Mallard Fest

I must start by saying that there is good news to report.  The lost dog is found.  After 3 days of being gone, turns out he was lying the field he was hunting waiting for his owner to come get him..  He was lying there barking and the house right by the field heard him and called.  There he was lying there looking around as if nothing happened.  Except for being a bit hungry, all is well. 
On to hunting.  Not much going on in the way of North the South duck movement.  There are still concentrations of birds in Southeastern South Dakota and they have had no reason to move.  We hunted the Ditch last Thursday and saw 7 workable ducks and shot one.  We arrived a bit late and was moving and setting decoys as 6 of the 7 were trying to land on our heads.  There was a gaddy floating around just before we jumped in and we took him.  That's all she wrote.  We have just two weekends left and this season of duck hunting is over.     
In light of the lack of action we decided to hit the road and try out our scouting scopes.  We managed to find a field to jump in for an afternoon of what we hoped would be mallard fun.  We hadn't really gotten into a bunch of Mallards this year so when we found a field we aggressively tracked down the owner and got our permission.  Somewhere west of the Mississippi, East of the Rockies and North of the Mason Dixon Line we set up.  Didn't take long and we had our first group.  They didn't like something and we adjusted the spread.  Our second group came and were working nicely in when "boom."  A shot fired from one of the lay downs, without warning or words, and one Mallard was in the bag, despite the fact the other 15 or so were closely behind. After a bit of razzing and wondering we decided that worse case was we were gonna leave with 1 in the bag.  The skunk factor was gone.  You know when you haven't pulled the trigger on a Mallard all year you get a bit itchy.  We had large groups and small groups, 5 to 250 working over us for a solid 2 hours.  We packed up with 19 in the bag, 17 Mallards and 2 Pintail, and were not in the least bit disappointed.  There is still time to finish off the season, if you put in a bit of leg work and polish your beggin' skills. That's all for now.  Check back for the latest and greatest and thanks for all the hits.