It’s been a little while since I’ve had the chance to sit in a layout blind with thousands of orange feet in your face, we headed up to Winnipeg to experience just that. The plan was to head just north of the perimeter of Winnipeg, which is essentially the 494 of the Twin Cities. Cell phones lit up with pictures of countless greenheads heading into a wet wheat field. It was actually one of the last things on our mind as we were still hours out from Winnipeg, still needing to cross the border, and pick up licenses before Cabelas closed at 9pm. We lost cell service as we successfully crossed the border at Pembina-Emerson right on schedule, but we didn’t have much time to spare, it was 7:30pm and we had another hour of driving. Traffic became a little hairy but the neon Cabelas sign called us in. 3 licenses later we were golden, awaiting the morning to come.
One of our hosts for the morning, Meats, swung by our place and lead us out of town to the spot. A quick stop at Tim Horton’s, a few miles of windshield time, and we arrived at the field. We met Matt Cornell of Bruin Outfitters, and you could tell he was giddy for the morning shoot.
The wheat field with a flooded patch was the spot, and with a south wind, switching to east we were playing the odds by setting up for a changing east wind.
Minutes prior to shooting light droves of mallards swarmed our spread, flocks of thousands piled in on us. The group tore into flock after flock, but as the sun came up, the blinds began to stand out more and more and the wind still hadn’t changed.
We set up in a patch of standing wheat but the wind didn’t allow the birds to commit feet down into the landing zone. slowly we chipped away at the birds. It was simply astounding the number of ducks using this field, it was a non stop show of greenheads for the first 3 hours of daylight.
When the feathers finally settled and the sun grew higher in the sky, we ended the day with 50 mallards down in the field. A truly awesome Canadian duck shoot, one I will remember for years to come!
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What a hunt!
