I am lucky if I kill 1 or 2 woodies with an occasional mallard on each outing. There are better places to hunt than where I go but my son and I have the swamp to ourselves. We bring our retriever and have a fun couple of hours. I love watching it barely get light out and hearing "oo-eek, oo-eek" as the woodies streak by. Unless there are bigger ducks around, the best wood duck hunting ends after the first hour or so.
Kinda funny but we have a pond behind the house and I probably saw more woodies there this year than what we killed in the swamp. It is a residential area we we don't hunt it. We put out corn all winter into the summer to keep the ducks there and enjoy them from our kitchen window. After a while, they are trained to swim in and get the corn. I even had them come into the yard and eat scratch with the chickens. Mallards adapt really easy but the wood ducks stay a little shy. I never thought we could feed the woodies like that as shy as they are.
The best part this past year was that 2 different hen mallards had ducklings. I think the woodies did too because the numbers shot up. They all left for parts unknown when the summer came. We look forward to seeing ducks back there every year. It's like watching duck TV from the kitchen window.
