This is North Dakota
It's known as a duck hunter's paradise but anything can happen in this throwback state
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BISMARCK, N.D. — The noise rising out of the marsh was uncomfortable.
Most of the cacophony was pretty standard stuff for duck hunting: Snow geese yelping with the occasional mallard hen yakking away and a whole lot of peeps and whistles added by widgeons and specklebellies. It's a promising noise standing in the pitch black of a North Dakota night.
Overriding all of that, though, was the purring and gurgling of thousands of sandhill cranes. Think about the sound The Predator made every time he looked at Arnold Schwarzenegger, then multiply that by thousands.
It's not unsettling, but along with being exciting, it can eventually turn uncomfortable.
This is North Dakota.
John Devney stood on the edge of Lake X, a few miles outside Bismarck, and started coordinating. In front of him somewhere in the dark was a marshy point he knew was full of ducks and geese. Behind him were five hunters who could see nothing but black.
"A couple of you get in this canoe and a couple more in this boat and maybe someone could walk," Devney said, pointing into the darkness. "It's just right there."
Devney never checked up, his confidence goading everyone into action. A quarter ton of flesh crawled into one canoe, another into a small skiff, and the other walking into a pitch-black lake with no promise of anything but a bunch of noise.
Devney is the senior vice-president of Delta Waterfowl. He lives in Bismarck, and the lake he didn't want to name has been filling up with mallards and pintails since the season opened in September. It's a big lake by North Dakota duck hunting standards, measuring somewhere around 500 acres.
This time last year the lake was about two acres, and the boon of water that hit the Dakotas this late summer and fall has it flooded and brimming with marsh grass and waterfowl, the latter waiting for a cue to start their seasonal migration.
Like the waterfowl, the Duck Trek crew deemed this as good a place as there is to start. From here, we'll follow the same paths as the ducks.
The plan was simple. The newly flooded lake made for a hard enough bottom that walking was easy. We expected the lake to fill with all sorts of waterfowl by mid-morning, when mallards, teal and pintails had finished dry-feeding in nearby harvested wheat, corn and pea fields.
All we had to do was set out a couple dozen dekes, hide in the tall marsh grass, and wait.
"Typically this lake gets good about 9 a.m. and stays that way," Devney said. "They come in for water and to loaf the rest of the day until they go to roost."
By shooting hours (a strange feeling at 7:45 a.m. because it was still dark) we were set. Soon after, the sun, mostly blocked by clouds in the east, started painting the sky in orange, pink and purple. It was a duck hunter's sky, one that boded well for our group. It also revealed the vastness of the plains.
The pitch black was replaced by golden rolling hills and pastures with nary a tree in miles. I looked at Seamus (pronounced Shay-mus), Devney's black Labrador, and felt a little sorry for a dog without a tree.
He didn't seem to mind. There were other things happening.
The snow geese kept yelping behind us, and the sandhill cranes picked up the volume of their gurgling.
"I'm offering a hundred-dollar bill for the first hand who'll slip back there and run off that gaggle," James Overstreet quipped.
Their incessant noise, along with the snow geese, was a magnet to the few mallards and teal that greeted us early. Like most places, a party of noise just seems like a better option than our quiet, laid-back decoy spread. We waited, knowing full well that something was going to happen any moment.
This is, after all, North Dakota.
NoDak is the essence of hallowed ground for duck hunters. Biologists and conservation organizations like Ducks Unlimited and Delta Waterfowl call it the Duck Factory, and with good reason.
It's still one of those places that, for the most part, is untouched by man's hand. Much of it still looks like scenes straight out of "Dancing With Wolves." At any moment you expect to top a rise and be greeted by Kevin Costner chasing a huge herd of buffalo.
But even in this remote part of the country, man's hand is a big part of how the land can function.
If you're a duck hunter, everything in your world revolves around the holes of the Dakotas and those like it in Canada. We've heard it called the "pothole region" our entire lives. Seeing it and how it works is as humbling as it is educational.
They worked so perfectly in 2009 that, for first the time in recorded history, these little holes that average 1 or 2 acres each produced the lion's share of waterfowl for the continent. That's saying something. Canada sports two-thirds of the continent's potholes. The rest are mainly in the Dakotas.
Many of the small holes dotting the landscape are protected by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, but most are protected and producing ducks because of the Conservation Reserve Program. If you shoot ducks in the Central Flyway and parts of the Mississippi Flyway, you are a direct beneficiary of CRP, as it's best known.
Two weeks before the Duck Trek arrived, many of these little holes were chock-full of mallards, pintails, teal and gadwalls. When we arrived in Bismarck, we got something a little different. [NEXT PAGE]
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2009 DUCK TREK
Stops and Hunts
- Oklahoma: Frozen solid on Lake Eufaula
- Louisiana: At the bottom of the MS flyway
- Louisiana: Scoring a TD, feeling the force
- Mississippi: Learning lessons the live way
- Arkansas: The circus of contraptions
- Arkansas: In the historic Black Swamp
- Kansas: Big wreck at Cheyenne Bottoms
- Missouri: Good times at Black Dog Circus
- Missouri: The Trek gets back at the ducks
- Illinois: A wing, a prayer, an artist
- Iowa: One of those not so good days
- Minnesota: Marsh delivers pleasure, pain
- North Dakota: Hunting the wild, wild north
Features
- Products: What it takes to do the trek
- Reid blog: The stories behind the stories
- Mega Pit: You won't believe the size
- James Overstreet: Blogging the Duck Trek
- Flying with guns — do's and don'ts
Resources
