My college roommate invited me to Winnsboro to hunt for the weekend. We spent Friday night at his cabin before the hunt. The cabin is literally a log cabin on a hill overlooking Lake Monticello with a walk-around deck and an outside fireplace. We had eight people in the hunting party, and we enjoyed cooking on the grill and catching up with each other.
We left the cabin at 5:30 Saturday morning and made our way to the duck hunting spot. The place we hunted is a series of man-made ponds surrounded by pine trees between the Broad River and Lake Monticello. The ducks fly along the Broad River and often dip into Lake Monticello for a swim in the open water. The pond we hunted is a great hunting spot because the ducks can gather away from the river without being exposed to the wind and the choppy water on Lake Monticello.
The lake is surrounded with duck blinds, each being just large enough for two people to share, and I shared a blind with a friend and his dog, Bay. Bay is an energetic yellow Labrador Retriever. As the sun rose and the ducks flew in to land, she was overwhelmed with excitement and began to whimper.
Most of the ducks were mallards and the two of us shot three of them from our blind. I missed some of my first shots because the mallard is so much larger than a wood duck, and I misjudged the distance.
The most exciting part of the morning was when three ducks came over the trees and cupped their wings to land. Two of them were shot down but the third turned and beat its wings out of fright, speeding past our blind just above the water. My partner and I both led the duck (aiming ahead of the target to compensate for the target’s speed), but our shots splashed in the water behind it. This duck was a red head which is a rare and prized duck and uncommon to see in South Carolina. The two other redheads that were shot were hens. The head of a hen is a brown color which helps her to blend in while nesting.
When the ducks had finished flying, we put Bay to the test. We were excited to see how she would handle retrieving a duck. I threw a pinecone at the duck so she could swim to the splash. She swam towards the duck and chose to retrieve the pinecone.
We tried a second time with a rock. The rock sank, and Bay’s only option was to retrieve the duck. Bay, being only 9 months old, was still fairly small so she held the ducks by the neck or feet when she retrieved them. She was reluctant to grab the first duck but became more comfortable as she retrieved a few more ducks.
Our group had shot 19 ducks over the course of the morning with a mixed bag of 11 mallards, five blue bills, two red heads and one wood duck.
We brought the ducks back to the cabin to clean them and to divide the meat. Blue bills and red heads are diving ducks and have a diet primarily of fish, which gives the duck poor flavor. The best way to cure the fishy taste is to let the meat soak in salty water for a few hours. I would not say that cooking and eating duck is as much fun as hunting them, but cooking what you bag is the best way to fully complete the hunt.