Steel Meets Teal

Neilson  Thursday, September 23, 2010

Adventure Review

The oder of rotting vegetation rose up in the pre-dawn gloom to greet me like an old friend.  They say that smells invoke strong past memories, and the smell of swamp gas wafting up from the muck I was walking through dredged up some pretty powerful memories of duck hunts gone by.  I honestly can’t remember the last time that I had hunted the early teal season in Indiana.  It must have been sometime in the early ’80’s down at Camp Atterbury.  I grew up on the southside of Indianapolis and that was the closest public hunting areas.  My brother and I spent our teenage and young adult lives hunting and fishing that fish and wildlife area.  We joked about it becoming our real home and the house we lived in was just place to eat and change clothes.

Fast forward to 2010 and my brother Bob, Tom Crowe and myself were headed to the strip pits of Linton to try our hand at the early teal season in Indiana.  We missed the first 2 weeks due to family and work commitments but were ready for the next opportunity to try to outwit a 2 pound airborne speed-demon.  Blue wing teal are some of the most agile and graceful of the early migrators through the state.  And while Indiana is not exactly on a major migratory flight path, we do get our fair share of birds.

Bob had organized this outing and it was the perfect opportunity to introduce his dog to lots of shooting and hopefully lots of retrieving.  We had set the decoys out in the fog and in an unfamiliar area.  We basically were flying blind but had great faith in our ability to make the best of our situation.  Well before shooting hours, our set was buzzed by teal, wood ducks and the occasional mallard.  Geese lifted off somewhere behind us as shooting hours finally arrived.  The report of shotguns echoed around our spot as we scanned the air for the blue-winged buzzbombs.  Suddenly a single teal was streaking directly toward Tom.  We had only a few seconds before the bird was literally above our spread and Tom dropped the bird with one well placed shot.  Now it was time for Dwight the dog to earn his keep.  With just a little direction the dog made his first water retrieve.  A beautiful blue-wing teal was brought to hand and rewards were passed around, Tom got his bird and Dwight got his doggie snack.

A few minutes later, another single teal buzzed the right side of our spread and made a long looping swing to get the wind right.  Bob directed the action as I raised up to track the fast flight of the teal.  My first shot impacted the rocket bird and it began a hasty retreat out of the area.  A second volley sent the bird down the levy and dropping hard.  Bob asked me to take his dog out to make the retrieve.  Together Dwight and I moved quickly to the downed bird and away from Bob and Tom.  60 yards later, Dwight smelled the down teal and lept off the bank and nabbed the blue-wing from it’s resting spot.  A blind water retrieve and another bird in the hand.

Our hunt ended when I took a walk around the pond, surveying some new areas and trying to figure out the best way to hunt this pond.  I kicked up another single teal who made the mistake of cruising by our decoy spread and Bob took advantage of the day to drop his bird with a single well placed shot.  Once again Dwight was called into action for his 3rd retrieve of the day.  While our hopes were to take a limit of birds each, the reality of the day was that this was the most action we had.  Shots around the area attested to the fact that birds were in the neighborhood, but just not where we were located.  But we’ll be back again soon when steel meets steel!