Late Duck Season Made Up for Poor Season Bill Cooper 2/2/13 Another duck season has come and gone. It will go down in the annals of my duck hunting memory as one of the worst and best duck seasons I have ever had in my forty years of duck hunting. Duck hunter hopes started high late last summer as reports poured in from teh Northern breeding grounds. Ducks numbers were the highest they had ever been since records were first kept in 1952. I, along with thousands of other duck hunters, was elated with teh notion of millions of ducks coming down teh flyways. I made my preparations early, so that I would be ultra-prepared when the duck season rolled around in November. I cleaned my shotgun again, bought a new choke for it, as well as a case of high dollar loads that were sure to blast ducks out of the sky. I tuned my bot motor, cleaned the boat from stem to stern, touched up the camo paint, and purchased new batteries. I also picked up 4 dozen new decoys, brightly colored canvasbacks and lifelike bluebills. Combined with the decoys I already had, I felt convinced I could fool any duck that came my way. Full of anticipation, I checked my decoy set one more time as I settled in for my first morning of duck hunting during the 2012 season. The decoys bobbed it the slight chop created by a northwest wind. My cell phone clock indicated that shooting hours would start in one hour. I star gazed to pass the early morning time. The North star shined brighter than ever. A falling star burned its way into the earth’s atmosphere, only to fade out almost as fast as it had entered. I fully expected to hear the whistling wings of thousands of ducks well before first light. It didn’t happen. Shooting hours came and went. No ducks. None. I always killed ducks at my spot. My heart sank along with my confidence in the reports of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Five trips later, I had harvested a grand total of two ducks. Normally I would have had a couple dozen ducks from five trips. The expected grand migration simply did not happen at my duck hunting spot. A few phone calls to other duck hunters and some browsing on the web gave me answers. The weather had been unseasonably warm and ducks were in a major holding pattern along the U.S. and Canada border. And when temperatures did drop enough to push ducks down the flyway, most ducks migrated through Missouri in a few major flight days. That is the days with bluebird skies and a nice tailwind. They didn’t stop for long and continued south, as if to make up for time lost loitering up North. Duck season came and went and I took a total of two ducks for the entire season, my worst total on record. Not to be outdone by ducks, I began researching other possibilities. The South zone of Missouri stayed open until January 20 for duck season. I hit the Web again and soon came up with a promising outfitter in southeast Missouri called IYF (In Your Face) Outfitters. That sounded like my kind of operation. I contacted owner Perry May. We quickly hit it off and set a date for me to arrive. The night I drove down, a snow storm put the damper on my hopes. I battled road conditions for the last 50 miles of the trip, trying to stay on the highway. The comforts of IYF Lodge were a wonderful sight. I spent the evening lamenting my duck hunting luck with May and other hunters at the lodge. “We will change your luck tomorrow,” May announced with a convincing grin. Smells of bacon and coffee wafted through the lodge early the next morning. Breakfast was ready. I panicked when I looked at my watch. It was 6:30 a.m. We should have been in blinds already. Not so, according to May. “A lot of water froze last night,” he stated. “Things will be different today. We will give it some time to warm up. We will leave here at 9 a.m. sharp.” I knew I was in for something different, but wasn’t sure I was going to like it. After a 45 minute drive to the hunting area, I had begun not to like the situation. We had wasted precious time. As we approached flooded rice fields, I could see ducks in every direction. I knew we should have been there earlier. May stopped the truck and broke a pair of binoculars. He studied intently while each hunter made their recommendations know about which way we should go. May insisted that we be patient. “I don’t want to make a hasty decision,” he quipped. “Let’s look a couple more spots.” An hour later May made an announcement. “We are going to the west pit blind. There is a pocket of open water in front of it and the birds will work it once we get our decoys out.” All four of us hunters could see dark clouds, that means thousands, of ducks going down in a flooded rice field 400 yards away. Why weren’t we going there? May delivered us and all our gear to the blind with a Ranger, slipping and sliding in the slim, black mud of the rice field. May hid the Ranger, threw out a couple dozen decoys and announced that every one should get ready. I had my doubts. May blew his duck call to the tune of: ‘ya’ll come over here’. In less than five minutes minutes, a flight of green head mallards locked their wings and pitched in, loosing altitude fast. “Shoot ‘em,” May shouted. Birds tumbled at the report of shotguns. “Boom,” May shouted. His black Lab bounded through the ice slush and retrieved teh first ducks of the day. “Did ya get all that on film, Bill ?”, May asked. “Yep, I did,” I replied. I had greed to film the entire first day of the hunt. I soon thought I had made a mistake as I watched flight after flight of pintails and mallards into the decoys. However, I made up for it over the next two most fabulous days of my duck hunting life waterfowling with IYF Outfitters of Southeast Missouri. Perry May is now booking for snow goose hunts. The birds have poured into the rice fields by the tens of thousands. Contact May at: perry@iyfoutfitters.com or call 573-421-0093.

Snow Goose Hunt of a Lifetime Bill Cooper 3/13 “I experienced a snow goose hunt of a lifetime,” Chad Everitt, of Lebanon, Ohio, began. “I have never seen as many snow geese as I saw in southeast Missouri recently.” Everitt and two of his Ohio hunting buddies, Chad Dwire and Jim Girtin, traveled 9 hours to hook up with Perry May, owner and operator of IYF Outfitters of Dexter. I joinerd teh goose hunting trio fro two days of their three day hunt. “We have to be where the geese want to be,” Perry May stated to us after our arrival to IYF Lodge on Friday evening. “ My operation is right in the middle on one of the major flight patterns of snow geese coming out of Arkansas coming into Missouri. They have moving by the thousands every day for the last two weeks.” May had been sending me phone videos almost every day for the week prior to my arrival. The numbers of white geese his videos showed were incredible. I, too, had never seen those numbers of snow geese in one area. To say our hunting party chomped at the bit to get started proved a serious understatement. The Conservation Order had come into effect and all of us shared visions of nonstop shooting and piles of snow geese. Fitful sleep haunted all of us, but smells of aromatic coffee stirred our olfactory lobes early the next morning and the caffeine settled frazzles nerves. May explained that we would be in no hurry. “Ours is really an early afternoon spot,” he confided. We will head to teh spot and make any necessary changes in the decoy set. During the process you will see thousands upon thousands of blues and snows headed out to feed. Enjoy the sight and rest assured they will return in about two hours.” We all had a difficult time comprehending what we were seeing as we stopped at the edge of a cut soybean field. Skein after skein of hungry birds winged north overhead. We lingered. “Load up,” May barked, after unloading his Ranger. “You will have plenty of time to scan the skies as we get our work done.” As soon as May pulled alongside his massive spread of decoys, perhaps a thousand, or more, he pointed in several directions and instructed us to pull the decoys in tighter. “The birds are in an aggressive feeding mode at right now and we want to imitate that scenario. With our motion decoys we will imitate birds feeding and leapfrogging to the front of the flock just the way birds naturally feed across a field. We all pitched in to create the desired effect with the decoy spread, while May issued instructions about fine tuning individual areas of the spread. He often reminded us that the less time we spent craning our necks skyward, the sooner we would complete the task at hand and could then climb into the well camoed layout blinds he had precisely positioned for each of us. We all chatted incessantly as we stashed our gear in our respective blinds. May had instilled within each of us a confidence that he knew what he was doing. However, we all wanted to see hard evidence. Birds milled in all directions as we placed final touches of soybean stalks on blinds to cover up any bare spots. Mays fanatical flare for detail spoke of his extensive experience at hunting snow geese. I lay in my layout blind and realized how fortunate I was to be in such a part of such a spectacular event. I have enjoyed many types of hunts in my six decades of life, but I had never witnessed anything quite that spectacular. We all voiced our hopes that thousands of snow geese would descend upon us. Tens of thousands birds flew over us. May turned on his e-callers as the North wind picked up. The wind breathed life into the thousand deke spread. The set looked very convincing to me. I could only wonder what the real McCoys thought. The answer to my thoughts came quickly. A pair of snows peeled from a large skein of high flyers and lost altitude quickly. Chad Dwire nailed the first single that banked and soared into the set. Congratulations echoed as Boom, Mays’ incredible one-year-old black Lab raced to the downed bird and retrieved it to hand. The tone for the day had been set. A lone blue goose swung low to the right and Jim Girton flipped it with the first shot from his new shotgun, a great way to baptize a new goose gun. Singles, pairs and occasional small groups teased us relentlessly as they banked, careened and turned to check out the spread. I secretly wondered if all the shooters gripped their shotguns as tightly as I gripped my video camera each time a goose came near our effective shooting range. The continual sight of such wild, beautiful creatures dropping hundreds of feet from bright, blue skies to investigate kept hearts pumping. Dwire dropped a blue that snuck in with one clean shot. A short lull in the action followed and May announced that we would make a change in the set again. “Thin ‘em out,” he instructed. “The aggressive feed is over. Move some the decoys out beyond teh current edges of the set. Create small family groups.” Mays call worked like a charm and the shooting action picked up again. The Ohio boys laughed and goaded one another as some geese dropped at the reports of their shotguns, while others escaped unscathed. They clearly enjoyed the snow goose hunt of their life as unbelievable numbers of snows and blues kept coming and coming and coming our direction. I kept hearing them mumble, “This is so unreal. Never seen anything close to these numbers of snows.” The three Ohio boys party and another of May’s groups, just three miles away, harvested over 80 blues and snows. And, they were well on their way to repeating the feat when I left them early the next afternoon. I scratched my head on the long drive home, pondering how to best tell the almost unbelievable story of what I had experienced. My best idea...call Perry May at 573-421-0093 or e-mail him at: perry@iyfoutfitters.com. He can paint a better picture of what to expect.