EP415 How to Find a Spot to Hunt Ducks | Waterfowl Scouting 101

Obviously, you can't hunt ducks until you have a place to do it.

So how do we find a place? Well, of course, just like most kinds of hunting, you've got private land and public land options.

Now, one of the convenient things about waterfowl hunting is that first word, water.

And so, uh, you know, when it comes to deer hunting, you know, the woods are big, and deer can be a lot of places, and how do you find them? Well, when it comes to waterfowl hunting, uh, a lot of times, not exclusively of course, but a lot of times we're hunting them on water.

So if we can find water, we can focus our search and our efforts on those areas.

Now, this water could be little ponds.

It could be big ponds.

It could be lakes of various sizes.

Could be little streams, could be creeks, could be rivers, could be the ocean or a Great Lake.

Anywhere-- Could be a marsh.

In fact, marshes can be one of, uh, some of the best places to go depending on a number of factors.

But wherever there's water, enough water for ducks to see from the air, and that's how I'm gonna quantify it, and of course, even that's not exclusive.

Some water they might swim along and then find little channels off that maybe you can't see from the air because they're covered over with brush, but they could swim through it off the main water, something like that.

But by and large, I'm looking for water that birds can see from the air, uh, particularly water that I could put decoys on so that the birds can see the decoys from the air.

Now again, you do not exclusively have to hunt waterfowl with decoys, but it's a fairly common technique used across a wide variety of applications, wet and dry.

And then you've got the dry side, which I will talk about a little bit here, but I think the majority of new hunters, and I think probably just the majority of waterfowl hunters overall, are going after ducks in near or next to water.

And there's good reasons for that.

Uh, for the dry hunting, you know, you're typically, not always of course, there is no always in hunting, but you're typically looking at fields that have maybe been recently cut that are along migration routes.

And so you've got things like that.

There's a lot of food scattered about, and the ducks are flying.

They come down there.

They're looking for the food.

Those can be great places to hunt ducks on the ground.

Uh, mostly though for dry land hunting, you're looking for food sources and food sources that are gonna be appealing.

Course could absolutely be local birds.