Short-Stopping Ducks
A Weird Hunt
 Editor’s
Note: Missouri has become one of the top duck states
in the nation. Many waterfowl hunters wonder why so
many ducks stop in Missouri and Illinois and not come
further south. To learn the answer to this question,
we went to Missouri and hunted with Avery Pro Staff
Team member, Tony Vandemore of Kirksville, Missouri.
We also wanted to know how Vandemore takes a limit of
ducks almost every day of the season.
Question: Tony, what made the first day of our duck
hunt so unusual?
Vandemore: We’d spent most of the morning scouting
for ducks. To really take numbers of ducks, we had to
be where the ducks wanted to be. Scouting’s the
most-critical tool for a successful duck hunt. While
we were driving around, we saw a really-good flock of
ducks feeding in a field we had permission to hunt on
the edge of a hedgerow. Finding any type of waterfowl
feeding close to a hedgerow is unusual because a lot
of ground predators li ve
and hunt in the thick cover of the hedgerow. Also, ducks
know that hunters sit in hedgerows and shoot at them.
What made this hunt very unusual was the hedgerow was
on the upwind side of the ducks. Ducks basically had
to come in vertical through the trees in a 25-mile-an-hour
wind to reach the spot where they wanted to feed. We
noticed the ducks were landing within 5 yards of the
woods. As the ducks approached the field, they had to
drop in through the trees of the hedgerow to get on
the ground where they found the corn. Another ingredient
that made this hunt so unusual was as we drove our truck
and trailer toward the place where we saw the ducks,
the ducks would fly up off the ground when they’d
spot the truck and then drop right back down in the
same site and continue to feed. The ducks came off the
ground and then went right back down to the ground about
three times as we approached. Even when we parked our
truck and traile r
only 75 yards from where we planned to hunt, the ducks
were still dropping in to the edge of that cornfield.
That told me that the ducks wanted to feed in that area
really bad ahead of that cold front. There were 50 to
75 ducks there when we pulled into the field, and even
after we flushed the ducks, they began to come back
to feed. Also new ducks came in to that spot while we
were hunting.
Question: Why did the ducks pick that little place
in that cornfield to feed?
Vandemore: The spot we hunted was a high-traffic area.
A lot of ducks were moving ahead of the front, and even
though that spot was on the upwind side of the hedgerow,
the ducks could see that there was corn there and ducks
were feeding there. When we set out our decoys, all
the ducks traveling in the area could spot them. There
was also open water on the downwind side of the hedgerow.
If you look at the place where the ducks were coming
into the field, there was a small open gap in the tree
line that funneled the ducks, as if they were all flying
through the neck of a bottle. 
Question: How did you set out your decoys, and why
did you set out your spread the way you did?
Vandemore: I use Avery Greenhead full-body mallard decoys
because they’re motion decoys, and any time you’re
hunting ducks in a dry field, the more motion you can
have in your decoy spread, the more realistic your spread
looks, and the more ducks you’ll decoy into your
spread. Also, in the spread, we used black duck decoys
as well as mallard duck decoys. The black duck decoys
are much easier to see from the air. The black color
on the black duck decoys really causes those decoys
to stick out in a cornfield, causing ducks to see the
black duck decoys before they see the other mallard
decoys. Although we don’t see or harvest many
black ducks in Missouri, most other hunters don’t
use black duck decoys in their spread. The main reason
we set up black duck decoys is strictly to make our
spread more visible to ducks traveling in the area.
To learn more about Avery Outdoors’ waterfowling
products, go to www.averyoutdoors.com.
Tomorrow: Why Use the Train-Wreck-Type Decoy Spread
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