Page 56 - South Mississippi Living - February, 2019

SPORTS & OUTDOORS like a duck to water
DUC HUNTING
ON THE MISSISSIPPI COAST
One of my earliest memories as a young boy was of my father’s hunting jacket with the strange pocket in the back. I later learned this was where he put the birds he harvested. But what I
admired most at the time was the huge 12-gauge shotgun he slid into its soft case as he prepared to go hunting. Not long before he passed away a few years ago, he gave me that shotgun which had not been fired in over 60 years. It was a J.C. Higgins that he bought at Sears.
Chris Barlow, one of our Find Your Outdoors charter team members, recently invited my daughter, Brittany, to film a duck hunt with him. We figured that Chris would be as good at putting us on the ducks as he was on the fish and made plans.
Since it would be her first duck hunt, Britt wanted to use my father’s trusty old shotgun. So, with the help of Wes Martin’s dad, somewhat of a firearms expert, the gun was given a thorough safety check and fired a few times.
While it depends on the weather, generally, by mid- December diving ducks, also known as sea ducks, begin to arrive on the Mississippi Coast on their annual migration. These divers, mostly redheads, can be hunted from shallow hard sand bars where they come to feed on the remaining roots, or tubers, of seagrass.
It was 4:30 on a dark, December morning with the temperature down in the 30s and a strong wind blowing when Brittany met the team and got underway. “Still trying to get fully awake, I was mainly hoping that I had put on enough layers of socks,” she said. Before first light, they were in position with over 100 decoys set in a V formation.
They watched daybreak break on overcast skies; good for spotting the large rafts of ducks working on the horizon. It wasn’t long before there was plenty of light to see a raft approach and lock on to the decoys. They approached but
then at the last moment flared and didn’t commit. But a couple continued to come into the decoys and Britt took her first shot. The Bufflehead drake was probably only slightly more surprised than Britt as it plummeted to the water. She had bagged her first duck.
This first encounter set the tone for the next two hours, with large rafts approaching but refusing to decoy. As the morning wore on, they saw fewer ducks but had more shots. By late morning, they recovered the decoys and elected to scout for the next day.
Britt awoke on day two to find the weather every bit
as cold. She and the team set up a little farther east and
it wasn’t long before divers began to appear, in smaller numbers but frequently. They spotted a large raft a mile away and watched as the ducks approached, circled twice, and then some 50 cut into the wind. They were cupping
story by Frank Wilem photos courtesy of Wesley Martin
56 SOUTH MISSISSIPPI Living • February 2019
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