Season is quickly approaching as fall is just around the corner. Just nothing like the sight of divers committing to the spread. Here’s a few pics to get the blood flowing.

Great pics, thanks for sharing.

Really nice photography there , kudos.

Nice pics can't wait

very nice,i'm the woodie whistlin down the river valley guy.

awesome pics

Love shooting woodies......hate cleaning woodies.

Beautiful pictures!!

Great pics and great way to capture the moment!

That first picture is enough to make a grown man jealous And I very seldom get jealous . Man I would love that kind of duck hunting . But than all ducks are beautfil Great pictues and good luck during the season Give us and update during the season

Have you ever tried a chicken plucker? I haven't just wondering how it would work.

Do you eat those things? Mallards, yes, but don't know about those.

during the market hunting days, cans were some of the highest priced of the ducks. beautiful photos.

Mallards are the McDonalds double cheeseburger of ducks. Good but overrated and a little grainy. Would rather eat a can or even a ringneck.

^^^^ wow, didn't know that. However, a good mallard is a lot better than a pheasant if cooked correctly. I lived on them in college. Put one in the oven, set the timer, and come home from class to a nice hot meal.

Great pictures

It’s really all about how it’s cooked, I’ve eaten duck that was awesome and done that’s impossible to take more then a single bite. I’ve eaten pheasant that was as good as anything I’ve ever eaten.
Typically divers are really good but a corn feed mallard or pintail is hard to beat.

Here’s a couple more Bull Cans for you.

For me I love mallards, teal and pintail, but for a diver the can is the best. Ringnecks, aka Blackjacks, are good eating too along with wood ducks. 'Ive eaten, or tried to eat, many widgeon and gadwall that were inedible. It depends on what they were eating but widgeon get better after a few weeks on rice but gadwalls always taste the same to me.

i practice -breast and release on my woodies.

I've been hunting both waterfowl and pheasants for over 50 years. I love pheasant meat. I think most waterfowl are just ok, or occasionally great...........PLEASE give me the recipe that makes duck better than pheasnt!!!!!

Love the pictures. Love the duck hunt. I have always liked having the dekes out well before shooting time. Then sitting back and watch the day come. Then that first loner or bunch that land or you just hear them. Now I am fired up

Five more great pictues but you had me with just the first one I lmow from my experience how ducks are cooked can make a big differemc with how they taste My wife is an excelent cook I would get a few ducks she would make them and we would eat them But it was always eat them because it was our meal that day Then she found a different recipe and they where great After that she woiuld say go shoot a few ducks We have not had any for a while .

J.Morse, you probably can google recipes. They can be dry. You have to keep them moist and not over cook. Sometimes I butter the breasts. Other times I will put bacon on the breasts. I will stuff them with onions. You can just breast them and cook in a gravy. Use your imagination.

Beautiful photos! I would love to hunt your neighborhood at least once.

Watching winter plumed mallards circle the decoys against a sunny November sky is one of life's most satisfying moments. As is watching a flock of Canada geese from an underground pit shift from "we're not sure" to "yea lets land". Sometimes almost regretted shooting them. But I believe if ducks tasted like pheasants or quail, they would be extinct by now since its so much fun to hunt them. Cooked them nearly every way and the result is at best marginal table fare. I remember shooting 4 green wing teal one time and trying to impress my future wife, I picked them, washed them, soaked them in salt water, stuffed them with apple chunks and oranges, and roasted them. Honestly they looked fantastic as the skin turned golden brown. Until an odd smell started leaking from the oven. Odd soon graduated to awful as the ducks finished . still the visual looked so good we tried, but they were completely inedible. I still try one new recipe a year, but have yet to find a good one.

Canada geese are better but not great. One winter I largely lived on bbq goose sandwiches. A bit chewy but decent. Duck cooked in that manner was awful. Goose jerkey with lots of garlic and cracked pepper is great. All of mine are made into Jerky now.

Pheasant on the other hand is wonderful meat. Once you figure out to remove all the tendons, ligaments and shot up areas, that is. I dipped mine in egg wash,\milk, powdered saltines and slow.fry, basically temp is the key, get them golden brown then lower the heat to where they steam. Don't overcook them or they can get chewy. I once served this for Christmas dinner. Electric stoves don't really do them justice cause it takes too long to reduce the heat. Sorry didn't mean to hijack the thread.

great pic, TRAY , can wait , been seeing lots of duck just no geese

Probably my favorite way to eat duck is making Chislic out of it. We also grind up a lot of outs and make snack sticks and jerky. Kids and their friends usually can eat the jerky faster then I can make it.
The thing I hate most about eating waterfowl is biting into a Steel shot, have cracked several teeth over the years, that’s why I mostly grind all my duck thru a small holed plate to catch the shot.

Absolutely something special about late season, full plumage mallards that gets the heart pumping. Probably some of my most memorable hunts are field hunting mallards in a driving snowstorm while being so cold I could barely pull the trigger. Those are usually the last hunts of the season. Another is mallards in flooded corn.
I’ve hunted long enough that it’s no longer about killing but the experience, I love to target certain ducks at certain times, shooting a limit of drake gadwall, or drake green-wings can be just as enjoyable as a limit of mallards to me.
Here’s a few more pics.

Feel free to post your pictures

One of my favorite lifetime memories is of Bluebills (AKA Scaup) ripping the air as they flash by or into decoys. Like a squadron of jets!

We used to hunt big water in layout boats on Lake Erie. One year on December 21 we had the best waterfowl show of our lives. Hunted from daylight to dark.

I have hunted cornfields for geese and ducks. I have an enclosed trailer loaded with decoys and blinds. It is for sale.

Also Inland lakes and swamps. Still have blinds and decoys.

Even boat blinds too. Still have a fantastic boat with a blind and the big water decoy spread.

The best involved my black labs. After living with labs and training them for 35 years I no longer have a lab.

Duck breast on the grill stuffed with cream cheese and jalapeños and cooked med rare normally doesn’t make it to the table if the boys or guest are around while cooking. About the only waterfowl I won’t even attempt to eat are Mergansers and Canada geese off a green field. Teal and Woodies are by far my favorite. All the other puddle ducks are about the same.
I did have roasted duck once...one bite was all it took, lol. Grilling is definitely the way to go.

My last duck hunt was the best. We where floating small rivers. We went down then back up river. Had lunch. As we where eating we saw a lone mallard dive bomb into heavy willow up river from us. All his buddies high balling him to come down. So we paddled up river from where we where. It was a Flooded beaver pond with very thick red willow. All we could do was go slow and follow the flooded creek channel. Took two wood ducks right away. Then spooked 4 mallards. Then all heck broke loose. If there where a 1000 there was 2000 mallards. All took flight. Then settled back down. We ended up limiting out. If I can get it figured out I will post a picture. Great times hunting waterfowl

I was a little younger then The other fellow is Dick Doll from MN.

Great picture, one thing I wish is I would have spent more time taking pictures when I was younger and my kids were along. It’s fun to go back and look at the old pics I do have with them and reminisce.

You sure take some high quality photos now, Tray. Nice work!

One thing I did was take pictures. Maybe just one for the season or something just memorable. Yes I like to look at the yrs gone by on the photos. Watch the young hunters grow up

In my experience all wild ducks can be great eating if handled and cooked properly...but the Canvasback is the best of the bunch. I can hardly wait!

Moosetrot

Correct Moosetrot. Has a lot to do with knowing how to cook. Another factor is culture and how a person grows up. Around here sea birds (lots of them not even ducks) are eaten a lot but most people outside condemn them. E.G. Mergansers good birds especially young fat ones later in the fall. Tastes have to be acquired at times is another way of putting it. Imagine some coastal Alaskan people who eat more traditional understand. A lot of it dying out now though as the world moves to universal global village habits.

Got that right Crosspatch;

some of us want Turkey for Xmas, but anyone off the Rock wants a salted turr for table fare as a Xmas present sent to them.
a molting Canvasback eating tubers of Richardson's pond weed has been set for some nice table fare; ever wonder why it was the market gunners selection to get

lovely picture with so " pants down" as every waterfowler should know the phrase

There is a lot of stuff the natives eat up north that has to be acquired tastes. LOL
I can’t even get past the smell of a fresh merganser to make me want to eat one, can’t imagine the smell of them cooking.

Common mergansers spend 2 plus months feeding in the wild rice lakes north of you so anything coming down past the 11 November, are the best grain fed birds there is, but you need a large roasting pan for their size,
Anyone for some wild rice flavoured gravy from the one inch rendered breast fat?
Cooked @ 275* F for 4 hours so you don't volatize the fat and get that burnt taste.

Good luck hunting.First day here in northern Maine is September 28th.I have the first 4 days of the season off.

Seeing alot of black ducks around this year.

common merganser are good , no one would eat them around here ,till they found out I had been feeding them it for year's , lol

Good luck, we still have to wait another week.