From the November/December 2008 Woman’s Place column of Sporting Classics Magazine.
Augusts full moon – the “dog days” moon relating to the rising of the Dog star Sirius – has a chorus of coyotes baying at the fringes of mv suburban neighborhood. My aging Shetland sheepdog, Tobiana, sits at my feet in the brightening moonglow, her near-deaf ears pricking up and her eyes going all distantly soft-focused.
I can see the wheels turning in her head: I almost know what that means, her eyes seems to say. I remember it from some long-ago place and time, when dogs were wild and I, too, knew what it meant to hunt and to know the seasons of the earth. She just can’t quite reach that primal memory embedded deep in her domesticated brain, and so, exuding a sigh, she lies down with head on folded paws.
I know what that moon means to me, though: It’s time. Time to re-string decoys, re-clean my stored shotgun, time to check waders for leaks, check flashlights for batteries, time to plot the days of the duck season into my work calendar as cannily as would any debutante into her dance card.
For by the light of the dog-days moon and propelled by the season’s first norther, my eye picks up flocks of blue-winged teal dancing in southbound skeins across the moonlit sky – harbingers of the great waterfowl migration to ensue.
A decade ago I might have watched the same scene much as Toby listens to the coyotes’ nightsong this evening: I would have seen the specks in the sky, but not known exactly what they were. Something primal would stir in my bosom, deep in my reptilian brain, but I would not have been able to identify it.
Now, I can, for I am a duck hunter.
Curious, as women duck hunters are a minority within a minority: According to the 2006 USFWS Survey, only nine percent of the nation’s hunters are women (about 1.2 million) and of those, 75 percent prefer to hunt big game, 36 percent prefer small game and 16 percent of us prefer to hunt migratory birds.
According to the same study, another key difference between male and females is that hunting participation among college-educated men declines, whereas college-educated females are just as likely to hunt as women with lesser levels of formal education.
Interestingly, 47 percent of women named “for the meat” as their No. 1 reason for hunting.
That statistic is far more complex than meets the eye, as modem hunting – with gun, ammo, license, equipment and often a guide and/or access fee – doesn’t play real swell as the cheapest way of putting protein on the family table.
“I spent $1,500 on gun and gear my first season,” shrugs Holly Heyser, Northern California journalism professor and avid duck hunter who primarily hunts the fecund Sacramento Valley. “I shot three ducks, so I figure it cost me $500 per duck.”
Rather, it’s our embrace of our role in the food chain and the profound appreciation of the life given to sustain our own; the recognition that birds such as the mallards trading back and forth between Dakotas prairie pothole country and the Texas Panhandle, fattened on peanuts, or the Texas Coasts myriad duck-throngs, crops filled with waste rice and smartweed, enrich us with so much more than can a cellophane-wrapped package ol hormone- and antibiotic-laden factory-fanned grocery store fare.
While farmed chickens may live their entire short lives without their feet even touching grass or seeing a shaft of sunlight, a wild duck is distilled from a swirl of atoms comprising sunlight, water, air, chlorophyll, protein, moon phases, wildness and more that ends in one abrupt… well… unfortunate moment for the duck.
“Ducks only live in pretty places,” a fellow outdoor writer told me early on, about the time I was becoming head-over-heels smitten with duck hunting. Creatures of both air and water, they seek the holiest of outdoor sanctuaries; broad open country dotted with lakes such as the prairie potholes of North Dakota and the playa lakes of the Texas Panhandle; the flooded cypress timber of East Texas; the back bays and barrier islands of the Texas Coast where surfing bottlenose dolphins play wingmen to our airboat and sightings of whooping cranes – as well as throngs of ibis, egrets, herons, brown pelicans, spoonbills and shorebirds – are commonplace.
“It’s the looking for the tiny specks on the horizon that may turn into ducks; the calling, the identifying, the hoping, the concealment, the ridiculously involved complexity of it till,” agrees Heyser. “It changes the way I see everything. I nearly always can see the Sutter Buttes and sometimes, even downtown Sacramento while I’m out in the refuge. I think about the people in the city who have no idea what they’re missing, how much life is going on all around them … this magnificence.”
Heyser, who pens the blog NorCal Cazadora (www.norcalcazadora.com), was introduced to hunting by fellow scribe Hank Shaw – a.k.a. Boyfriend – in his passionate pursuit ol honest food. To sample Shaw’s writing and recipes, go to www.honest-food.net.
Duluth, Minnesota-based Debbie Waters, who grew up pursuing deer and grouse with her father, is also a recent convert to duck hunting. “Our family goes to our deer camp in the Upper Peninsula every fall,” says Waters, “and as I love venison, my purpose is to get a deer or two for the freezer.I discovered duck hunting to be quite different, more complicated, necessitating lots of gear and being able to call in birds. And you wouldn’t want to duck hunt up here without a dog, which adds so much to the enjoyment of the experience.”
Waters, who holds a B.S. in ecology and M.A. in education, is currently education director at Minnesota’s Hawk Ridge Nature Reserve. Her work in rehabbing raptors has led her to shooting non-toxic shot only. ‘There’s nothing like having a bald eagle – the symbol of our nation’s freedom — die in your lap from lead poisoning to show you what damage lead wreaks on wild birds,” says Waters.
“I hunt to experience what it’s like to be a part of the woods and not just an observer,” she continues. “I know it sounds cliche, but it’s the stillness and beauty of the duck marsh that draws me. Dawn is a spectacular time to be outdoors in a quiet place and this experience is inherent in duck hunting.
“I love trying to predict where the ducks are going to be. I even love being wrong, because we learn better from our mistakes than from our successes. I love watching a silently quivering duck dog scanning the skies for ducks, then seeing the ears prick and the eyes intensify when a flock is spotted. Pied-billed grebes will swim by and greet each decoy. White-tailed deer will come to the water’s edge for a drink.
Snow will silently accumulate on the marsh grass tucked into the blind.”
“It feels like a gift every time I go out,” says Heyser. “The act of hunting completes you; until you do it, you don’t realize that part of you is missing.”
I could not agree more.
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