IN BLACK AND WHITE
courtesy of Ducks
Unlimited
Few areas of the country are as steeped in waterfowling lore as
northwestern Tennessee's Reelfoot Lake, where the legendary market
hunter Victor Glodo helped develop the modern duck call. An expert on
the subject is Russell Caldwell, one of the nation's foremost duck call
historians and collectors.
Caldwell hunts from a location known as Lost Pond, a large pocket of
open water surrounded by ancient cypress trees, where he has established
a permanent blind. Although the area was once a prime hunting spot for
canvasbacks and other divers, today Caldwell primarily bags mallards,
other dabbling ducks, and Canada geese that return to the big water to
rest after feeding in distant grainfields.
An enduring tradition among Reelfoot waterfowlers is the use of vast
decoy spreads. Caldwell is no exception, and, every year, he and his
hunting partners deploy more than 1,000 blocks around their blind. The
bulk of Caldwell's spread consists of headless, Styrofoam Canada goose
bodies.
"The quality of your decoys is not as important as their general shape
and how they ride on the water," Caldwell explains. "When ducks approach
a big spread, they can't tell if the decoys have heads or not. They
simply see a lot of bodies that appear to have their heads down in a
feeding or resting posture."
Caldwell paints roughly two-thirds of his decoys a flat black. He paints
the remainder with a white feather pattern-similar to that of a scaup.
"We use black paint on most of our decoys because that is the most
visible color to waterfowl from the air," he says. "If you fly in an
airplane over a large number of resting waterfowl, you will see that
they largely appear black. Adding white to some of the decoys further
increases the spread's visibility by providing color contrast and flash
while the decoys are bobbing on the waves."
After more than 30 years of experimenting with different decoy spread
configurations, Caldwell has devised a rig that he has found to be most
productive under a wide variety of conditions. "We place our decoys in
tight bunches of about 25 each, which are much more visible to waterfowl
from a distance than decoys scattered more widely apart," he says. "We
leave a hole about 20 yards wide in front of the blind to provide the
birds with a clear place to land, and we set several dozen super magnum
mallards and a few motion decoys on the edges of the landing zone as an
added enticement. For geese, we set a separate group of 100 hand-painted
Canada goose decoys in a horseshoe pattern off to one side of the main
decoy spread."
Even while using such a large spread, Caldwell stresses the importance
of loud, aggressive calling to bring waterfowl in close. "On Reelfoot,
we have to compete with a lot of other hunters, and many of them are
excellent callers. In such a competitive environment, your calling has
to be just as good as-if not better than-your decoy spread to have good
shooting."
Duck unlimited is the world's leader in wetland conservation. They
raised over $175,000,000 for wetlands preservation last year. For more
information visit their website:
www.ducks.org
|
