front was excellent. Looking forward to the next installment.

Did you guys get turned away when asking for permission? Did you see other groups of hunters? I'd love to get your thoughts on the hunter numbers in the area.

Eric
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Thanks Eric. I don't watch a lot of other popular duck videos on youtube just because so much of it is large group flock shooting. Just not my thing. My friend that organizes the trip only does a maximum of four hunters to keep the chaos to a minimum. We were very conservative calling the shots and absolutely not allowed to shoot anything while the dog was working.

Being that this was my first year going out there I leaned a lot on the other three guys who have been doing it for years at this point. I was told this was the most electronically posted farms he has seen ever. Now when we had to try to get access we had decent success, but did get turned down on the best feeds we found later in the trip. We ran into one farmer scouting our first day who was quite friendly to us and gave us permission, but we noticed that the day after we saw him he had updated that field to posted on OnX.

We only started seeing other rigs around later in the week as it coincided with pheasant opening up that weekend. We did not have a lot of competition, but we were there shortly after the nonresident opener and the weather was still warm. On our drive to the airport going home around 2 AM every truck we passed heading west was pulling a decoy trailer.
 
outstanding film.
There were more pintails in that first flock than I've seen my whole ducking hunting career!
 
Eric Patterson said:
Craig

What is "electronically posted"?
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I've just learned this, but there are two ways of posting your land out there. Traditional posted signs and electronically posting via apps like OnX, it is posted through the state and will show up on the app that the land is posted. There are typically also traditional posted signs, but it helps when you are looking at an area on the app and see that it is a sea of red E-posted land. Again you can still gain access by asking, but ND allows hunting on any harvested land that isn't posted from what I understand. This is just another way farmers can easily post their property.

Electronic and Physical Posting Information | North Dakota Game and Fish

Electronic Posting | Physical Posting Landowners (or individuals authorized by the owner of land) may post land to prohibit hunting either physically, electronically or both.
gf.nd.gov gf.nd.gov

I learned a lot about field and private land hunting this trip. I'd only ever previously field hunted for snow geese with an outfitter and as a coastal NJ hunter all I've ever known is open access public land.
 
Thanks. Did you do the statewide license or the zone option? Looking at the regs it looks like the zone license saves you $50 but restricts where you can hunt.
 
Eric Patterson said:
Thanks. Did you do the statewide license or the zone option? Looking at the regs it looks like the zone license saves you $50 but restricts where you can hunt.
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Zone license, my friend that organizes the trip has a barn where he keeps his decoy trailer for the year so he doesn't have to tow it back and forth to NJ. We used that as a base camp of sorts and hunted from there. The zones are quite large, not like NJ where you can hunt all three zones in one day if you really wanted to.
 
Awesome experience Craig,
I just returned from Alberta it was insane. Captured some stunning footage with the crew and the hospitality couldn't not be beat up there. Some amazing people as well. We got into 400+ ducks & geese harvested with our 8-man crew. I think ND is in the cards for next year! Nice work
 
Great videos Craig. I go out every year it’s truly an experience for us east coast guys. We mix in some upland hunting as well, I don’t know if your crew is into that but you sure won’t be disappointed if you give it a shot.
 
Wyatt Russo said:
Great videos Craig. I go out every year it’s truly an experience for us east coast guys. We mix in some upland hunting as well, I don’t know if your crew is into that but you sure won’t be disappointed if you give it a shot.
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They definitely mix in some pheasant hunting when it is open. We were out there the week prior to the opener this year. I've never seen so many pheasant in my life!
 
Craig F said:
They definitely mix in some pheasant hunting when it is open. We were out there the week prior to the opener this year. I've never seen so many pheasant in my life!
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The partridge and Sharptail hunting is out of this world as well. We shot more partridge than anything they were everywhere!
 
Good morning, Craig~

Wonderful work ! Good for you and your friends!

As others have noted, your video has the suspense and dignity of hunting as I know and enjoy it. I do not watch duck hunting videos on line. The sport is too important to me. I much prefer to consult the memory banks in this old head.

I have never hunted out that way, but did "super gun" (for work - as part of a big study) for Hen Mallards in Saskatchewan - month of May in the mid-80s. The landscapes are very similar. Glad you had this experience!

All the best,

SJS
 
Good video Craig. You guys must have been in ND a week before us. That pea field video is almost a carbon copy of our field hunts this year. Only it looks like you had better wind. We had almost a windless week except for the day it was 45-70 mph. 1000s of pintails we couldn't shoot. Trying to pick out the ducks you could shoot. We hunted water a few days just to escape the fields ducks and to get some cans to grill. I was lucky enough to get a banded pintail though.
 
We got out there just before the one day of 40-50 mph winds, the day after that we had our best field duck hunt which should be the next video coming out.
 
Craig F said:
We got out there just before the one day of 40-50 mph winds, the day after that we had our best field duck hunt which should be the next video coming out.
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We were there at the same time then. We hunted the big blow with little to no scouting, but still killed some birds till things got to wild and we had to pack it in. The day after was a very good shoot for us as well. Looking forward to the next video.
 
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