It started with an early morning wake-up, but getting my dog Ace awake, he knew what was going on, and his excitement helped get me in the mood. With the car mostly packed the night before, it wasn’t too long before Ace and I were heading into the cool late summer morning darkness to meet up with the old boys, including my Dad and friends who had come down from Auckland for a week of summer duck hunting with my Father-In-Law.
After waiting in a big box store car park for them to arrive I spotted them heading past and had to quickly get out and start following them to the farm we were going to hunt. A quick call was made to make sure I was following my father-in-law. It would have been embarrassing to end up at the wrong place.
It was a short trip to the farm, while opening gates I got told that we would be driving around looking for where the ducks were sitting. We got through a couple of paddocks to find a couple of dozen in one spot on some green feed, which I thought good. We kept driving around the farm and in a few more paddocks over there were about 100 paradise ducks. This is where we decided to set up.
Setting up our hides on the southern side of the paddock where an empty drain ran and with the slight south-easterly breeze creating the perfect spot. With our heads just about the ground level in front and an overgrown paddock behind us, we were well hidden. The decoys were put out just in front of us with the furthest out at about 20 metres as they like to land outside the spread.
The ducks started to trickle in as did the weather with drizzle turning to rain and then back into drizzle. The shooting was good, this was the first time picking up my gun after recently having eye surgery but it was good to look down the gun and see the targets properly. We had a couple of wounded ducks which I sent Ace after. He was properly excited and it took a few goes to get him to go past the dead ducks in front of us and hunt down the wounded birds but we got there. Over his hunting career, there haven’t been many times when we have left dead birds in the spread. By the end, he was working better and listening. This shows that we all need to spend more time with our dogs in the off-season.
While out picking up birds and bringing them in more turned up so I was crouched just outside the decoys with my head down. I heard some birds get shot and was about to move when I left the wind and a dead duck passed just behind my back. I am sure that my dad was aiming for me.
Highlight of the ducks I shot was a single bird coming in left to right just outside the decoys about a metre above the ground and just mounting the gun perfectly swinging through it and hitting it cleanly in the head, stopping it dead in its tracks.
The ducks entertained us as they arrived in small flocks of two to five, allowing us to pick off a few from each group. I had a fantastic morning with my Dad, enjoying our time together while hunting ducks, running the dog, and sharing plenty of banter. In total, we collected 50 paradise ducks and assisted a farmer by driving some away from his crops.
