Shootin' The Breeze

Laura and I made it out for some duck hunting yesterday morning. What a great time that was! We saw quite a few ducks and even some geese - in fact, we had three geese decoy into our spread, but spotted Laura, who was caught off guard and in aww as the giant birds quietly soared towards us! Once they spotted Laura they were on the move though, and we was still a little in shock from how much larger the geese were compared to the ducks we had been seeing most of the morning! Laura took the first shot of the morning and got herself two Ruddy Ducks, I got myself one leaving from the same group. The rest of the morning we were seeing a lot of activity and ducks were giving us good looks, but our gun barrels must be bent because we missed EVERY shot we took. Oh! The shame... We still had a great time though. We were just happy to see good numbers of ducks in the area - a lot more than we saw last week when we went on our evening hunt. Laura was having a good time, as you can see in the photo. It wasn't long after she dozed off and took a short nap. I laid back for a nap but about one minute later I was awaken but the distinct sound of ducks dropping into the pond from WAY up high! If you don't know what I am talking about, imagine a little fighter get buzzing past you! The wind on the wings of the ducks makes them sound like miniature jets, and they will get your blood pumping to see them wizz past you - in some cases reaching well over 50 mph! ZOOM!

I told Laura she could try to shoot the duck, she just looked at me with that "you're crazy" look. I don't blame her, that guy was on the move!

We packed up the gear a little before noon and made our way to some geocaches. We had a few caches in the foothills of the mountains that we wanted to get before the snow was too deep so we made our way to those. It was a great little hike too, we had the trail mostly to ourselves and when we arrived at the end we had the great waterfall all to ourselves too. This is Morrell Falls it is just a few few miles outside of Seeley Lake.


One last thing that I know Laura and I were dumbfounded by was the number of idiots who come out of the woods, or maybe go into the woods, on opening day of big game season. Yesterday was opening day of elk season and the number of hunters is staggering. Ok. let me rephrase that. The number of hunters is few, and the number of idiots out driving around with rifles is staggering. There, that's more accurate.

What am I talking about? Well, we encountered a lot of road hunters. Road hunters are what I call lazy and stupid. They are the people who give hunters like Laura and I a bad reputation. Some of the examples from yesterday would be the guys sitting in the back of a pickup truck in lawn chairs, wearing their blaze orange with rifles in hand - going down the highway. Another came when we were driving to the trail head of the falls - a guy standing up in the back of a pickup, wearing the blaze orange, leaning against the cab of the truck looking for game - oh, did I mention he had his rifle in hand as well? This is NOT hunting. For people who do not hunt, and see this kind of behavior, I can understand why they see hunters as a bunch of beer drinking idiots with guns!

Believe me when I say, real hunters don't comply with this subterranean behavior. We work hard for our rewards, and we don't intentionally break laws. It's disgusting to see this type of behavior being paraded around, and it's these people who make us look bad. It's too bad this is the type of behavior that many non-hunting folks see.

Until again

-=Nolan=-