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.