Cody Williams
Well-known member
Yesterday afternoon a good friend and I went and hunted one of my favorite spots, which I call the Flats. It's a huge former river delta that, depending on the snowpack from the winter before, can be either a dry playa or thousands of acres of flooded marsh and grassland. When the water conditions are right it will attract thousands and thousands of ducks and can be a magical place that is both hard to access and requires some specialized equipment to hunt effectively. It never gets more than knee deep at the most, and the majority of it is ankle-calf deep, and there is minimal cover to hide in so we usually hunt from coffin blinds that we cover with a grass mat. Airboats are really the only motorized craft that can effectively travel out there, it's mostly too shallow even for mud motors so we usually hunt it by our coffins as sleds and by walking to where we want to go.
Yesterday we had about a mile walk in to where we had glassed up some big rafts of birds-
We found some small grass islands to hide in and set up our spread. We will typically use about 2 dozen floater decoys and anywhere from 3-5 dozen homemade flat black plastic silhouette decoys, they are a great lightweight way to fill in your spread and attract ducks from a long way off! The grass line in the background had a group of roughly 2,000 pintails in it when we were walking out, they spooked as we were getting set up and it sounded like a rolling thunderclap of wings coming out of there mixed with some pintail whistles.
The ducks that use this area are almost exclusively pintails, teal, and mallards, my dog Cedar got some great retrieves in and she loves to pick up teal! I think she loves this kind of retrieving most of all because it's shallow enough that she can run and run without getting bogged down by swimming.
We finished the day with some mallards, they were being their typical wary selves and circling and circling only to land about 100 yards outside the decoys, but a few strayed into shotgun range. The long walk out and back was worth it! It has been unseasonably warm here so far this winter, typically this spot is frozen solid by now but this year it's almost like it's October again. I'm happy to be able to take advantage of the weather, this spot changes so much year to year that any time I get to hunt it I'm most thankful!
Yesterday we had about a mile walk in to where we had glassed up some big rafts of birds-
We found some small grass islands to hide in and set up our spread. We will typically use about 2 dozen floater decoys and anywhere from 3-5 dozen homemade flat black plastic silhouette decoys, they are a great lightweight way to fill in your spread and attract ducks from a long way off! The grass line in the background had a group of roughly 2,000 pintails in it when we were walking out, they spooked as we were getting set up and it sounded like a rolling thunderclap of wings coming out of there mixed with some pintail whistles.
The ducks that use this area are almost exclusively pintails, teal, and mallards, my dog Cedar got some great retrieves in and she loves to pick up teal! I think she loves this kind of retrieving most of all because it's shallow enough that she can run and run without getting bogged down by swimming.
We finished the day with some mallards, they were being their typical wary selves and circling and circling only to land about 100 yards outside the decoys, but a few strayed into shotgun range. The long walk out and back was worth it! It has been unseasonably warm here so far this winter, typically this spot is frozen solid by now but this year it's almost like it's October again. I'm happy to be able to take advantage of the weather, this spot changes so much year to year that any time I get to hunt it I'm most thankful!
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