The Band of Bands

Some people say bad luck comes in threes. This past duck season, it was the opposite for me when good luck came in threes......three bands that is. Duck and goose bands are one of the many mystiques of this wonderful past time. Each tells a story about the duck’s or goose’s past. 

Some of you may be wondering what a band is or what they look like. The Bird Banding Laboratory website goes into further detail about bird bands. The next logical question would be  Why band birds? Don’t worry; problem solved, thanks to the wonderful people of BBL.

Learning about a band on a duck or goose truly fascinates me. (It’s a shame they didn’t have a subject for this in school; I might have been a better student.) Each band is engraved with a unique nine digit number. This nine digit number is used to report an encounter with a banded duck or goose. By calling in the band number (1-800-327-BAND) or registering it online, you can find out where the duck or goose was banded, when it was banded, who banded it, the age and sex of the bird, as well as many other interesting facts. You are then mailed a 5x7 certificate with all these facts and it looks really great once framed (as I do with all mine).

What a band certificate looks like.

Just a fraction of the wall of fame.

One can only imagine the lakes, rivers, ponds and other bodies of water each banded bird has visited while making their way up and down the flyways. In the continental U.S., there are four major flyways for migratory waterfowl. (As seen on the map from the BBL website.) They are the Atlantic, Mississippi, Central and Pacific flyways with the Mississippi flyway being the largest. 

All my bands have come from the Mississippi flyway with the exception of one. This picture is of a Drake Mallard I killed on September 22, 2010 while hunting in the Peace River Valley of Alberta, Canada. I can only assume he migrated down either the Pacific or Central flyway due to the location where he was killed in Alberta. I will never know since I killed him before he migrated south for the year. This is the first of three bands this hunting season.

Most hunters, like myself, wear their bands on their lanyards as in the picture above.

Here is some info from the band :

Mallard

Sex: Male

Banded: August 23, 2009

Age: Hatched in 2009

Banding Location: Cardinal Lake, 20 W Peace River, Alberta, Canada

Encountered: September 22, 2010 at Cardinal Lake (The same exact lake where he was banded and born a year earlier). This means he migrated south to who-knows-where and came back to the same place he was born! How fascinating is that?!

Band number two was on a Lesser Snow Goose - my first ever Snow Goose band, might I add.

Info from the Snow Goose band:

Lesser Snow Goose

Sex: Won’t know until I receive the certificate in the mail.

Banded: July 23, 2008

Age: Won’t know until I receive the certificate in the mail.

Banding Location: Manitoba 

Encountered: January 24, 2011 a mile west of the house in Crocketts Bluff, Arkansas across from the Lybow field (shout out to the gunslinger from the east). At least a three year old goose.

Finally, my pride and joy of the three bands this year - a rare Northern Pintail band.

Info from the Pintail band:

Northern Pintail

Sex: Male

Banded: August 23, 2006

Age: Won’t know until I receive the certificate in the mail.

Banding Location: Saskatchewan 

Encountered: January 29, 2011 at Wolf Island. (He was five years old. That means he migrated up and down the flyway five times! I can only imagine how many miles he had flown!)

Bands, just as the ones pictured above, are an absolute and lifelong treasure, as well as a rarity, in duck hunting. However, having many bands is not a reflection on how hard a waterfowler hunts as it is, in my opinion, more a reflection on where you hunt. If a duck hunter hunts near an area where the USFW Service bands a high number of birds, well, more than likely, he or she is going to have more bands than a person who doesn’t hunt near such an area. What I’m trying to convey is that getting a band is nothing more than being at the right place at the right time. It revolves around the big L word....luck. I know waterfowlers that have many bands but couldn’t blow a duck call if their life depended on it. I also know waterfowlers who have very few bands and are absolute studs in this sport. In turn, I think that alone makes them even more special and unique. A blessing, if you will, that I will always cherish for the rest of life. So tell me, do you have any good band stories? I eat them up, so post away fellas.

Opening day: The day of fog.

Opening day of duck season is a little hectic to say the least. A barrage of ”Do I have this? Did I get those? and Don’t forget that!” run through your mind the night before and the morning of the big day. It’s the first day that most of your gear gets used again since the previous season and along with that comes a long list of to-do’s and don’t forgets. I, for one, have a routine I go through the night before the season begins and every night for that matter. This routine includes a mental list of all the gear I’ll need (calls, bullets, drinks, snacks, camera, binos, license, etc).  Accomplishing all these tasks while experiencing the excitement that opening day brings can make things difficult at times.

The castle.

Opening weekend at the 12 is a busy one. Typically, all the members are there and in the morning, it can sound like a herd of buffalo going through the house. The shuffling of feet, gun cases being zipped and flatulence from the fried food the night before make it impossible to sleep after 4 a.m. Speaking of mornings at the 12, we have four coffee pots in the kitchen for our coffee drinkers. And let me tell you, when that timer goes off, it truly is like a swarm of bees drawn to honey. Men packed in the kitchen, shoulder to shoulder, filling those thermoses. It’s a sight to see. 

Because the Island can only hunt six people, four of us headed there while the other six hunted the 148 field. When we hunt the Island, I drive the 4-wheeler from the house to the field. The 4-wheeler pulls the wagon and dad follows behind driving Blackie (Blackie is the official vehicle of the Tennessee 12). This particular morning, the fog was as thick as I have ever seen. Visibility was maybe twelve yards and it was absolutely brutal. I had to follow the levee the pit was in just to see where I was going. But we finally made it and the hunt was on.

The 4-wheeler & wagon.

As shooting time (always thirty minutes before sunrise) approached, we could hear ducks and geese all around us. The sound was deafening. They never got up as they could not see us coming due to the dense fog. My hope was that the fog would lift as the morning progressed. This never happened; there was no wind and the fog was going to hang with us all morning. It was like a white blanket around us all day. I remember getting a headache from staring into the white oblivion. At most, I could see thirty yards from the pit. We could hear ducks chattering overhead and the Specklebelly geese sounding off on the ground to the west. Green-winged Teal would come racing through the fog and be out of sight in a matter of seconds only to be sitting in the decoys before we knew it. The morning started off slow as I knew the conditions were not in our favor. But, as a hunter, you must accept those things you cannot control. This is what we were dealt and we had to adjust accordingly. All things considered, we still managed to shoot ducks and geese at point blank range.

The fog.

It was about 8 a.m. or so and we were sitting in the twenty-foot pit when I hear a double cluck greeting call from a speckbelly (aka White-fronted Goose) coming down the levee from the east. I knew they were close, danger close. They appeared out of the fog like B-51 bombers behind us at twenty-five yards. There were five of them flying in a single line formation. I yelled “Behind us!” and the four of us emptied our guns throwing as much flack at them as we could. When the last shot was fired, there were five geese on the water. No cripples, just dead; hevi-metal 3.5 #2‘s at their finest.This just goes to show how close the birds were that morning. 

Brian & the snow.

Meanwhile, the 148 field which is about one and a half miles to our northwest was absolutely hammering them. They shot and shot all morning. It sounded like a mini fire fight going on. I said to dad, “They must be covered up over there!” We could hear their six man volley followed by water shots with ease. They had their limits by 10 a.m. At about 10:30 or so, we decided to pick up and head to the house with the visibility still at about forty-five yards. We walked out with 24 ducks and geese. Not a bad day considering the fog from hell. 

Opening Day 2010-2011