Thanksgiving Day Hunt

                                                                                                      BY: YRC STAFF

  It’s tradition every year for us to go waterfowl hunting on Thanksgiving morning. It was looking like we were going to have an epic hunt in our bean field. So naturally, we had Murphy’s Law against us leading up to this hunt. 

  Monday: We go check out our bean field. As we arrive there were new ducks in the area and the goose population almost doubled. We pull up to our field and it had been tilled under. Our jaws dropped in disbelief. It was a nightmare, nothing but dirt left. If it was a corn field it wouldn’t have bothered us as much, but a tilled bean field is extremely tough to hunt in. We call the farmer, who leaves the field untilled for us, and we ask why he tilled it. He says he didn’t and made a quick phone call to a friend. He called back and said his friend was driving by in his tractor and figured he’d do him a favor. The farmer felt awful, being a longtime friend and knowing that our best field was done for the year. Frantically we looked for new fields or something around that area. We saw a cornfield in the lot next to our bean field. The field looked great. It was tilled with a large patch of untilled corn so we could hide there perfectly. We drove to the Farmer’s house right away to get permission. But there was a problem. There’s one dirt tractor trail getting into the field. But the farmer said we can only use that road if it’s not wet. He asked where in the field and we told him of the spot he left cut and not tilled. Of course the forecast was showing rain all day Tuesday. If we couldn’t get our trucks and trailer in there it would be a 1000ft walk to the spot, something we weren’t about to settle for. But we figured we’d wait to see what the weather did. 
  Tuesday: Of course it rained. Not only that, but the farmer went out and tilled up the spot we told him he missed and that we were going to hunt there. It was as if he didn’t want us to hunt his land. So we knew we couldn’t use the road because of the mud and our spot had been tilled up a second time. The forecast changed for Wednesday showed a possible 3” of snow. Now that we could work with! We could use our dirt bean field, now covered in snow, and set up like normal. The birds would only know that food would be there, and they would see our decoys easily.

  Wednesday: It snowed all day and looked like our luck was turning around. We had our minds set on our original field. We got the snow covers out and prepped the blinds. The winds were looking to be West @ 10MPH. The snow fell and stayed. We were ready to go hunting in the morning.

  Thanksgiving: We get up early, go out to our spot and put everything out. There was a little bit of fog in the air but nothing too thick just yet. The winds were great and the field was covered in a blanket of snow. We get set up and wait for the ducks to come out first. We kept waiting, and waiting. Where were all the birds we saw all week? They finally got up 2 hours late and they were hungry! With the help of a few mojos and some great calling with the Dub and Nitro duck calls, we got them to come right down into our spread. With a little bit better shooting and some more time we could’ve got the last 2 we needed for a 4-man duck limit. Since we could only hunt the morning because it was a holiday, we could’ve stayed all day and shot birds. One thing we couldn’t figure out was the geese. They didn’t want anything to do with us. No matter what we did, they didn’t want to even take a look. Then we noticed they were piling into a corn field about a half mile south of us and they all started to land there. They didn’t even bother looking at us after that. We tried moving decoys, changing the whole spread, taking the mojo’s down, nothing got them to look. At this point we were content with our duck numbers and called it a day. It was another great duck hunt for us on a traditional Thanksgiving.

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