ND report

We had a decent week in NoDak. Hunted Oct. 21-25.

One great mallard hunt in the fog and a bunch of ok-decent ones…….mixed bags of mallards, gaddies, widgeon, and pintails. Found some nice sized roosts and feeds, but couldn’t get under any of them. Grrrr…..That was frustrating! Duck numbers were good but widely varied and we covered large portions of the state. Never saw another duck or goose spread the entire trip, and didn’t even hear any other shooting until the last day when we had moved into a more popular area.

The whole state was super wet. Roads sucked, fields were bad. We had to walk in most hunts. Pot holes were flooded well up into the cattails…..that meant standing in knee-waist deep water while hunting ponds.

Saw huntable numbers of snows as we were cutting across the state Saturday midday……but didn’t have time to stop and hunt them.

The swan was by far the coolest part of the trip. Haven’t eaten him yet. Not as much meat on them things as you’d think. Check the stories post in the General Discussion forum for the recap on that adventure!

sweet! nice job on the swan! did it come into the dekes? i just shot mine flying over top of me, would of been sweet to see one of them big birds cupped and comen in. we found everything tough to hunt too. no way you can hunt cattail ponds with a dog. cant let the poor dog sit in the 35-40 degree water the whole time. we had about 5000 mallars in this one pond. we used to hunt it about 6 7 years ago. it has been dry so it was pretty much grass with cattails for years. it was flooded this year, and we tried getting to it. there was no way i could even bust though the cattails. they were all knocked down and matted down from the wind, and the water was waist deep. tried for about an hour to bust a way though from every angle of the pond. very frustrating!

Came in cupped and committed. I mouth called him the whole way. Took a load of 3″ BBB black cloud at 15yds feet down over the dekes!