Todd Duncan Tennyson
Well-known member
Pepperoni pile. I like it and the dogs never turned it down as a treat.
You can, you cannot
- Thread starter don novicki
- Start date
I'm kind of surprised that all the talk is about how ducks taste. For me, how I eat them has nothing to do with why I duck hunt. I'll buy a chicken if I'm wanting to eat a bird. It's way easier to cook and WAY less expensive.
Duck hunting for me is all about dynamic decoying, the experience, the feel of the hunt, the variety of species I can shoot, what is most prevalent at any given time. About the only duck I'll give a pass to is a mallard, it's about all I shot the first 30 years of my life. It's about watching that barrows cruising by and turning himself inside out when he sees barrows decoys.
Every few years things change along the migration. When I first moved to Idaho over 30 years ago it was mallards and wigeons. I hadn't hardly shot a wigeon at that point and it was just something new and a duck that was a pretty dynamic flyer and fun to decoy. We are seeing thousands of bluebills now, ringers are common and a goodly number of redheads around, an occasional oldsquaw, even a euro wigeons once in awhile. So much variety.
Then it was common goldeneye for several years, they decoy great, a feast for the ears and very dynamic flyers. The whistling wings of the drakes coming up the river, then one breaks out of a group and takes a big turn and comes straight at you like a kamikaze, it's kill or be killed, combat duck hunting. Or you get a crossing shot at a big drake bluebill with his feet nearly touching the water just inside the decoys going mach two and you stone him dead and he still skips three times across the water like a flat stone. Do you hear the whistling in your ears all the way back home in the truck after hearing 5000 goldeneye pass upriver. We were hunting divers one day a few years ago and saw a duck coming in from down stream we couldn't tell what it was, but noticed how slow it was, turns out it was a mallard. I find it hard to dial down the lead on mallards after shooting divers.
my perfect limit would be 7 drakes, 7 species, I care not what they are or how they taste, only that they decoyed well.
The last hunt my dad ever went on before he died at 84 years old. He was more or less a mallard hunter from Kansas. This was the first diver hunt he had ever been on here in Idaho. He was beyond excited about the hunt, a 4 man limit of divers, mostly goldeneye. If you are wondering, yes, we are very good at skinning divers and also, we call this a sausage hunt. Spice them up in breakfast sausage and you can't tell the difference from store bought. I'm not a puddler hunter, not a diver hunter, I'm a duck hunter, the better they decoy, the more I like it.
I've had several people over the years tell me that divers are just too easy to decoy, that's why they don't hunt them. That's like going fishing and hope the fish don't bite. I'm not hunting for food, I'm hunting for fun.
Duck hunting for me is all about dynamic decoying, the experience, the feel of the hunt, the variety of species I can shoot, what is most prevalent at any given time. About the only duck I'll give a pass to is a mallard, it's about all I shot the first 30 years of my life. It's about watching that barrows cruising by and turning himself inside out when he sees barrows decoys.
Every few years things change along the migration. When I first moved to Idaho over 30 years ago it was mallards and wigeons. I hadn't hardly shot a wigeon at that point and it was just something new and a duck that was a pretty dynamic flyer and fun to decoy. We are seeing thousands of bluebills now, ringers are common and a goodly number of redheads around, an occasional oldsquaw, even a euro wigeons once in awhile. So much variety.
Then it was common goldeneye for several years, they decoy great, a feast for the ears and very dynamic flyers. The whistling wings of the drakes coming up the river, then one breaks out of a group and takes a big turn and comes straight at you like a kamikaze, it's kill or be killed, combat duck hunting. Or you get a crossing shot at a big drake bluebill with his feet nearly touching the water just inside the decoys going mach two and you stone him dead and he still skips three times across the water like a flat stone. Do you hear the whistling in your ears all the way back home in the truck after hearing 5000 goldeneye pass upriver. We were hunting divers one day a few years ago and saw a duck coming in from down stream we couldn't tell what it was, but noticed how slow it was, turns out it was a mallard. I find it hard to dial down the lead on mallards after shooting divers.
my perfect limit would be 7 drakes, 7 species, I care not what they are or how they taste, only that they decoyed well.
The last hunt my dad ever went on before he died at 84 years old. He was more or less a mallard hunter from Kansas. This was the first diver hunt he had ever been on here in Idaho. He was beyond excited about the hunt, a 4 man limit of divers, mostly goldeneye. If you are wondering, yes, we are very good at skinning divers and also, we call this a sausage hunt. Spice them up in breakfast sausage and you can't tell the difference from store bought. I'm not a puddler hunter, not a diver hunter, I'm a duck hunter, the better they decoy, the more I like it.
I've had several people over the years tell me that divers are just too easy to decoy, that's why they don't hunt them. That's like going fishing and hope the fish don't bite. I'm not hunting for food, I'm hunting for fun.
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No one knows what the original poster's thought was. I threw roasting divers in as a joke. It could have just as easily been... can you call divers in? can you bait them with corn? can you kill them with a 28 gauge?
I will say that hunting for fun and hunting to eat go hand-in-hand for me.
Kevin Layne
Active member
All ducks taste the same when you grind them in to sausages or pepper sticks.
Neal Haarberg
Active member
In western Oregon mallards will taste different depending on where they have been feeding. You can shoot 7 mallards in the morning and some will have nice white fat (good), some orange colored fat (not good). Same goes for the divers. I will hang my birds for 3 or 4 days and it evens out the taste. Grant it, most of my ducks end up in the sausage pile, but I have found that hanging my ducks reguardless of the species greatly improves the table quality.