Game bird diary for all

**Woody** · 23-07-2023, 04:17 PM

I think the breast pocket ammo was all used up trying to head shoot that gobbler

**Brownie8** · 25-07-2023, 10:12 PM

Late post, but getting there in the end.

I ended up having an incredible first duck season out on my own. The pup Bruce and I got out of Auckland into the Kaipara every fortnight to chase the birds around. After some suspect shooting and calling attempts, we only ended up with two pari's on our first day out. However, by season's end, we had sorted ourselves a better strategy of setting up at a likely spot for mallards in the morning and then getting some sweat chasing birds around jump-shooting. This proved much more successful, and we managed eight mallards and a handful of pari's one Sunday in early June (grateful for the extra time on our licence in Northland). I plucked the mallards and breasted the pari's, which became a more tedious task the more birds that went down. My girlfriend made this problem worse by shooting a gobbler that flew past one weekend after missing a couple of ducks hurt her confidence. Turkeys are big and smelly birds I tell ya.

Being the only one to eat duck in the house, I offloaded most of the birds to my old hospitality teacher from college who cooked the birds for both students and teachers to enjoy. As you can imagine, most students in an Auckland college hadn't been exposed to wild duck before, which was a treat. Sidenote: Mallard breast schnitzel and orange is my new favourite duck dish.

Bruce was excellent, and it was great fun having him work out we could work together. Still working on holding the duck all the way to hand when retrieving out of the water, so there is plenty of work to get to before next year. Any tips on dog training would be appreciated. I kept a couple of sets of wings for training and have been using them as bumpers and hiding them around the backyard for him to find and retrieve recently.

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