Opening Day of Teal Season

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This post needs a sub-heading.  "Not Much Meat For the Gumbo" sounds like a good description.  It was opening day for teal season.  I logged onto the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries website and purchased a resident hunting license for $20, a resident waterfowl license for $12 and a Federal Duck Stamp for $25.  I printed them out and carefully folded them in my wallet in the event we're visited by a game warden bright and early Saturday morning.

I set my alarm for 5 AM.  I had talked to my buddy, Gary, and was to meet him at the farm at the air strip at 6 AM.  That would give us ample time to get situated in the blind prior to sunrise.  Gary and I carried our shotguns and five gallon buckets down to the duck blind.  We turn the five gallon buckets upside down and sit on them.  They also are helpful in carrying out the game we kill.  Gary had gone out a few days prior and set out the decoys.  The pond is in a cut in a rice field that we had stopped up to save rain water.  As the sun began peeking up in the east, you could see the decoys bobbing in the water.

It was partly cloudy, with a gentle breeze.  Actually, quite cool for this time of year at 70 degrees.  Mosquitoes buzzed around us in thick clouds.  I began slapping my neck.  Gary passed a can of Deep Woods Off to me.  We heard shotgun blasts from other blinds in the distance as the time of official sunrise passed.  My Dad was hunting with my nephew and his friends not far from us.  Neighboring farmers were scattered in blinds adjacent to us.  Mexican squealers, crooked beaked cranes and cattle egrets flew by.

The ducks were coming in slowly - one or two at a time.  Some would cup their wings and land amidst the decoys.  Bigger flocks flew higher overhead.  Some groups circled our pond and then changed their minds and flew away.  Gary and I took shots when we had them.  Some of our shots were true.  Some were hopeful at best and fired when the teal were well out of range.  I thought I saw a teal look back at us and wink.

Gary and I use the occasion to catch up.  He's a good friend and we don't get to spend the time that we ought to.  We talk about family and work and the things you normally talk about like life, health, and memories of times we shared when we were younger and worked together.  In retrospect, some of this talking likely scared some of the teal away, I'm sure.

About 8:15 AM the ducks stopped flying.  The sounds of shotgun blasts from other ponds stopped.  We walked out to the pond and retrieved our ducks.  Sadly, Gary killed one and I killed one.  We missed four or five.  Not a very successful hunt, if you gauge it by the weight of your game bag, but we enjoyed ourselves.  Dad, and the other three in his blind killed 10.  Here's Gary with our two birds.

And here's me with the teal.

Gary was going to bring his daughter out hunting Sunday morning, but I told him I'd meet him next Saturday.  I'm waiting on a report to see how many they got.  With only one bird, it didn't make sense to get out the crawfish boiling pot I use to scald them or the big plucker we use when we butcher chickens.  I just decided I'd scald them on the kitchen stove.  It might have been my imagination, but I thought I sensed displeasure from my wife in this decision.

Once the water got to 145 degrees, I began dunking the bird.  You can see why they are called blue-winged teal, can't you?  I plucked the teal in the kitchen, being ever so careful to put every single feather in the five gallon bucket that had served as my seat in the duck blind.

I had sharpened my knife while waiting on the water to boil.  I took the teal outside to gut.  I certainly didn't want to push my luck.  Tricia sat out with me while I cleaned the teal.  It didn't take long.  In no time I had the teal cleaned along with the gizzard, the liver and the heart.

Not much meat for the gumbo, but that was only day one.  I'll get more.  We can always "stretch the pot" with some sausage, too.  

Good Time in the Duck Blind

Every year at this time, my buddy Gary and I get together for some duck hunting at the farm in Oberlin.  Last weekend teal season opened.  Teal are a small migratory duck that fly a LONG way.  Several years ago I killed one that had been tagged in Canada.  I read somewhere that they winter in South America.  They certainly put in a lot of miles on their wings.

Gary and I meet at 6 am, right before sunrise and park on the side of the road.  We're both in camo and have our shotguns and plenty of shells.  The previous weekend, Gary had put the decoys out to attract the ducks.  We walk down the muddy road whispering to each other and then walk down a grassy levee and take a seat on turned over 5 gallon buckets.  We are hidden from the pond by tall grass.  Gary takes out a can of OFF and passes it to me.  It's a good thing he remembered because the mosquitoes are atrocious.  It is hot and humid.  We are concerned about all the rainfall we've had.  Despite getting a free flood on our pond, there is plenty of water everywhere for the ducks to land.

As the sun rises above the fog, the view across the pond takes shape.

The pond is actually the bottom cut of a rice field.  There is a gully immediately behind us, and we can hear the rush of water flowing out of the field through the drop pipe as the rainwater makes its way over the weir.  

We hear shooting in duck ponds around us and see lots of ducks flying.  Teal fly faster than most ducks.  Wood ducks fly in front of us in spitting distance, mocking us, seemingly knowing it is not wood duck season.  Pretty soon a teal flies by and we take it down.  Then two more fly in and we harvest those.  Only three on Saturday morning, though.  We always do a lot of visiting in the duck blind and miss a shot here and there when 'swarms' of teal fly past us.  Here is Gary with two of the teal that flew into a hail of steel shot.

Gary and his daughter went Sunday morning to see if they could add to the pot.  I texted him after 8 am and he told me they got four.  We'll try again Saturday morning.  It will be the last weekend of teal season.  

So you can tell why they call them blue-winged teal, can't you?

I always find it interesting when cleaning birds, to cut open the gizzard to see what they've been eating.  In this teal's gizzard, there was a little sand and a lot of rice with an assortment of small seeds.

This teal had lots of pin feathers and was time consuming to clean.  After gutting the teal, I froze them.

It's the beginning of a gumbo.  I hope to add to the pot next weekend!  Gary and I already have plans to meet.  Looking forward to it!

The Blue-Winged Teal's Final Flight To Louisiana

This past weekend was the closing weekend for teal season.  Teal are ducks that migrate south for the winter.  They enjoy dabbling in rice fields for seeds leftover from the harvest.  They are generally the first ducks south and the last ducks to leave in spring.  Teal season opens on September 15th and runs through September 30th.  There is a 6 bird daily bag limit.  We have to wait for "big duck" season until later.  The trouble with teal season is that it is still hot.  Mosquitoes are in abundance.  In fact, last weekend we didn't kill any ducks, but we got more than our legal limit of mosquitoes!

Here is a look at our pond with the decoys in the foreground.  We sit on the levee camouflaged by tall weeds 

We arrived at the pond at 6 am, before the sun rises.  We walked quietly out to the blind with our guns and a 5 gallon bucket to turn upside down and sit on.  We load our guns and while slapping mosquitoes, we quietly talk and wait patiently for the ducks to come swarming in.  You can hear them before you see them, their wings rapidly beating through the thick, humid air.  They fly fast and furious, ducking down, rising up, circling before they cup their wings and commit to landing among the decoys.  That's when we let 'em have it.

The flights usually slow down or stop around 7:45.  We trudged out and picked up the birds.  We ended up shooting eight, but one was wounded and crawled away, hiding himself in the tall grass.  I hate to lose a bird!  They were all Blue-winged teal.

Here is a photo of my hunting buddy, Gary.  Gary and I grew up together and have hunted together for as long as I can remember.  Gary has keen eyesight and can spot the birds flying in wayyyyyy before I can.  He told me to go ahead and take all 7 of the ducks home to clean.  I'm not gonna argue with that, but I agreed to give him all the ducks we killed the next morning.

Here I am with a handful of teal.  They aren't heavy.  Teal are small ducks.  The male weighs a pound and the female slightly less.

Now's time to pluck, gut and clean them, but first, something shiny caught my eye.  One of the birds has a band on his leg.  See it?

So what you do with a band is you get on the Internet and go to www.reportband.gov.  When you get to that sight they ask you many questions about your encounter with the bird.  They ask you to drag a 'push-pin' to the exact spot on a map where you killed the bird and the date of the encounter.  Finally, after submitting answers to many questions, they send you a certificate to let you know interesting information about the bird you harvested.

One of the things they said was, "Bird banding is important for studying the movement, survival and behavior of birds. About 60 million birds representing hundreds of species have been banded in North America since 1904. About 4 million bands have been recovered and reported."

Check out the certificate they sent me:

How cool is that!  So my teal hatched in 2015 and was banded on August 16, 2016 near Fairmount, Saskatchewan, Canada!!!  That little bird did some powerful migrating, right?  Since he was banded in 2016, this is likely his second trip down.  I did a search to see how far it is from Fairmount, Saskatchewan, Canada to Oberlin, Louisiana.  It is 2,033.7 miles.  How's that for some frequent flier miles?

I plucked and gutted all the birds and packed into a gallon-sized ziploc bag.  The cleaned birds weighed only 3.75 pounds.  It is exceedingly less expensive to just go the the store and buy some meat, but then you miss out on all the fun.
 

Tricia put them into the deep freeze and promised that she'd be making a gumbo with them soon.  The first cool front should be approaching in the next couple of weeks.  I cannot wait.  It was 95 degrees today.  When it gets cold, we call that "gumbo weather!"

It was a lot of fun going out and hunting with my buddy, Gary.  It was also very interesting to kill a banded duck and learn about the long trip that he flew.  Unfortunately for him, he won't be making the second leg of his journey back to Canada in the spring.