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John's Journal... Entry 227, Day 5 THE BEST HUNTING-LEASE DUCK HUNTING Hunt Pothole Quacks Successfully Editor's Note: My family always belonged to a hunting club. The lease included 8,000 acres of excellent deer and turkey habitat and a rich river-bottom swamp with enough squirrels to keep our squirrel dog's tongue hanging out all day. During my senior year of high school, as my dad and I hunted squirrels in a swamp, a huge flight of mallards and wood ducks flew over. We went to the nearby town of Livingston, Alabama, to buy our duck-hunting stamps, and I realized that the University of West Alabama there only was 15 minutes from our hunting lease. I made up my mind that I'd attend the University of West Alabama to study something. While in college, I duck hunted at least two or three mornings a week before class and learned some productive tactics for taking hunting-club quacks. If not for my family's hunting-club lease and that flight of ducks that came in as we hunted squirrels, I might not have attended college. But, I knew if I could stay in school for four years and graduate, I'd have four years of the greatest duck, deer and turkey hunting of any young man in the country. You easily can overhunt a beaver pond, a flooded-timber area and/or a river or a creek on your hunting lease. Don't plan to hunt any one region more than once a week. The more pressure you put on the ducks, the less likely that they'll stay on your lease. However, you can hunt your ducks more often than once a week if when you watch the weather channel, you see a major cold front about to move into your area. That cold front will push your ducks off your lease and possibly bring in some new ducks. Before the cold front arrives, you may want to harvest some of the ducks already on your lease, and then hunt the new ducks brought in by the cold front as well. Also,
to take more hunting-club webfoots, use compact, light-weight decoys when
and where you can. Decoys always help any type of duck hunting, although
you can have success without them. Since you can wad up decoys, like Carry
Lite's decoys, easily and stuff them into the back of a hunting coat,
you easily can take a few decoys with you when you hunt pothole hunting-lease
quacks. I believe decoys can play a critical role in pulling in ducks
for you. Do use your duck calls. If you've done an effective job of scouting,
then the ducks will show up where you expect them. However, if you're
hunting in places where you've hunted before, decoys and duck calls can
make a major difference in your ability to pull ducks down. I love to
deer and turkey hunt. However, when the bucks stop moving and the ducks
start flying, I make the transformation from a hard-core deer hunter to
a wet duck hunter. That's why I believe to receive the maximum benefit
from your hunting lease, you must consider its duck-hunting potential.
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Check back each day this week for more about THE BEST HUNTING-LEASE DUCK HUNTING... Day 1 - Hunting America's
Most-Dependable Duck
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