Beaver Pond Woodies

Bill Stroup of Valentine deploys our stool of wood duck decoys from his 12-foot boat on a beaver pond along the Niobrara River.

It might of have been one of those grand schemes that grew from reading too much old sporting literature or was hatched after a morning of poor duck shooting on the marsh. Perhaps it just festered up over time from regions of the brain dulled by strong drink. It was born of the knowledge that in October wood ducks can be found on backwater sloughs and rushy ponds across the state, and founded on the principal that wood ducks are toothsome on the table. And so Bill Stroup of Valentine and I found ourselves hunting wood ducks over decoys on the first weekend of October last year. It was a good hunt, and an education.

Bill and I came of duck hunting age when wood ducks were trophies, birds you shot to mount on the wall, not to eat, although I admit to having shot a few and roasted the breasts on a stick over a campfire along Looking Glass Creek when I was a kid. And there was the time in high school when I built a canvas canoe from a kit so my cousin and I could float down the Second Drainage Ditch, hunkering low, drifting right up to the beaver dam topped with a row of dozing drake woodies. It was a good plan, and probably would have worked had we not put the canoe in over a submerged log that popped through the bottom when we stepped in.

All that was ancient history, though. Bill and I knew about all there was to be known about ducks, decoys, wood duck whistles, duck boats and open choke shotguns. It would be a slam dunk. So in late-summer, as soon as the new decoys arrived at the sporting goods store, I bought half a dozen wood duck look-alikes. The drakes were nicely painted, although I have always thought a drake woody in full nuptial dress was akin to a pink, 1957 Cadillac with tail fins, chrome bullets on the grill, wide whitewalls and a coon tail on the radio antenna - a bit ostentatious.

Stroup pulls his duck boat over a low beaver dam separating two beaver ponds along the Niobrara River.

The hen decoys were worse than plain Jane, just a muddy gray with white eye rings and a few white dots on the breasts, so I repainted them. I thought they looked pretty darn snazzy, until I studied the real thing through a telephoto lens several weeks later. Bill and I theorized that the hen decoys would be the key to our success, as our intention was to only shoot drakes. Six wood duck decoys seemed like plenty as we would be hunting small beaver ponds, but at the last minute we tossed in half a dozen blue-winged teal and three each of shoveler and mallard decoys just for good measure.

I had shot wood ducks in the Rainwater Basin in Octobers past when they decoyed about like any other duck, almost as recklessly as teal. And I had heard of flocks of 300 woodies during autumn migration. But I had also read that in the heart of the wood duck's breeding range they mostly fly in the early morning and late evening, between roosting and feeding waters.

We took the early and late flying business to heart and arrived at our pond in the pitch of night when skunks and porcupines are still waddling down trail roads. A couple of days earlier we had made a makeshift blind of wild indigo bushes, willow branches and a squatty little cedar tree on a point jutting out into the pond. Beaver ponds are typically small in expanse, but their depths are uncharted waters, with deep holes where the old stream channels once coursed and submerged beaver runs lead to lodges. With chest waders and a walking stick, we deployed our fake ducks and remained dry.

Wood ducks find everything they require on vegetation-choked beaver ponds.

It was a lovely setting and a lovely morning to be afield. So lovely that legal shooting time found us standing at the edge of the pond, our shotguns still cased in the blind, when four drake wood ducks came careening down the creek through the arched branches of aged cottonwoods and wheeled over the decoys. It was, of course, too late to do anything but watch, and they were gone as quickly as they had come. As the weekend hunt played out, it became evident that squad of woodies was to be our only opportunity to shoot over decoys, and we had muffed it.

"A regular flight exists night and morning from roosting to feeding and from feeding to playgrounds," F. Henry Yorke wrote of the wood duck in the October 1904 issue of Field and Stream magazine. "Thus flight shooting is in order morning and evening; whereas 'jumping' is most successful through the middle of the day."

"Middle of the day" arrived at 9 a.m. for Bill and me. We had not seen another duck since the four drakes. Our plan of shooting woodies over decoys had not been forgotten, but was about to be modified. Bill drove me a half-mile upstream and dropped me off. I waited 15 minutes for him to return to the blind, then stalked along the creek. I was to push any ducks loafing on dead-water creek bends or above smaller beaver dams toward the decoys. Any I flushed within range were fair and legal game. Who was I to argue with F. Henry Yorke?

Forty-five minutes into the first morning hunt, Stroup fine-tunes the placement of a small stool of wood duck decoys.

I flushed a lone hen and shot her, then searched for a beaver dam where I could cross the creek to make the retrieve. Wood Duck Hunting Maxim No. 1 - Nine out of 10 wood ducks shot will fall on the other side of the creek. Corollary A - The creek will be deeper than your waders are high.

I reached Bill in an hour. He had seen four disinterested mallards and two green-winged teal that "slipped in under the radar," surprising him enough that one escaped unscathed. Bluewings would have been a better omen, as they are early migrants like wood ducks. We picked up decoys and drove to town to regroup.

The scarcity of wood ducks on the creek concerned us. Several times in recent years I guided duck hunting fly-tiers to drake wood ducks at will on the same creek and there seemed to be woodies around every bend, even into mid-October. Wood ducks, often called "summer ducks" because they nest in lower latitudes and migrate early in the autumn, are notoriously tender birds. The arrival of the first cold front out of the Dakotas is enough to send most woodies that summered in Nebraska south. Migration out of Nebraska typically begins in mid-September, although some woodies often linger into early November during mild autumns.

A cold front had swept across Nebraska and temperatures dropped dramatically from days above average to several days below average on the Tuesday before Bill and I hunted. The region's first killing frost came in the early hours of Wednesday. When we built the blind it was 36 degrees with a 40 mph northwest wind. The temperature again dropped into the upper 20s the next morning. Because of the birds' scarcity we began to worry the "summer ducks" had pushed south.

By midafternoon Bill and I had relocated our quest for decoying woodies to an even larger beaver pond along the Niobrara River. By Nebraska standards it was an impressive beaver-created wetland, about 200 yards long and varying in width up to 40 yards. Actually, it was a series of dams. The upper end of the complex was shallow and choked with aquatic vegetation, while the lower pond was deeper, with more open water. All the water was fringed with cattail and bulrush. The browning leaves of white waterlily blanketed all but the deepest open-water pools.

I had scouted the beaver pond two days earlier and sat in a patch of brush on a high bank to see what Bill and I might expect when we tossed out our decoys. At one point there were 10 to 15 wood ducks 25 yards in front of me. An exact count was difficult, as they slipped through the field of brown lily pads like phantoms, their plumy crests laid back and heads tucked close to their bodies. The hens were even more difficult to detect, their white eye ring the only thing giving them away.

It was encouraging to see so many the day after the hard frost, but discouraging to never see one fly. They had no reason to fly. Everything they required in life was right there. The concept of morning and evening flights between night roosts and feeding grounds I had read about seemed foreign to these ducks. There were slightly more drakes than hens, an expected ratio, and all were in full nuptial plumage. Wood ducks molt into their full breeding colors earlier than any other North American duck species, typically by late-August or early September. Waterfowl biologists relate the early molt of wood ducks to pair bonds being formed in the autumn rather than on winter grounds or during spring migration as with most duck species. The wood duck's early molt means hunters are not frustrated picking pinfeathery birds, even in early October.

A drake flushed out of range from bulrush along the north shore as Bill and I launched his 12-foot duck boat in the lower pool. We paddled to the northwest corner of the pool, pulled the boat over a beaver dam to enter the larger west pond, spread our decoys and hid the boat in a stand of nearby cattails. We wanted to shoot over open water if possible as we were without dogs. Bill's chocolate Lab, Lucy, had died during the summer and my wirehair was in Lincoln, probably sleeping in my recliner. We knew without dogs it would be difficult or impossible to find a wounded bird. And there was another reason for spreading decoys where we did. Just to our right the pool necked down before widening. Woodies swimming back and forth would have to pass close to the decoys and within shooting range. We had come to terms with reality, that any woodies coming to the decoys were as likely to be swimming as flying and we were prepared to flush birds if necessary.

By 3 p.m. we were set. A single hen circled the pond several times, rudely ignoring my sweetest imitation

Stroup uses a call to simulate the drake's drawn-out whistles--jeweep, jeweep, jeweep.

of a wood duck squeal. The sweetness of my calling was suspect, though, as I had not actually been able to hear any sound at a frequency as high as a wood duck's call since I was about 20 years old. Bill assured me it was a perfect imitation.

Talking in a blind or duck boat is generally not a detriment when hunting over decoys. But considering wood ducks were as apt to swim to our decoys as fly to them, I think Bill and I talked a bit too much that afternoon. Bill is one of five known card-carrying Democrats in Cherry County, eager to engage a transient Democrat in a rousing discussion of national politics. And while he may be in the minority in Cherry County, he is not a silent minority, and our political discussions were not conducted at a whisper.

I would not describe Bill as a flighty hunter, but he has a lot of nervous energy. Put dry land under or near his waders and he has an uncontrollable urge to move around. As the afternoon grew long, and after we had vanquished all political foes, Bill took off on a mission to push woodies from the west end of the pond in my direction. Fifteen minutes later he shot once. I could hear Bill thrashing through the water looking for the bird, in the course of which he put up a drake woody. The bird came low and I did not see it until it was about to splash down behind a point of rushes beyond the decoys. A hasty shot from my 20-gauge had no effect.

Bill arrived back at the boat just in time to praise my shooting skill, saying it was nearly the equal of my calling. He had shot a hen woody that fell in a dense stand of water lilies. We paddled to the west end of pond and in short order found it floating belly up among the lily pads.

We looked for explanations for our poor success in all the wrong places, pulling up the mallard, shoveler and teal decoys on our way back to our blind, leaving only the half-dozen wood duck floaters. An hour later, Bill saw two woodies land on the south edge of the pool west of us. Being short of sunlight, we slogged along as quietly as possible in thigh-deep water over a foot of marsh muck. We had marked their spot well, but no ducks flushed from the pond. Then a hen squirted out of a pool behind a six-foot-long beaver dam on a spring bubbling out from the foot of the canyon wall. I had the best shot and dropped it. At the shot a second hen flushed within easy range for me but I had my two wood duck limit for the day. By the time Bill had a clear shot the second hen was well away. We had planned to only shoot drakes, but had been forced to take advantage of our limited opportunities.

We slogged back to sit out the waning daylight over the decoys. Ten feet short of the boat I stepped in a beaver run and fell backwards. My chest waders were cinched at the waist and floated admirably. The rest of my body sank admirably. Wood Duck Hunting Maxim No. 2 - When hunting in a beaver pond, eventually you will find all the deep-water runs. Corollary A - If you are wearing hip boots the water will be up to your waist. Corollary B - If you are wearing chest waders it will be up to your shoulders.

We sat in the boat until nearly sundown without seeing another duck, then loaded our gear and retreated to Bill's kitchen to lick our wounds. Our grand plan to shoot drake wood ducks over decoys had failed. It could have worked, and the account could have been told in a paragraph if we had both been in the blind first thing in the morning the day before, if the four drake woodies had come to the decoys as it appeared they wanted, and if both Bill and I were shooting better than we usually do.

Humbled, but not defeated, Bill and I accepted the inevitable. Over a leisurely breakfast the following morning, by which time every wood duck in Cherry County had already fulfilled its daily quota of flight time, we decided to abandon decoys and embrace jump shooting. After all, it would not be in league with youthful bellying up on the bromey backside of farm pond dam to back-shoot mallards. No, stalking the snakey course of a brushy Sandhill creek would be more akin to hunting quail without a pointing dog. So by mid-morning we were on the same little creek where we had optimistically spread our decoys the morning before. No more lying patiently in wait, we were taking the hunt to the woodies. Wood Duck Hunting Maxim No. 3 - "A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week." - General George S. Patton, an ardent advocate of jump shooting.

Wood ducks are beautiful birds, also excellent on the table.

Just before noon Bill dropped me off where the creek began flowing intermittently. As more seeps fed into the creek it swelled to four or five yards wide, crystal-clear groundwater racing headlong to the Niobrara River, writhing like a long snake through its narrow but densely brushy valley. Bill drove a mile downstream and began his stalk.

A hundred yards downstream a drake and hen flushed in easy gun range, and I missed with both shots. In a perfect world of perfect shooting, a world where I seldom reside, I could have had my two-bird limit. The birds flew north and seemed to be looking to land. Perhaps I would have a chance to redeem myself.

Another hen flushed at 30 yards but my snap shot went wide just before she vanished behind a cedar tree. Wood ducks do not always explode straight up like most puddle ducks. Often they stay fairly low to the water and careen along a wooded stream before rising. They are woodland ducks, highly maneuverable, zigging and zagging through trees like a Cooper's hawk. Wood Duck Hunting Maxim No. 4 - A bushy cedar or willow tree will be between the hunter and the flushing wood duck 84.9 percent of the time. Corollary A - Rarely will there be a bushy cedar tree to obscure your stalk on a beaver pond littered with wood ducks.

Small beaver dams became more frequent. Behind each was a small pool of quiet water littered with floating duckweed, a favored wood duck food. Forty-five minutes into my stalk, as I stood watching two white-tailed deer bound away through the underbrush, a drake wood duck flushed 25 yards upstream from me. By the time I raised my shotgun it had darted behind a willow tree and vanished. A hundred yards beyond I flushed a hen, and dropped her cleanly with the second shot from my double-barrel after my first went awry. And, then, of course, the drake flushed. I was searching for a safe crossing in my hip boots to retrieve the hen when Bill showed up in his chest-high waders, retrieved my duck and told his story of good luck gone bad.

Bill had only walked 200 yards when he dropped a drake woody. He scoured a hundred yards of shoreline in both directions but could not find the bird. Then he flushed four drakes and doubled, knocking down two with one shot. One fell just above a beaver dam, apparently dead, the other at the head of the pond, wounded but dying. Bill retrieved the wounded bird first. By then the other had washed over the dam and Bill could never find it. We currycombed the area again. We both knew the real problem. It was not where we were hunting or our shooting, it was the lack of a dog.

While our hopes of shooting drake wood ducks over decoys had not panned out, it was a grand hunt. We learned something about the daily habits of wood ducks in early October on small streams with beaver ponds, and we will apply that knowledge to the next hunt. The key is probably hunting early, being ready at the stroke of legal shooting. With legal shooting ending at sundown, evening shooting is probably not as likely to be successful. An overcast day is said to extend wood duck flights both morning and evening.

Even if wood ducks cannot be induced to decoy, jump shooting them along wooded creeks is great sport. Hunters should expect fast shooting at close range as wood ducks use every bit of cover to their advantage. A short, fast-handling, open choke shotgun is best. Wood ducks are tender ducks, not protected by thick layers of down and fat. A relatively small shot size, such as a No. 4 steel, is adequate for jump shooting. Maximum number of pellets is more important than larger pellets. While wood ducks are easy to drop, they are difficult to find, so a good retrieving dog is an essential member of the hunting party.

Stroup and Farrar at the end of their first class in beaver pond wood duck hunting.

Like morel mushroom grounds or a crappie fishing hole, a good wood duck pond or creek should be jealously guarded, not just for selfish reasons but because in Nebraska these waters are likely to be nesting grounds and should not be overshot. Seed should be left to ensure woodies return to the same waters the following spring to nest. Hunts specifically for wood ducks on the same waters should be indulged in only once or twice a year. On larger waters frequented by migrating woodies, their population is stable enough they can take as much hunting pressure as legally allowed.

Wood ducks can be found during the early weeks of the hunting season on quiet waters across Nebraska, often on public hunting areas. Backwaters and sloughs on streams are likely haunts, as are beaver dams on creeks. Marshy ponds in the Rainwater Basin and the Sandhills have more wood ducks nesting every year and attract migrants.

Wood ducks will probably always be viewed as trophy ducks in Nebraska, worthy of mounting and hanging on the wall, but they are fine birds to hunt and eat as well. Convincing hunters that wood ducks are abundant enough they can be taken in accordance with daily bag limits is a bit like convincing deer hunters 30 years ago it was acceptable, even necessary, to shoot does. Just because a drake wood duck looks like waterfowl world's version of a pink, 1957 Cadillac doesn't mean they should only be admired from afar. Who knows, hunting them might get you started tying fishing flies.