WATERFOWLER'S HEAVEN WITH JOHN E. PHILLIPS
Exciting Hunts At Dog ‘N Duck
Editor’s Note: Ducks and geese rained from the
sky like a giant black cloud. Although making an exact
count was difficult, the cloud appeared to have 300
to 400 ducks in it, a flight of 20 speckle-bellied (white-fronted)
geese and about 50 Canada geese. I waited in my Ameristep
bale blind for Bob (Rip) Clark of Edmonton in Alberta,
Canada, to call the shot. When I finally heard him say
the words I’d been waiting for, “Take ‘em,”
the Canada geese had dropped down through the swarm
of ducks and were right in front of my layout blind.
The Quickest Limit Of Ducks At Dog ‘N Duck:
According to Rip Clark, “My guide, Mark Thirlwell,
holds the record for the quickest four-man limit of
ducks ever taken. His four hunters took their limit
of 8 ducks in 20 minutes. All the ducks were mallards.
The ducks had come from a small pond out in the middle
of the field after they had been to an adjacent pea
field. All the ducks were coming to a little dug-out
drainage ditch, about 20-yards wide and 100-yards long.
I had put the hunters out that morning, got into the
truck and started heading down the road to go back to
camp when my cell phone rang. When I heard Mark’s
voice, the first thing I thought was other hunters might
have come into their field, someone had gotten hurt
or there was some kind of problem with the hunt, because
no guide would
call me during the time he should be working ducks and
geese. When I asked, ‘What’s the matter,
Mark,’ he simply replied, ‘We’re done.
Come and get us.’ So I turned the truck around
and went back to pick up Mark and his hunters. I couldn’t
believe that their hunt was over in 20 minutes.”
The Quickest Limit Of Geese At Dog ‘N Duck:
The quickest limit of geese on record at Dog ‘N
Duck is 45 minutes. This limit occurred the opening
weekend of the 2004 goose season. Thirty-two really-big
Canada geese were on the ground (four limits in 45 minutes).
“We had had quite a bit of rain the night before,
so we couldn’t take the trucks into the field,”
Clark reports. “We had to carry all our decoys,
blinds, shells, guns and other equipment about 600 yards
from where we’d parked the trucks. The trip in
was the easy part. After the hunt was over, we not only
had to carry out all the gear we carried in, but also
those 32 big honkers.”
The Funniest Hunts:
On this particular day, Clark and his clients were hunting
from layout blinds, commonly called “coffin blinds”
because these blinds looked like coffins since they
sat only a few inches off the ground. Brushed up with
the stubble from the field, they blended in so well
with the other field stubble that the waterfowl never
saw the hunter’s heads, which were the only part
of a sportsman’s body outside the blind. When
the birds came in, the hunter would throw the doors
of the blind  open
with his elbows and sit up to shoot. “The funniest
thing I’d ever seen was when one of my hunters
shot a giant Canada goose that was flying straight toward
him,” Clark remembers. “The goose was coming
so fast and at such an angle that when the hunter fired,
the goose started falling straight toward him. To dodge
the goose, he had to lay out over his legs, and the
goose fell in the coffin blind right behind him. If
that goose had hit the hunter, he would have given the
hunter a headache he would remember for a long time,
and/or possibly knocked the hunter out. The goose probably
weighed 10 pounds.”
Another funny hunt was when Clark and his dad had been
hunting all morning and failed to call in one duck or
one goose. Clark’s dad, Bob, had an outstanding
Labrador retriever that enjoyed hunting hard and making
many retrieves in a morning. But this particular morning,
the dog, as well as the hunters, was extremely disappointed
when no geese came in. “When we got out of our
blind to start picking up the decoys, the dog went over
to one of our mallard decoys that was sitting on the
ground and took a dump on that decoy, as if to say,
‘This is what I think of you and your ability
to call ducks for this hunt today.’ My dad and
I saw that dog go to the bathroom on that decoy, and
we nearly fell out laughing. What could we say? The
dog was right.”
Some people are just naturally unhappy. Regardless
of how good or how bad the waterfowl hunting is going,
these kinds of folks will always find something to gripe
about. Clark remembers  one
hunter named J.J. who just couldn’t seem to be
happy. “J.J. was complaining because he was missing
the birds,” Clark says. “He accused us of
calling the shot too early or too late on every flight
of birds that came in. He felt that the reason he was
shooting so poorly was because I didn’t know when
to call the shot. Finally I looked at him and said,
‘J.J., you’re right. I can tell that you’re
an experienced-waterfowl hunter and that you probably
can call the shot better than I can. So, the next flight
of geese that comes in, we’ll all wait for you
to call the shot.’ Before long we had a huge flight
of Canadas working to our decoys. The geese came in
and all lit down on the ground right in front of our
blind. J.J. never called the shot. Finally the geese
got up, and the other geese that were in the air circling
and trying to come in flared. No one took a shot. I
asked J.J. ‘why didn’t you call the shot?’
He answered, ‘I didn’t see the geese.’
We all started to laugh because there was no way he
didn’t see the geese right in front of him. J.J.
found out that making the call to take the geese wasn’t
as easy as he thought it was.”
To learn more about Dog ‘N Duck, call (780) 913-1337
or (780) 416-3825, e-mail clarkrd@shaw.ca,
or visit www.dognduck.ca.
TOMORROW: WHEN TO MAKE THE CALL AND AGGRAVATING THE
GUIDE
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