Exactly why there should be some wiggle room under those circumstances. Most COs will observe a hunting party prior interactions with them.
I was hunting a large point that extends out into Lake Michigan. My hunting partner had flown in from Anchorage to Escanaba to spend a couple of days with his aged god mother, force her to eat goldeneyes, and then fly on to the east coast for an anesthesia conference. We met at a Federal forest ramp site as the snow squalls started rolling in. I had arrived a few minutes early and picked-up "8 dead soldiers" some folks who didn't want to risk a DUI charge had tossed in a pile by one of the parking stops the previous night. As we unloaded, we reached the decision to not slide the canoe out, since the chop was already pretty high, so I grabbed the decoys and shifted them over to a couple of decoy ponchos that would enable us to carry them down the hiking trail that paralleled the shoreline until we found a spot that looked worthwhile to setup at. We found a big cedar snag with a small pocket of quite water within gun range and went to work with the loppers clearing a cubby and enhancing our hide as the storm continued to build. Within the first twenty minutes we were worked twice by a flock of blacks who eventually did what black ducks generally do, ignore our set and slide down the shoreline to land somewhere else. Joe killed a goldeneye hen out of one flock and we doubled-up on another drake and hen pair out of a flock of six. I hadn't had my right knee replaced yet, so the tight quarters of our hide began to wear on my pain threshold to the point where I knew I had to get moving. I finally told Joe I was going to drop back into the woods and see if I could get close to the blacks about 3/8s of a mile down the shoreline. After I left, about half-way to my destination, I heard Joe shoot three times, but couldn't see through the snow squalls what he shot at or how he did. The pocket of sheetwater the blacks landed in held some thin Phragmites sp. and some Sparganium sp. clusters which I thought would be where the blacks were holding so I pinpointed my sneek to this spot...NOPE! They jumped off the far end from some grass clusters. I knocked the closest bird down...with the last of three shots. Chased him into the surf and anchored him prior starting back. I returned to our decoys to find that Joe had taken a couple of wigeon out of a flock that worked the set. After I climbed back into our snag blind we had another five minutes of, "this is where I screwed up" conversations back-and-forth, prior noticing that two COs had just cleared the cedars behind us and were approaching our hide. After checking both our guns, shells and licenses, we were informed that they had been observing us for our entire hunt interval. Initially, I thought that this was a bit odd because of the weather, but then the light went on. They had seen the beer cans sitting in the nose of the canoe sticking out of my truck bed. I asked them if this was why we garnered so much of their interest and time? Yes! They left at the end of our conversation, complimenting me on the decoys and Joe's willingness to fly from Alaska to Michigan to duck hunt.
