Banded About

 

January is deep down into the waterfowler’s season. There will be a few odd goose seasons into February, but the duck and crane season for this country ends January 25th. So long, boys, it’s been good to know you. Hope to shake your hand again next year.

Any bird that turns into as good a dinner as a duck, goose, or crane is a treat, but shooting one of the same that has been banded for research becomes every waterfowler’s ultimate trophy. I’d as soon shoot one as I would an eight-point buck. Really. You think I’m kidding; I’m not.

Every waterfowler wants the “jewelry”, the “bracelet”, the mystery of the far wanderer, a leg band represents, and it has been many, many years since I picked up a duck, goose, or crane without first looking at its legs before I did any other part of it. The government agencies that band waterfowl to plot their travels will send you a nice printout, suitable for framing, if you send in the tag’s number, and of course the band itself becomes yours, as well as part of the bird’s mysterious past. Who doesn’t want a little mystery in their life?

Two weeks ago, I read an account in the newspaper of a pintail banded in northern Alaska, near Russia, which was recovered in American Samoa. You’ll have to get out your globe, not a map, to track that baby. Bird banding has been going on for the better part of 100 years. About the time you think everything that could possibly be learned from the practice has surely been learned, something like that wandering pintail (lost, or not?) turns up.

There’s a lot of luck involved in shooting a banded bird. As any slot player will tell you, the more times you pull the lever, the closer you are to hitting the jackpot. I have been lucky enough to shoot quite a few banded birds in the 40-plus years I have actively hunted them. It’s been several years since I have shot one, but you can bet I’m going to be out there pulling the lever right up until the 25th.

Clay McKinney, née of Sand Springs, now of Chickasha, once hunted ducks and geese quite a bit, but then quit when he decided he didn’t like eating them, to me practically the only good reason (and the best) to give up the grand game. Eat what you shoot or give it up.

Anyway, soon after he started college at Tahlequah, Clay took up the ropes and tools of goose hunting along the McClellan-Kerr waterway near Wagoner. Any number of times he had asked me about the bands collared about my neck on my call lanyards and wondered out loud whether or not he might ever shoot a banded bird.

One evening just after dark of a cold January day, I got an excited call from Clay to tell me he had just shot a giant banded goose, and (get this, Conrad!) it also had a radio telemetry device of some type about its neck. The odds? I told him that I didn’t think they were computer programmable. Leg bands are rare enough. To this day, he’s the only hunter I know that has ever done that, and I know some very, very old ones. Oh, yes, the government agency wanted their radio device back, and they got it.

Was Clay lucky? Well, yes, but luck didn’t put him on his back out there in that frozen field on top of all that goose doo-doo surrounded by decoys.

I got into a situation guiding goose hunters years ago out in the Texas Panhandle on an 80,000-acre ranch where I was able to stack the banded bird odds in my favor, absolutely, and I did it without the least twinge of guilt. Mostly, we guided the customers over winter wheat field setups, but I also hunted some of my clients over a midday roost pond back in the mesquites that became absolutely choked with birds wanting a drink of water after 10 a.m.. I never shot at any of the birds unless the customers wanted me to and asked me if they could take my birds home with theirs. Sure. Perfectly legal with assigned notes and license numbers. I always waited until they had reached their limits and put their guns up before I would shoot.

Early on, I noticed that at this particular location, so low did the birds circle the blind, three to four times before landing on the water right in front of the us, that by careful observation, I could actually see the sun sparkling off of leg bands and would shoot only at those birds with “bracelets”. Nobody could understand the depths of my “luck”, and they who only looked at the outstretched necks of incoming geese, and never their legs, used to ponder it deeply. “I’m part Indian,” I would say in an offhanded manner when quizzed, and nothing else.

At that same ranch, I had out one day an eighty-two-year-old man who had hunted ducks and geese since boyhood in Louisiana without ever having shot a banded bird, a mystery in itself so populous is the winter waterfowl count in that terminus of the Mississippi Flyway. Wanna’ shoot a banded bird inside of 82 years? Bet on Louisiana. Anyway, Fred was so arthritic, there was no way that he could lie down in a decoy spread, raise up and shoot, so I stood him up in some mesquites alongside a wheat field and let him pass shoot birds coming and going to dinner. He was a good shot. He dropped two birds, then the limit on dark geese in that area, out of the first flock to come over. I walked out and picked up his birds for him, part of my job, returned and handed them to him where he stood grinning eyeballing the long necks and softball-sized, black and white heads.

“Well,” he laughed, “I can’t move very well, but I can still shoot a little!” He was plumb tickled, and so was I.

“Yeah,” I said, “and you’re a lucky ol’ rascal, too. Looky there.”

Both of the birds were banded, and I thought he was going to cry when he finally noticed it. I knew, then, in an instant why I like little boys and old men. Is there a difference?

Copyright © 2009 Conrad M. Vollertsen