Think of the wood duck as the working man's duck, best hunted before nine and after five, in the first few minutes of daylight and in the last moments before the sun goes down.
He's an uplander's duck, too, twisting up through the branches with aerobatic skill when jumped off a beaver pond by a grouse hunter. Then again, the woodie is an angler's duck, a lover of small streams whose yellow "lemon" feathers are prized by flytiers as a source of wings for delicate mayfly imitations.
Last and certainly not least, the wood duck is a gourmet's duck, bigger than a teal yet every bit as delicious on the table when fattened on a diet of acorns.
Teetering on the verge of extinction in the early years of the 20th century, the wood duck is now thoroughly re-established throughout the eastern half of the U.S. and many parts of the West as well. For waterfowlers, the wood duck's recovery is especially good news in these times of declining puddle duck populations; while many hunters nowadays find a boat and six dozen decoys too great an investment for too little return, the wood duck can be hunted effectively with no more equipment than a shotgun and a pair of waders.
Wood ducks, as their name suggests, possess a most un-ducklike affinity for the woods. They nest in hollow trees and feed in large part on mast of all kinds--acorns, hickory nuts, beechnuts among others. Like ruffed grouse, wood ducks will even seek out wild grapes, and they are completely comfortable trundling around on dry land to find them. At the same time, woodies include duckweed, pondweed, and wild celery in their diets, and thus they often visit the same marshes and swamps frequented by dabbling ducks.
More often than not, wood ducks will roost in a secluded pond in the timber, leaving at dawn and traveling along creeks to find a place to feed. After feeding, they'll loaf on ponds or streams, feed again in the afternoon, then return to the roosts near dusk.
Successful wood duck hunting begins with scouting the duck's daily patterns. Watch for them at dusk as they head towards the timber. Typically wood ducks travel in ones and twos, or occasionally in small, low-flying flocks. At a distance, you can recognize a wood duck by the way it holds its head up in flight, and by the whistling sound it substitutes for quacking. If you spot a flock one night, note the time and wait a little farther along the route the next evening. Eventually they'll lead you to the roost.
Some wood ducks will simply find a secluded spot with a mast nearby and spend all of their time there. If you flush wood ducks off a creek or beaver pond near a good food source while bird hunting, bow hunting, or fishing, you may have found a good place to check when you want to try some jump shooting.
Jump shooting wood ducks is simple, being no more than the waterfowling equivalent of walking up grouse or pheasants without a dog. Stay low and approach the water quietly. If you bring a retriever, keep it at heel. Listen for the sound of ducks. Often, too, you'll see ripples on the water or even feathers floating downstream before you see the ducks themselves. When you've crept as close as you can, stand up to startle the ducks into flight, picking one out of the flock to shoot at. A final tip: when you flush wood ducks, the drakes will appear almost black from behind, the hens a sort of light olive drab.
My father's favorite wood-duck-jumping tactic was to float a river in a canoe, which is as pleasant a way to hunt ducks as you'll ever find. Jump shooting from a boat requires two hunters, one to sit in the bow and shoot while the other paddles. As you float downstream, remember that the ducks will likely be loafing on the inside of bends, since the current there is weak. Hug the inside bank, and come around the bend ready to shoot. If you're steering the boat, try to keep the ducks to your partner's left (if he's right handed) since it's very difficult for a sitting shooter to swing to his right.
You can combine wood duck jumping with squirrel hunting on these float trips as well, merely by looking up every once in a while.
I've thrown out a few wood duck blocks along with my mallard decoys for some years and I am often rewarded with a chance at a woodie venturing out to the marsh in search of duckweed. How well do wood ducks decoy? Often, they'll just swing close for a look at your blocks before going on their way. On the other hand, one day last fall a flock of 10 or 12 wood ducks spotted my decoys, and streaked in with wings set. I picked a bright drake and missed. The ducks then flared, circled once, and tried to land again, whereupon, having reloaded, I missed again. Fortunately they didn't come back a third time, as I was getting low on shells, but you get the idea.
If you want to rig for wood ducks especially, there are some wood duck decoys on the market. I use Carrylites, but the upscale duck hunter may not be able to resist a few of L.L. Bean's classy cork wood-duck decoys. Early in the season, when the young birds of the year haven't yet feathered out, you should use more hens than drakes, since many ducks of both sexes will appear olive drab. You can find wood duck calls in some catalogs, too, although a few hunters simply whistle at the ducks with reasonable success.
An alternative to decoying wood ducks is to set up early in the morning along the creeks they'll follow on their way from the roosts to their feeding grounds. The woodies will come at first light if they're coming at all, so after a few minutes of pass-shooting, you can pack up and still get to work on time.
The traditional way to hunt wood ducks is to shoot the roost ponds. There's no reason to arrive early at the roost; most of your shooting will occur in the last few minutes of legal light. Nor is there usually any need to build a blind, either. Instead you lean up against a tree and wait, checking your watch in the gathering darkness at the edge of a tree-lined pond or swamp. Five minutes before the end of legal shooting time the first of the wood ducks might arrive. With your mind on feathers for the fly-tying bench as well as dinner, you wait for drakes, looking for dark heads, white cheek patches, and burgundy breasts.
As the ducks appear over the tree tops and drop down toward the water, there's a flurry of shooting, and whether you kill a two-bird limit or not, suddenly it's quitting time. Now the show really begins as wood ducks pour into the roost in the safety of closed hours. You stay until full darkness, watching as the ducks keep coming, now no more than black blobs against the night sky. Holding your drake, or two, or maybe just a handful of empty hulls, you hear the sound of woodies splashing in for a landing and you feel profoundly grateful that there still are wood ducks in the world.
A quick, open-choked bird gun and a load of 6s has always been the wood duck hunter's arm of choice. Typically, shots are close, and wood ducks share the ruffed grouse's ability to put trees between themselves and danger with astonishing suddenness.
In these days of steel shot, however, we must make some adjustments to our thinking. Most experts agree that the best steel duck loads use two or even three sizes larger shot than were appropriate with lead. Switch to steel 4s or, even better, steel 3s, for wood ducks. As for chokes, pick one that will put at least 110 pellets of your chosen shot size into a 30-inch circle at the range you expect to do your shooting.
This spring, while sitting under an oak waiting for a gobbler who never showed, I passed the time pleasantly by watching a pair of wood ducks flit from tree to tree like giant songbirds, looking for a hollow trunk to nest in. That's not an unusual sight today, but in the early years of this century it appeared certain that the wood duck was doomed to follow the passenger pigeon down the road to extinction. The same overshooting and forest clearing that was wiping out the huge pigeon flocks threatened the timber-loving wood duck as well.
Seasons on wood ducks were closed beginning in 1918. Experiments conducted by the US Fish and Wildlife Service during the 1930s proved that nesting boxes designed to simulate the cavities in dead trees could help offset the loss of natural nest sites. By the late 30s, nesting box programs were underway in many parts of the wood duck's range.
Wood duck boxes are now a familiar sight almost anywhere you see trees near water, put there by sportsmen's groups, Boy Scout Troops, 4H clubs, and landowners. The wood duck has responded by recovering to become the most common breeding duck in the eastern United States.
Hunting seasons were re-opened in some parts of the wood duck's range in 1941, with a limit of one duck. Today, the limit is two, and the woodie ranks just behind the mallard in terms of numbers bagged in both the Atlantic and Mississippi Flyways.
Home | Library | Hunting | Wingshooting