Early Season Hunting
By Ryan Graves, Drake Field Expert

The first few weeks of duck season can be my most favorite time to hunt. I by no means consider myself a Mallard purist and the early season provides a variety of birds to hunt. Duck season doesn't come in around my area until Thanksgiving but the Central Illinois Season opened up the last weekend of October, so I headed up north for some early season action on the Illinois River. The Illinois River Valley stretches from Chicago and winds it way through the central part of the state before it dumps into the Mississippi just north of St. Louis. The entire Illinois River Valley is saturated in waterfowl history and provides lots of opportunity for hunters. A wise man once said "when there are no more ducks in this world, there will still be ducks in the Illinois River Valley".

Knowing there were very few mallards using the area, we dug up a mixed bag of decoys that consisted of wood ducks, wigeon and teal to try and separate our decoy spread from everybody else's in the area. After about an hour commute and a very greasy breakfast we were headed to the blind to enjoy the sunrise, some fellowship and to kill some ducks! No sooner after we threw the decoys out and got loaded up the wood ducks started to eat us up and in no time three of us had limits of wood ducks. The next couple of hours brought us a group of teal, pair of geese and enough singles for us to shoot and get our limit. Since we planned on hunting this hole for the next several days we wasted no time bagging the decoys and getting out so what birds were in the area could use our hole to rest.

After having several good days of shooting in Illinois I was headed home when I got a call from a good friend of mine Ryan Colbert to go do some shooting at his place in Southeast Missouri. Ryan has some rice fields that they only shoot a couple times a week in order to not burn the ducks out. The neat part about this hunt was that we would not be hunting out of pits or blinds but we would be hunting out of layout boats. They choose layout boats so they can be very mobile and go to the parts of the field that the ducks are using. So Saturday morning rolls around and Ryan and I take off through the field dragging our boats. The unfortunate part about this was it was about 60 degrees and walking 200 yards through a muddy field with waders on can sure get your heart rate up. One the walk out we were kicking up groups of ducks ranging from 10 to 50 so I knew we were going to have a good hunt. We finally get to the hole, throw out two bags of decoys and get ourselves situated before shooting time.

After getting loaded up we had about 10 minutes to wait before we could shoot, I used this time to get myself comfortable and situated in the boat since I was not use to it. The sky was full of birds and right at shooting time a bull sprig centered Ryan up and he killed it to start out the morning. For the next hour we took turns picking our shots and shooting singles and ended up the day with two drake pintails, two drake wigeon, 4 grey ducks and 4 spoonbills. It was a very fast hunt and we hurried up and got out so that we could let the field rest so that we could hunt it the following day if we desired.

With Thanksgiving getting close I want to wish everybody a happy holiday season and safe and successful hunting season. Till next time shoot straight and be safe!