Extreme weather can test the best
Published: Friday, January 10, 2014 at 11:00 p.m.
Last Modified: Friday, January 10, 2014 at 11:34 p.m.
There was a lot of discussion about the polar vortex and how cold it got and how rare hyper cold spells have gotten. I noticed that the coldest day recorded in America since 1900 was Christmas Eve 1983. The national average was somewhere around 12 degrees.
Tuscaloosa News colleague Mark Hughes Cobb and I remember it well. Mark was at the not-so-aptly named Sun Bowl watching Alabama destroy a pretty good SMU team and guzzling cups of coffee hoping the hot liquid would warm him. I was hunting south of Demopolis on a fish pond with Dr. David Mellown, a local dentist, and Dr. Bill Hill, a local optometrist.
It was the coldest day that I remember hunting. The thermometer on my parents’ front porch read 6 degrees and the wind was howling out of the north at, I’d guess, 18-20 mph. I don’t know if the thermometer was accurate and I don’t know how to calculate wind chill. But it was cold.
Younger guys have no idea how far hunting apparel technology has advanced since then. The stuff they make today works pretty well to keep you warm. Back then, we’d just keep putting clothes on until we looked like the Michelin man.
Enough layers will eventually keep you warm but it’ll also restrict your movement. That morning, I looked like Ralphie’s little brother Randy in “A Christmas Story” — “I can’t put my arms down.”
Oddly enough on the coldest day I’ve ever hunted, I broke a sweat. Laboring to put the decoys out and then walking about a quarter mile to retrieve a crippled gadwall that had fluttered off and lit in a tree-lined drainage ditch did it. The bad part is when you start cooling down again. Thankfully, my waders didn’t leak.
I’m not particularly prone to chapped lips. After that day, my lips were split and as crusty as if they were covered in scabs. If it had been as painful as it looked, I’d have been in serious trouble. Mostly, they just felt really odd. But any morning you kill ducks is a good morning.
Normally, I cleaned ducks in the garage. That day, I cleaned them in the den as I watched the Sun Bowl where Mark was freezing his behind off.
Ducks do seem to be creatures of extremes. Epic cold fronts always seem to bring them down in big numbers. But winter floods are good, too.
One of my favorite places to duck hunt was a cow pasture on some land that I hunted on in Hale County. The pasture was a place the landowners called the “Goat Barn.” I’m told that sometime in the past, a farmer had actually raised goats there and had a barn for them.
The pasture was dry unless the river was flooding. After the rains would pass, we’d usually get some cold weather. The river would back up the creek. The creek would back up into the pasture. The cold weather would bring new ducks.
The absurdly wonderful thing about it was that there was a spot right next to an overgrown fence that was higher than most of the pasture. I could park my bright red 3-wheeler about four feet in front of the fence, cover it in camouflage burlap and sit behind it on a dove stool. I was perfectly camouflaged as well as high and dry.
For some reason, hunting where there was normally no possibility of finding a duck made the hunt better. The ducks usually decoyed well and it was a fun hunt.
Flooding can have a downside. Hunting in a beaver pond on that same property on the last day of the season in January 1992, I discovered that. I walked out into the pond before daylight to put out my decoys and felt a strange tugging at my legs. It remained a mystery until the sun came up.
Heavy rains had flooded the pond and water was rushing rapidly through it. It didn’t seem to bother the ducks. But when I doubled on a pair of greenheads, I learned about the pitfalls of flooding the hard way. By the time I picked up one, the other had been swept downstream. Although it fell right in front of me, I was never able to find it. It wasn’t the only duck I lost to the rushing water that day.
Extreme weather can be a blessing or a curse for hunters.
Reach Robert DeWitt at firstname.lastname@example.org or at 205-722-0203.
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