Saving the Best for Last

By Pro-Staffer Mike Bard
December 12, 2009

Well it's no secret that this season has been all but a bust for mallards in the Northeastern zone of NY. We initially had our typical local mallards and we had a couple very small influxes of mallards, but never the typical big push we annually see. Today was it for NY's Northeastern zone for this season and seeing we had finally got the weather needed to move birds, it was a day I didn't want to miss.

My buddy John and I initially set out to try a new spot where a couple days before I had seen a good number of mallards, however upon arriving to the launch, we saw nothing but ice. It wasn't just the launch iced in, but the entire area was covered with ice. This put a little damper on the morning, but we went to our Plan B. Of course we were a little late getting launched and when we arrived to the area I wanted to hunt, we were met by a very large ice shelf extending about 75 yards out from shore. Well we had come this far, so the ice shelf wasn't going to stop us and we used my boat and a lot of manual labor to break our way to shore and clear out a nice hole for the ducks.

Once the ice was cleared, we set a relatively small spread of about 18 decoys. We set mallards, blacks and widgeon tight against the ice shelf we left around our man-made hole and then 3 goldeneye decoys on the far edge of the hole. It was now about 9:30 am and as I was sitting down in our make shift shore blind – aka a fallen tree, a single drake mallard was already coming into our set. I loaded up quick and bang…our first bird was down.

As the morning wore on the skies became filled with migrating geese and ducks. Hundreds seemed to think our area looked like a good resting point and came down, creating a lot of opportunities for us on mallards. It's too bad geese were closed! By noon, we had our fill and packed things up heading home and bringing this season's NY Northeastern zone to an end.