doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Your very best day afield

I accept that, as I respect your State and the great "Live Free or Die Motto" as well.I am the only son and grandson, I have 3 younger sisters, all good Catholic grammar school girls that I am sure, as Billy Joel said- "started too late".. No barefoot and pregnant scenario, we only had as many gals as we could provide for, as I wanted them to have a more liberal education and upbringing than I saw my sisters enduring. Being the only son, and also the eldest of 4 children, I was a lot closer to my father and grandfather-they both were machinists, shot Model 12's, and lived to hunt and fish, after work was done. My sisters were all "sheltered" by Catholic guilt- I was always testing the boundaries, so to speak. But I do tend to live in the past, when you could go to Corrant & Howe and buy a used Model 12 20 gauge, with a case and two boxes of Peters paper hulls in the snazzy yellow and blue trimmed mallard logo box, with three hard-earned $20's, and get change back- no 4473 form BS either. Aaaah Yess, as W.C.Fields used to say--

Ken, about 10 years after your hunt, I enjoyed some great quail hunting in SE KS. It seems, unfortunately, that that part of the country isn't much for quail any more. The DNR says they're coming back here in IA, but I can't imagine--mostly due to changed farming practices--that we'll ever see anything approaching the quail numbers we had in southern Iowa 40 years ago.

Larry,
It's true Northeast Ok/Southeast Kansas is not what it used to be as far as quail numbers. But....one of my buddies told me he spoke with a Oklahoma game biologist that is a mutual friend and he stated the Panhandle counties are shaping up to be very productive this year.

7 or 8 years ago, My hunting partner (He is also our Lutheran Minister) headed up on the Republican river in Nebraska to shoot ducks. Filled out with mallard drakes in an hour or so, drove about 10 miles to a corn stubble, killed 5 geese, pass shooting. Took a break and went into Stratton Ne, for breakfast. Then over to friends place. and shot 6 roosters and 4 quail...Headed home and as we got a mile or so from my place, saw a bunch of roosters fly into a draw, killed 3 and a Chicken...Double guns all day switching when it made sense...Grand day....Hunted 2 states, good variety of birds, excellent dog work, best of all good friends having fun...Last hunt together

My good friend Mark Kircher, a fellow PGCA member, and I belong to the same duck hunting club located in central New York�s Finger Lakes region. In addition to being a couple of duck hunting addicts we both enjoy hunting with Parker guns. The 2013 duck hunting season was much colder than normal. With two weeks left in our first season split, our marsh froze near solid with up to 3 inches of ice. Our 1000 acre marsh looked like a white waste land. We were both depressed that the season was over at our duck club. I turned my attention to deer hunting and Mark continued to hunt the big open water of Irondequoit Bay, a bay that empties into Lake Ontario. While out deer hunting on the uplands surrounding our marsh, I glassed our frozen marsh to discover mallards and blacks dropping into a little hole more than a mile away. The hole was about the size of a basketball court; I estimated 300 to 500 ducks were crowded into that small hole.

I thought what a set up but how to get to the birds? I made arrangements with my regular ducking hunting partner Jeff to try to get to the birds the next morning, a small creek channel with some water flow may make it possible to get close to THE HOLE! The next morning at zero dark thirty I get a call from Jeff that he had caught a stomach flu. He was up all night and sick as a dog and couldn�t hunt, dam! What to do???, it is much too dangerous to hunt in the deep freeze without a partner. I knew Mark was an early morning riser but calling at 5:00am on a work day was a long shot. But I thought maybe he can adjust, he is a duck hunting addict after all. Not wanting to wake up his family with a telephone call I sent him a text message on the chance that he was up and willing to give it a go. Thirty seconds later to my surprise I get a response, LET�S GO!
We met at our Knoll Landing to find solid ice that you could walk on. Determined to get to THE HOLE we broke enough ice to float the Jon boat and get the Go Devil motor started. We made some progress but the ice finally won the battle. Still determined, we pulled the boat up on the ice and walked the boat over the ice a few hundred yards to where a small creek runs through the marsh. To our surprise the creek was ice free. We pushed the Jon boat into the creek and motored towards THE HOLE that was still a quarter of a mile away. The open water ran out about 300 yards from THE HOLE but the noise from the boat motor caused the birds to flush. Hundreds of ducks taking flight all at once is an impressive sight and makes any duck hunter come unglued.
There was no cover around THE HOLE so we decided to set up at the end of the open channel three hundred yards away from where the birds were sitting. A dozen decoys were set, our boat blind set up and our Parkers uncased and loaded.
Mark is a Parker man all the way. He shoots a 20ga DH early in the season, a 16ga Trojan mid-season and his 12ga Trojan loaded with Kent Tungsten Matrix for hardy late season red-legged mallards. Mark�s high condition circa 1930 12ga Trojan serial number 235679 has 30� barrels, #2 frame, splinter forend, pistol grip and choked IM/F. I am a recent disciple of the Parker gun for which I take a lot of ribbing from my AH Fox collector friends. I was shooting my circa 1905 CHE 12ga with 30� Bernard barrels, pistol grip, splinter, serial number 131942, choked IM/F. I was shooting 11/8oz Bismuth reloads.
Almost as soon as we were loaded up the ducks came back in groups of from five to thirty. A highball hale call and a few hen mallard quacks interspersed with a feeder call and they were locked up decoying into our little piece of open water. The shooting was fast and furious, in twenty minutes we had a two man limit of ducks. To add to the fabulous hunt we killed every bird we shot at and didn�t lose a bird since the ice conditions meant no dogs. The duck gods were smiling on us this December day with an assist from our Parker Guns the �Old Reliable�.

Ken, I hunted the Panhandle for a couple days last season. Excellent quail numbers!

Except for the differences between your fine CHE Bernard barreled Parker and his well-worn Winchester M97 "cornsheller" you have a lot it common with Nash's "The Shootin'ist Gent'man" circa 1916. No misses or cripples- that is great shooting indeed.

Many years ago, I owned and shot a HE Fox 12- 32" F&F, restocked, but in the era of Federal copper plated Premium loads (before steel) it was one great waterfowling shotgun. I now used a Smith Ideal 12 Longrange with Bismuth loads "on special days", but in really nastier weather, tend to use a M12 3" Mag.

I also related to your wise comment about not going out to that "hole" surrounded by ice alone. Safety on the water when hunting, or in this case, on the ice as well, comes first. Do you and your hunting pals ever shoot the big lakes for divers from layout boats. Takes a fair amount of many power to set up the dekes, handle the layout boats and the pick-up boats as well, but when everything "clicks" and the flight birds are in, the fastest and most challenging of all waterfowling develops.

My day afield can't come close to others. I've told it often. My grandchildren and great-grandchildren appeared interested. It was a hunt long ago, of double guns, shells sparingly used, meat was important, and before outboards in our fishing village on Nova Scotia's Eastern Shore. From my eulogy for Warren Baker eight years ago:

"Warren and I are cousins. We grew up together, next-door neighbours, and went to our one-room school together, and when I went away to work in Halifax I always returned to the village to hunt birds together.

There were no rough edges on Warren. He was the quiet and steady one, a wonderful companion, and he didn�t use bad words like the rest of us.

Warren made the best of the stuff he was. He worked and loved, and he and Neva made a good life and brought up a family from the place where he was born.


I�ve always thought making a living from the sea as something special, a sort of mystery of being able to find fish every day in the ocean, from places he couldn�t see.

He did that all his working life, and he did it well.

Now, here we are on this beautiful day, at the church where he and Neva were married, in the churchyard by the sea which provided their living for so many years.

I saw Warren miss a bird---once. It was a shot at a partridge going away across a little bog near Goose Lake. It didn�t happen often to one of the finest gunners on the Eastern Shore. There�s another story, though, that Warren would like me to tell.

From the blind at Rum Point we saw birds flying into Leader�s Lake, and Warren said �That�s where we�re going tomorrow.� We rowed up the harbour next morning, pulled the skiff up Big Brook into Leader�s Lake and shot 16 bluebills in 10 minutes.

We walked to Goose Lake where Warren�s beaver trap held the biggest beaver I had ever seen, maybe 80 pounds. On the way home, there was a smelt net to pull, with so many fish the headrope was out of sight.

While picking the fish, with a cold north wind making whitecaps all over the harbour, Warren saw a big buck swimming to Leader�s Island. He dropped me off at the middle of the island with instructions to make enough noise to push the deer back to him. I heard the shot---and when I got to that little cove Warren was smiling.

Warren stepped the sail and, down to the gunnels with deer, beaver, 16 bluebills, and five- or six-hundred smelts, we sailed all the way to the slip, home before nine."

This story can't compare to so many excellent days told here, but this was my best day's shooting on a dove field. It was about 1994, give or take a year, and my youngest son was dating the daughter of a country lawyer named Rowland Dye, who practiced in Augusta but lived just out of Waynesboro a very few miles. Rowland and I became friends, due to the interest our progeny had in each other, and we spent some time together.

Rowland invited me, for opening day of dove season, to be his guest at his home and sunflower/corn field about 1000 yards behind his country home. His lovely wife and he had prepared a fine lunch for everyone on the backyard lawn. Cold cuts, fresh fruit, I can't even remember it all, but a very sumptuous spread. There were about 25 shooters there, including three judges. After lunch we threw a few clay birds for warmups, then took the field about two o'clock. The field consisted of maybe 40 acres of alternating strips of corn and sunflowers, both of which had been partially run through with a silage chopper. Many, many doves.

I had taken a 26" BSS that I had recently acquired, and shot pretty well, I thought. I was placed near the middle of the field, but within sight of my host, who chose a shady spot for himself. I soon realized that killing a limit was not going to be a problem, and since, back then, the limit was twelve, I decided to pick my shots carefully, which I did. The pile began to mount by my stool, without a miss. I couldn't miss that afternoon, literally. It was along about bird number nine, I guess, that I hit another one, but not solid enough to put it right down. It was winging it's way, in a downward glide path, straight toward a very thick, and huge, briar patch. In an instant I realized that if it went into that briar patch it would be lost, and I hit it again with the left barrel, downing it. Well, the perfect average was gone, but I hung in there.

I would like to say that I made a true double, two birds with one shot (to get my perfect average back), which does happen occasionally, but I can't. I finished out my twelve bird limit without a miss, and ended up 12, for 13 shells. I actually didn't miss, but did have to shoot one twice. Highest average I ever had on a day afield.

BTW, the only man on the field that did not honor the limit was one of the judges. At least he admitted it, sheepishly.

All my best, SRH

104 Eurasian doves in one day. Had to do a morning and an afternoon to accomplish it. I had on many occasions shot 50-60
so I decide to see if I could get 100 in a day.