WATERFOWLER'S HEAVEN WITH JOHN E. PHILLIPS
When To Make The Call And Aggravating The Guide
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.
When To Make The Call:
Sometimes there will be hundreds of ducks and geese
in the air. Knowing when to make the call to take the
shot is critical to the success of a waterfowl hunt.
Some guides will try to get all the birds that are in
the air within shooting range before they make the call.
 Other
guides will call for the shot when 6 to 12 birds out
of a huge flock are within gun range. I asked Clark
when he made the call for the hunters to take the shot.
“If there are 5 or 6 birds working into the decoy
spread, they have their wings cupped and their feet
stretching for the ground, and there are another 30
to 50 birds behind those 5 or 6 that are working toward
the decoys, I’ll go ahead and call the shot to
take that first 5 or 6,” Clark answers. “Even
if there are 30 to 50 geese coming in, four hunters
are only going to take 5 or 6 geese. If you don’t
take those first 5 or 6 geese, you run the risk of the
bigger flock with more eyes in the air seeing the hunters
or deciding something isn’t right in the spread.
My rule of thumb is ‘shoot the birds in the decoys,
and don’t worry about the birds that may come
in behind them.” Because each hunter at Dog ‘N
Duck could take 8 dark geese, 20 light geese and 8 ducks,
I asked Clark if ducks and geese generally were coming
in at the same time when he called the shot. “This
call depends on the hunters,” Clark says. “Some
hunters primarily want to take geese, and then worry
about taking ducks. But most of my hunters don’t
really care whether they take their limit of ducks or
of geese first. So unless the hunters want to take geese
first, I usually call the shot on the first birds that
come into the spread, which is usually  ducks.
However, if my hunters want to wait for the geese, I’ll
let the ducks land in the spread and not call the shot
until the geese are in the decoys."
How To Aggravate A Guide In The Blind:
When a guide and a hunter were in a blind together,
you often would be shoulder-to-shoulder, or in coffin
blinds (layout blinds), you might only be a few feet
apart. When I asked Clark what aggravated him about
his hunters, he answered, “When we’re hunting
from coffin blinds, I usually ask my hunters to wear
headnets. But even then, I’ll have some hunters
who want to sit up really high in the blind and constantly
be turning and looking for the ducks and geese to come
into the spread. When that hunter has his head moving
like a bobble-head doll, he flares the geese and ducks
I’ve been trying to call into the decoys, and
then he wonders why he’s not getting to shoot.
I try to call the shot so that all the hunters on the
hunt will have birds at which to shoot. I get really
irritated when I have a hunter in a bale blind, and
he jumps up and starts shooting before I call the shot.
He generally won’t get as good a shot as he will
have gotten if he’s waited for me to call the
shot, and he usually
causes the birds to flare so that the other hunters
either don’t get a shot or have to take a poor
shot. Some guys just can’t wait to take the shot.
“On another hunt where birds were really pouring
in, I could hear a gun rattling in the blind just before
I called the shot. Of course, that noise and movement
in the blind flared the ducks and geese. After three
different flights had been flared, I finally went over
to the hunter and asked, ‘What are you doing?’
‘My gun is jammed and I’m trying to fix
it,’ that hunter said. I fixed the man’s
gun and told him to sit absolutely still in his blind
until I had called the shot. By the end of the hunt,
the noisy hunter with the jammed gun limited out.”
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: WHY CLARK DOESN’T USE A DOG
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