Just Mallards

Mulak Reader - Just Mallards

This was the third in a series of essays I wrote in praise of specific gamebirds: Knuckleball saluted the woodcock, Thunderbird paid homage to the ruffed grouse, and this one, of course, is a deep bow to the only wild duck that even non-duck hunters recognizes. Sports Afield paid me the compliment of acknowledging this my 20^th sale to them in their editors’ remarks, and used Just Mallards as their cover story in the December 1988 issue.

JUST MALLARDS

The hunter crouches in his blind

'Neath camouflage of every kind,

And conjures up a quacking noise

To lend allure to his decoys.

This grown-up man, with pluck and luck

Is hoping to outwit a duck.

The Hunter

Ogden Nash

            Years before the Alyeska pipeline made Alaska a famous oil producing state, small ocean-going tankers carried oil out of Drift River on the south coast of Alaska. In the winter of 1971 I was on one of those tankers. We were anchored awaiting a tide shift. At that time of the year, dawn isn't until mid-morning, but we were out after breakfast, working in the dark to repair a steam leak.
          When it became bright enough to see beyond the range of our flashlights, I noticed that ducks were trading into a cove in the distance. Like every other waterfowler, I'm a junior-varsity bird watcher, and I couldn't help speculating on the type of ducks that would be found here on the south coast of Alaska in the dead of winter: Old Squaws or Whistlers, probably, but, then again, maybe one of the several exotic species of eider, or maybe Barnacle geese. I had never seen any of them, and I had my hopes up.
          When the repair job was done I went up to the pilot house and used the world's best binoculars (Navigation quality 9 x 50s) to check out the exotic ducks a half-mile away. There were several small flocks in the bay, perhaps fifty ducks in all, and every bird I could see was a mallard. Like greenheads everywhere, they were swimming about, dipping and talking to one another and seemingly having a good time. They were no different than those in the pond at Forest Park, just a few miles from my house in Massachusetts. They might have been the same birds, for all I could tell.
          When you're expecting spectacled eiders, naturally there is a twinge of disappointment at seeing "just mallards". But, knowing what I know about Mr. Anas platyrhynchos, I should have expected as much: Paraphrasing Rodney Dangerfield, I think you could look up the word "ubiquitous" in the dictionary and find a picture of a mallard.

Because he lives in virtually every corner of the country, the mallard is considered common. Yet, if the pheasant is the salvation of upland bird hunters, the mallard similarly represents all things to all waterfowlers; He will decoy well enough to provide good shooting, yet is no sucker, either—a waterfowler who hasn't done his homework flunks the greenhead exam every time. When the prairie potholes come through, the flyways abound with greenheads, and he is usually plentiful enough to provide a full bag limit on both the first and the last hunts of the season, as well as all the days in between. Any duck hunter who would tell you he wouldn't be delighted with a limit of greenheads has become so jaded he should be put out of his misery as soon as possible. Unlike all but a few other species, it is relatively easy to pick out drakes from Suzies on the wing. The table qualities of the bird are rivaled by few others, and his clean beauty is such that if he were a rare bird that only passed through briefly while migrating, he would be something that bird watchers got excited about. A hunter with a single drake mallard has a big, beautiful trophy to show off.
          And, you can actually call them in.
          If you need another reason to love the mallard, there it is. A caller must know what he's doing in order to talk them into gun range, but he doesn't have to be a Stuttgart champion, either. Let me put it this way: If I can call mallards, you've got to believe they can't be all that difficult to fool. (Any duck call that is not supposed to imitate a hen mallard is so named: pintail whistle, wood duck squealer, etc. For the most part, though, all duck calls are mallard calls.)
          One might argue—and duck hunters often do—in favor of the black duck or the canvasback or the pintail or whatever duck you happen to champion. There are many good things to be said for all of them. But whatever it is you're arguing; speed, beauty, wariness, size, sophistication, table qualities—The same can be said for the mallard without exaggerating more than just a little. He's everyman's favorite duck, and with good reason.

There is nowhere north of the equator where mallards are not found, and they are the ancestors of every domestic variety of duck, bar none. They have been the favorite of wildfowlers quite literally since the dawn of man: Egyptian wall paintings show mallards bursting into flight before nets thrown from papyrus boats, and greenheads are depicted in art from both ancient India and the earliest dynasties of China. Although the world's oldest known decoys are made to represent canvasbacks, those ancient American wildfowlers would have done much better with a rig of greenheads. The mallard pattern comes close to being the universal decoy: No matter where he hunts or what the conditions, a duck hunter can't go too far wrong if the rig he puts out in front of his blind is made up of Suzies and greenheads. I believe it is a significant fact that in the short time I ran my decoy making business (Before I realized the hard way that although there are people willing to pay fifty bucks for hand-made decoys, I could not afford the kind of advertising it took to keep the customers coming.) aside from a small rig of whistlers, every decoy I sold was a mallard.

          Autumn, 1923: His dog looked up, then he heard the mallards grumbling as they passed, driven before the gusty wind. They were beyond his spread and out of gun range before he could react, but, as he watched, the small flock banked into a wide turn. "They’re coming back," he whispered to his retriever. The ducks flew low, hugging the lee of the near bank. Two hens broke away from the flock and swerved upward, allowing the wind to carry them down river again, but the remainder of the birds made for the dozen cork decoys in the calm-water cove by the massive fallen oak tree.
          They were in front now, and there was a moment when he was sure he could see the eye of the lead bird against the dark green of his plumage, but as he shouldered his gun his cold fingers had trouble with the safety. Instantly alarmed, the birds flared upward, and his first shot passed behind a climbing mallard. He held on the same bird and dropped him with his next shot, then he swung on one of the departing ducks and drew only a pair of tail feathers that spun in the wind long after the flock had departed.
          He looked to where the drake should have fallen, but saw only decoys. Next to him, his Chessie peered intently into the cattails.
          "Go fetch." he said, and the dog leaped into the water. Moments later, the retriever emerged from the tall weeds with the drake mallard in his mouth and brought the bird to his master, who was pulling the canoe from under the fallen oak.
          "Good boy," he said. "That'll make our limit."
          It had been raining off and on all morning, and now a few big drops slanted down on the wind once more. He motioned for the dog to get into the canoe, then pushed off and began to pick up the decoys. When the last block was wrapped, he paused to light his pipe, then turned the bowl upside down to shield it from the rain as he paddled off.

          Looking at an old poster for UMC shells, I realize that the hunter in a canvas shooting coat with a canoe paddle in his hands could just as easily be today's waterfowler as the man from the 1923 calendar.
          Amazing.
          Old-time ball players are dated by their uniforms and equipment, as are soldiers and factory workers and just about everyone else one might see in old pictures, but not so our sport—Oh, a few pieces of utilitarian equipment have evolved into something different, but not the sport itself, and above all, not the ducks. Each time a mallard decoys it is still an event—a memory in the making.
          There is no other sport where the participants adhere so tenaciously to the traditions surrounding it. But, too, there is no other sport where the traditions make as much sense a they do in duck hunting. Occasionally I succumb to my fascination with the past and try to write a story set in a time before I was born. The toughest part of that assignment is finding things that have changed—I end up using old cars, mostly, because by and large hunting today is the same as it was in 1923: Ducks come to decoys, men fumble with the safety on their guns, they shoot and miss more often they succeed, and good dogs, as always, correct their mistakes.

I mentioned earlier that mallards are found nearly everywhere, but when I was a kid they were not common in New England. A few lived in parks, of course, where they grew fat on a constant diet of day-old bread and popcorn, but the ducks my father brought home from his hunts along the Agawam river were nearly always blacks, with an occasional woodie or teal, and even less often, a mallard. It doesn't seem to be a coincidence that the greenhead's northeastern population expansion has taken place at a time when the black duck is declining. Mother Nature, by all accounts, is a tough old lady who has been shuffling species in and out since the dawn of time. There are any number of reasonable-sounding theories regarding the wane of the black duck, and virtually all of them list among their major causes the inter-breeding of mallards with blacks—a situation where the weaker black duck genes inevitably are overpowered by those of the mallard within two or three generations. It just may be that the black duck didn't evolve far enough away from the mallard to prevent being eventually re-absorbed by him. Away from the coast, it seems, the mallard is replacing the black, but not so in the salt marshes. On Cape Cod, in Merrymeeting Bay, at Plum Island and down on Martha's Vineyard, when the black is gone the east wind will indeed be empty.

          In case you didn't know it already, mallards are good to eat. I shoot bluebills and snipe and woodcock and eat them. (Better change that to "Sometimes I eat them.") They're better than a poke in the eye with a pointy stick, but just slightly so. Thankfully, that's not true of mallards. Like seafood, the less you do to them in the way of marinates and sauces, the better they are. (For best results with whatever recipe you use, clean them promptly after your dog brings them in—the plucking can wait, but if you're going to turn your trophy into a delightful meal, get the innards out quickly).
          My favorite recipe is as follows: Stuff them LOOSELY with whatever you happen to favor (I like chopped onion and apple) and rub them down with oil and salt and pepper. Then put them on some sort of rack that will hold them up out of their own fat and roast them for 20 minutes at the hottest setting your oven will take. My wife puts them in a browning bag to contain the spatter while roasting. The last part of the recipe calls for a bottle of Zinfandel and plenty of Italian bread—They're superb.
          A Tex-Mex recipe I brought back from Amarillo is simpler yet: Slice breast fillets from your mallards. Cut a small pepper in half (My Texas friends used fresh jalapinos, but I've had similar good results with friers.) and toothpick the halves to make parenthesis around each fillet. Wrap a single strip of bacon around the edge and hold in place with the same toothpick-acupuncture method. Get the barbecue grill going. Sear the fillets over the direct heat, then put them at the far end of the grill to slow-cook for 20 minutes or so, then sear them again. In Texas, a small amount of mesquite was used to season the smoke, which lent a marvelous flavor to a marvelous duck. In honor of all things Tex-Mex, this recipe should be accompanied by Lone Star long-necks and plenty of flour tortillas—The results are equally superb.

          When you sit for as long as you and I have behind various sets of decoys in all manner of blinds, both elaborate and simple, you begin to approach the conclusion that maybe as much as we are duck hunters, we are even more duck watchers. The conglomeration of memories we share are seldom those of good shots made, but rather, of the birds themselves: In those recollections teal twirl over the decoys and leave a flash of color that lingers in our vision like the burst of a flashbulb, magnificent brigades of eiders parade across the breakers in time to an unheard march, elegant pintails glide out of the late afternoon sky as if aware of their own stateliness, and a single drake wood duck springs into the long morning sunbeams, his colors gleaming almost incandescently. If you are a waterfowler, and I know you are, there are dozens of equally indelible memories that you could ad to our list. Ducks, after all, can be an obsession that causes wives to shriek each time we neglect our driving in favor of a too-long look at a pond—Any ducks out there? Wives don't understand: We duck hunt, of course, but more than anything else, we duck watch.
          But if mallards are all things to all duck hunters, then, more than any other, the one sight that sums it all up comes just after legal shooting time when a half-dozen silhouettes glide out of the morning fog and bank around the decoys with their necks craned. If it's still, sometimes we can hear their quiet murmuring and the air in their feathers. Then, just when they pull up and change their posture in the air, we notice the orange of their outstretched webbed feet and the yellow of their bills and, mostly, the green-on-black of their heads, and we realize that these are the first colors we've seen on this gray morning. Whether or not there are feathers in the air and a duck or two at the center of a ring of ripples certainly matters while the smell of gunpowder still hangs in the morning air.
          But not here, later, remembering. For me, and for you, too, just that one singular vision is enough.
          "Just mallards." you say?
          For once, we can appreciate what we have while we still have it. "Yes, please. Just mallards for us, thanks."

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This site was last updated 09/21/06