Birthday Bluebills for Delta’s Jim Fisher

An Epic Hunt at Mysterious ‘Lake X’

When Jim Fisher’s alarm went off Sunday morning, he hit the snooze button. Actually, he turned it off completely. It was his 44th birthday, after all, and he figured a little extra sleep would do his body good.

“My intentions were good, but I was too bloody tired to get up and hunt,” said Fisher, Delta’s director of conservation policy. “I spent most of Saturday on year-end yard duty, so I wasn’t moving as fast as normal and figured I’d sleep in a little before I went out. When I woke up, I was chomping at the bit.”

The day was shaping up nicely: a blustery weather system that would eventually bring the year’s first blanket of snow had Fisher with visions of bluebills dancing in his head. By 2:30 p.m., he and Mike Claussen, a friend and Delta member from Winnipeg, headed out for an undisclosed body of water.

“Where did you hunt,” I asked.

“Lake X,” he said.

“Lake X? Where’s Lake X?”

“Lake X is where I hunted.”

Fisher wouldn’t break under my relentless interrogation, but he did finally disclose some vital intelligence. “We had two comments when we got to Lake X: that there were tons of ducks flying over the road and no vehicles there. We had the place to ourselves.”

By tons of ducks, Fisher meant mallards and bluebills, the latter of which he covets more than any other waterfowl species on the planet.

In fact, the bluebill concentrations were so dizzying that Fisher (and I know him well) likely thought he had died and gone straight into a Les Kouba painting. “I’d rather shoot at one bluebill than kill a limit of geese or mallards any day,” he would say a day after the hunt.

Fisher and Claussen hunted about 200 yards from where they parked. They launched a canoe tipped with a two-horse silver-colored motor. All seemed perfect until they hit a rock and broke the motor’s shear pin.

“We really didn’t have the decoys we needed either,” said Fisher. “Some of my friends had the majority of my bluebill decoys, so we set out a hodgepodge of what we had.”

Translation: a melting pot of canvasbacks, redheads, buffleheads, mallards (yes, mallards) and some anchorless drake bluebills (which he snatched from a long line and clipped to the other decoys) to “brighten the spread.”

“We set two pods with a landing area in the middle,” he said. “The bluebills were flying almost immediately. It was just glorious. Flocks of 30 to 40 birds at a time, and all came past at high speeds and no more than 15 feet off the water out of the north.”

One problem: They weren’t decoying.

A fine birthday present.

As it turned out, Claussen, in true “bumbler fashion,” didn’t “properly” conceal the canoe and motor. “Most guys, you would think, would put the decoy bag over the silver motor,” said Fisher with a laugh. “Any potential positive impact of the decoys was wiped out by boat placement and the lack of concealing the motor.”

Fisher was hoping for a classic decoy hunt, especially on his birthday, but what he got was pass-shooting bliss, what with those bulbous-shaped bluebills (and some ringnecks too) barreling in from seeming all directions.

“Limits were taken in short order,” he said. “We were back at the truck by 4:30, with plenty of daylight left. Honestly, it ranks right up there with some of my best bluebill hunts. It was epic.”

A fine birthday present, indeed.

* Editor’s note: The waterfowl migration is in full swing throughout much of the four flyways. Recent weather patterns (snow, cold and strong winds) in Canada and some northern-latitude states have pushed fresh birds into many areas. Stay tuned.