Duck Hunting

Part of my Christmas vacation includes activities which cater to my caveman tendencies, the most prominent of which is my primal need to hunt for food.  Luckily, American society has provided grocery stores as the main source of food for people like me since my hunting abilities are "limited" at best.  Even so, this duck hunting trip is yet another in a series of outings this year which leads me to believe I'm getting better at this.  As with any duck hunting trip, this one began before dawn.  It continued as many duck hunting trips do, without any ducks.  We deployed our gear and sat in the mud from 6:45 to 8:45 with no action.  Luckily, Lenny and I find this lack of action quite amusing and use up the dead time with sarcastic remarks like "the birds will be here any minute" and "they really start flying after 9".  Amazingly enough, one single group of birds did come in at 9, but landed just out of shotgun range to our right in the back of the cove.  After watching them on the water for a half hour we decided to perform the "famed" stalk maneuver which has never worked before but was always referred to as an effective way of getting birds.  We decided to sneak through the water behind some grass to get closer to the birds and amazingly this worked.  Only problem was, they kept swimming further back in the cove looking for food and we were no closer to them than we were before.  After 45 minutes of this nonsense, I whispered to Lenny that this would never work and in fact has never worked before.  He cut his eyes at me and said that quitting was not an option.  We continued after the ducks in stealth mode and did in fact sneak up on them and took three out of the four birds!  This is my first ever successful stalk and I'm proud to say we didn't quit.  Behold natures bounty harvested by cunning, perseverance, and gunpowder!  Wood ducks are pretty up close and these were no different. 

Many thanks to my lovely wife for taking pictures of more dead animals than she would like.  Here is a pic of the noble hunters and their take for the day.