Drake:Hen ratio in your diver rig?

Steve Sanford

Steve Sanford

Well-known member
All~

I am repairing and re-painting a couple of Broadbill rigs - my own and a friend's. They are all Herter's Model 72 Broadbill/Bluebill, 80 or 90 stool all told.

Question: What ratio of drakes to hens do you hunt in your diver rigs?

I always paint up a higher ratio (60:40?) of drakes to hens because:

1) drakes show more white and so show up better, especially in the open bay
2) among the pochards (cans, redheads, scaups, ringnecks), disparate (drake-heavy) sex ratios are common in nature
3) I only use the divers late-season when adult drakes have migrated down - primarily on Long Island

BTW: I recognize that this question is probably academic, i.e., it probably doesn't matter at all if you rig where the birds want to be....

Your thoughts?

SJS
 
Steve,


I think you're "spot-on" on your comment about this subject being "academic". For we ALL know pretty decoys are more for the hunter than the bird. Every time I think decoy looks are important, I remember the times several of us limited on Black Ducks over silhouette "Y" boards, painted all black, no eyes, no bill color and not even all that ducky looking. Or the times shooting mallards over crappy looking Bluebill blocks. I could go on and on...


That being said however, I always try to match the hatch so to speak. In most of my observations out in the wild, I believe a 60/40 ratio is about right, and that's about what I strive for. But then again, every time I think of the white on the drakes as an attractant, I think about how almost ALL female ducks are some shade of basic brown.


Everyone has their opinions, but in my 38+ years of chasing our web footed friends, the only constant is-there ARE NO CONSTANTS.


Jon
 
Unlike you Steve most of my gunning is for divers.
I start with 80% hens and add drakes as the season progresses. By the end of the season I'm about 50/50 with a rig about the size of yours.
Don't know if it matters but I feel better? John
 
My bluebill rig is 1:1 and I liked it very much. My reason is that they are all oversized and I hunted calm waters and want the dark mass to draw from far away and compete with the large rafts of live birds. I always feared to much white and loosing that dark mass appeal when hens are reduceed. Bluebills where I hunt travel shipping lanes and we need to pull them in just a few hundred feet so if I can get them locked in on the dark mass far out they don't realize their deviation from the prescribed route. Bluebills up here are such creatures of habit that they can be impossible to hunt some years when they change rootsing areas, feeding areas or flight paths. With eiders I hunt 2:1 but I was not competing against large rafts of live birds and the white really seems to pull the eiders more so than any other duck I have hunted. Fortunatly with eiders are not as routine as the scaup and the bright white sucks them in.
 
when we had the extended broadbill season we had about 70/30 ratio [easier to paint drakes]. Looking across the bay you can see drakes easier from a distance. Used Can drakes too...
 
On cloudy days i think the hens stand out better than the lighter drakes. Having said that in another lifetime i always used to go where there were more girls than boys so my rig has more hens than drakes. By the way, i only target drakes, when i can see them. I have been known to make mistakes.
 
My redheads and cans area all drakes.
Bluebills, GEs & Buffies are 3:1.
I have no idea if it makes a difference!
 
My rig is somewhere around 3:1, drakes to hens. Steve Sanford pretty much perfectly summed-up my logic for sex preference in a diver spread.
 
I've been going to more hens than I use to.
When the birds are flying high above, the reflection off the water is usually light in tone there for dark stands out better. When low flying (our view) the water seems darker and the white stands out better. Plus if drakes are seeking a mate they my want to see a few hens to decoy to. (Not a biologist, just seems to make sense).
 
As discussed in some of my earlier threads, hunting goldeneyes and buffies in the late season in Maine seems different than what some of you serious diver hunters do.

For me, the GE's and buffies are a bonus, because I'm chasing black ducks. I'll toss out a few diver decoys if the blacks aren't flying, but I only get serious and set up for GE's on purpose after I've killed my black, and on days when the GE's are really flying--usually a few days before Christmas.


I started out with a cheap rig of a dozen all-plastic GE's, and they all drakes. I'm down to three from that rig (they take a beating from stray shot and I've lost a few to the tide, too), and I have 4 Beans cork GE's of various vintages that I've picked up at yard sales, also all drakes. I've never seen a Bean's hen GE. The plastics and corks are different sizes, so when I put out "the big spread" there will be 4 corks on one side of me and 3 plastics on the other. I've never seen anyone hunting a hen GE or buffie up here. (Of course, lots of people think I'm kind of weird for putting out any diver decoys, since they decoy pretty well to black ducks, and almost nobody hunts them here any more except as incidentals.)

I suppose the divers decoying to black duck decoys might argue in favor of "hens are attractive", but the truth is they pile right into mallard drakes, too.

I do think I do better on both buffies and GE's when I have a few white decoys out, but have never noticed that species matters. (My usual hunting buddy has a half dozen buffie drakes, and we use them interchangeably with my GE's.)

Steve, if you can make decoy optimization theory out of that, have at it. I'm all ears!
 
Not claiming to be a diver hunter at all but based on trying to be a sponge, reading the many discussions over the years and seeing a few guides rigs hear in New England I pretty much stuck with B&W rigs. I'll let the pictures speak for me:

I actually refer to these as my B&W rig and they get deployed on most of my saltwater late season hunts.
View attachment tableshot.jpg

Here's part of an open water set off shore:

View attachment longlinesared.jpg

Scott
 
Jeff, the two species of divers you target incidentally are the two species that decoy best to small pods of their kin placed seperate of the main spread here on the Great Lakes. I have never put out more than nine GE decoys in years. Same for bufflehads.
 
My diver rig is about 90% drakes. I don't know if it makes any difference but it sure makes the rig show up from a long ways away. Then again lots of guys around here run a rig of all black sillouhettes and spray painted black floaters for hunting out on the Great Salt Lake, where it's a pure numbers game. I'm sure that like most things in duck hunting what works one day might not work the next, that's part of the fun!
 
Jeff, the two species of divers you target incidentally are the two species that decoy best to small pods of their kin placed seperate of the main spread here on the Great Lakes. I have never put out more than nine GE decoys in years. Same for bufflehads.


That's certainly been my experience. But the Lake Champlain guys seem to set some big GE spreads, and Carl's buffie hunts appear to require a seating chart to keep all the decoys straight. LOL. Whatever works. I'm just glad the "handful of black ducks and a few black and whites" strategy generally works for me--it saves room in the boat for my fat ass and keeps my decoy costs down.
Click to expand...
 
My diver rig is about 90% drakes. I don't know if it makes any difference but it sure makes the rig show up from a long ways away. Then again lots of guys around here run a rig of all black sillouhettes and spray painted black floaters for hunting out on the Great Salt Lake, where it's a pure numbers game. I'm sure that like most things in duck hunting what works one day might not work the next, that's part of the fun!
Click to expand...

I would say mine has wound up being 70/30 drakes to hens. The hens show up better on cloudy days when the darker colors show better on water. On sunny days the drakes are more visible with sunlight on the white.


I will be turning some old junky dekes into hens this year.
 
Currently my diver rig is 100% drakes. Bluebills redheads, can,s goldeneyes and buffleheads. I typically only set out bluebills It works but many are due for repaint and I am thinking about 60% hens on the scaup. It may seem like a drastic change but where I am in the northwest it is rare to have a sunny day during the season, typically cloudy and rainy. The darker hens seem to be more visable to me in these conditions. Plus I like the theory that dudes are looking for chicks not other dudes. Even with all of this I believe the most important is just being where they want to be
 
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