MN Duck Hunting

We arrived at the cabin around 10:30 Friday night. This weekend Logan, Brady R. and I would be hunting. We set up on the West side of the Mecca Slough for Saturday mornings shoot. The morning started with party cloudy skies, temp around 40 degrees and no wind. The weather report was calling for a west/southwest wind later in the day and it arrived around 8:30 AM. Bill and Ryan B. also joined us for the morning shoot.

The morning start off with a Greenwing Teal streaking into the decoys. After putting him up I made an easy going away chip shot on him. That was followed with a flock of world famous spoonbills cupping up into our spread. I missed the action but Brady, Bill and Ryan added three of the trophies to our bag. The action remained steady all morning. Every 20-25 minutes we would get a group of birds that would work the decoys. We called it a morning at 10:15 and had 9 birds in the bag (4 redheads, 4 spoonbills and 1 greenwing teal) Below is a picture of Logan with Saturdays morning shoot.

Saturday afternoon found us hunting the puddle right behind the cabin. Earlier in the morning we could hear what sounded like a mess of mallards feeding in the little puddle. Saturday afternoon Brady, Logan and I walked the slough for pheasants and to check things out for ducks. While walking the slough we must have kicked close to 5 dozen large birds off of it. We quickly decided this would be our evening hunt location. Below is a picture from the slough which shows how close to the cabin we hunted.

Brady and I found a nice pocket to setup and placed Logan on top of a muskrat house in his thrown. We had a fairly strong SW wind at 15 mph and mostly clear skies. Shortly after getting into the slough I ran into a minor issue, the crotch of my waders tore and I had water up to my thighs. I decided to tough things out for the final 2 hours of the day. Right away I called in a small flock of Gadwall and made a nice shot on a big drake, dropping him 3 feet from Logan and I. That was followed up by another gadwall, a widgeon and another spoonbill. Brady finally connected right before quitting time by making a great shot on a merganser, "That will make for some good eating." By quitting time my legs and feet had gone mum for the cold water which made for an interesting walk in. As we walked back to the cabin we got buzzed by literally hundreds of ducks piling into puddle slough for their evening roost. It would have been fun to sit back and watch if I could have felt the lower 1/3 of my body. Below is a picture of Logo on his muskrat house and another of him with part of the evening shoot.


Only Brady was able to hunt Sunday morning as I was wader-less and Logan’s boots where soaking wet from the night before. Brady snuck into our new puddle behind the cabin and was greeted by hundreds of ducks leaving the slough right after shooting time. Brady made a nice triple on mallards to start the morning and lost a couple more birds in the reeds the rest of the morning. He should have pulled a quick limit out of the puddle but that is hunting. There is a chance we will make it out this coming weekend for our last duck hunt of the year. Below are a couple more photos from the weekend. The first one is the total from the weekend.