Scrubbing up & tagging

the duck party's in a bit of disarray at the moment. Dad's had a knee replacement and is on crutches, Tim's moved with his family to Invercargill, Andy's just had a baby (congrats bro), Rick and Jase are in Fiordland chasing Wapiti. So that left the absolute shittiest job of the shooting year to Paul, Tom (hamstring injury!) and I. We decided to get a real early start to knock the job over, and met at the Huntly farm just after 7am. Working in the cool of the morning was great as we cut and bundled ti-tree for camouflaging the maimais. We'd decided that with such a small crew that rather than kill ourselves we'd go for 18 or so bundles - 3 per maimai. So by 9.15 we were loaded and on the road to the swamp. As we were preparing the boats, dad arrived with the license tags needed to mark the ponds. (Each year hunters must tag their hunting spots with a license tag, giving them the first right to hunt that spot on any given day during the season). We arrived at the hut and were met with a magic sound - hundreds and hundreds of mallards were calling their heads off. The simple reason is that with the drought (which to my mind hasn't truly broken despite some recent rain) the ducks are congregating where there's water. Because of the sheer local abundance of birds (our party and our neighbour's ponds are stream fed) we need to be very careful about how we manage our hunting. I have decided on a mallard drake only policy. Grey ducks, Shoveler and Mallard hens will be off my menu for the start of the season. I hope that other hunters are mindful of the affects of the drought.

We left the crippled Tom to clean the hut and began to ship bundles of ti-tree scrub out to the ponds. We pushed off hundreds of birds as we went. At times there were masses of birds wheeling overhead, calling and buzzing the ponds. By the time we reached our furthest pond, The Willow, many of the birds had settled in our neighbour's ponds. As we hit the nail for dad's pond tag, a sound like thunder boomed through the trees - the wing beats of masses of ducks! Holy cow, it was a sight to behold.

I got a clip of the boat ride out to The Willow pond.

We worked solidly through and by 3pm were back at the landing and ready to head for home. Scrubbing done for another year.