Hasty – In a restless, wandering sky, a cloud takes on the appearance of a ship, which then morphs into a whale whose broad fluke trails off into wind-driven wisps.
This waterfowler’s Rorschach ends abruptly when dark specks suddenly appear on the whale’s torso, grow progressively larger and materialize as a flock of mallards.
The birds spy a spread of decoys arranged against a dense stand of cattails at the edge of a small lake, bank against the breeze and quickly lose a hundred feet in elevation.
Hard against the sun, the birds are dark silhouettes without color, and hunters hunched among the cattails are reluctant to shoot. When a green head briefly catches the light, a shot rings out and the second half of eastern Colorado’s duck season has begun. With a quick wave of his hand, Erik Wettersten sends his 6-year-old yellow Lab, Breeze, splashing off to retrieve the bird.
Wettersten has made the long trip from Fraser to this place a few hundred yards from the Arkansas River to answer a call almost as old as humankind. Man has been fascinated with waterfowl from the start, mesmerized by these wedges against autumn skies and driven to find ways to capture them.
Modern waterfowl hunting is a misnomer of sorts, a term that suggests a certain degree of active pursuit. Rather it is an exercise in clever waiting, as it is best defined by infinite patience and deceit. You get to imagine a lot of cloud shapes in between ducks.
In Colorado and other perpetually dry places, duck hunting also is a function of water, which, like gold, is where you find it. Nowhere is this more true than in the lower Arkansas River Valley, a place whose aquatic resources are drying up before our very eyes.
Once the brightest jewel of the state’s waterfowl crown, the southeast has shriveled beneath the multiple curses of drought, water diversion, agricultural changes and, ultimately, a shift in migration patterns.
Not long ago, hundreds of thousands of lesser Canada geese made the lower valley their winter homes; the town of Lamar billed itself as a goose-hunting capital, a claim without dispute.
When these dark geese drifted away to the Texas Panhandle and points southeast, they essentially were replaced by more transient flocks of snow geese. Snows now pause in the valley on their way south and again each spring en route to their northern nesting grounds.
But they leave a considerable void in between.
Now, in the growing light, flights of snow geese came streaming off John Martin Reservoir to settle on a field of winter wheat, intense white on dark green.
Straight overhead in their shrill tens of thousands they came, many low enough to shoot a day before the opening of goose season. When they later rose in a giant mass after filling themselves on green wheat, the sound came as a long, loud scream.
By a scheduling quirk, the duck season for the eastern plains opened Friday, the hunt for light geese a day later. The regular goose season, when Canada geese become legal game, opens Nov. 25 and extends through Feb. 18.
Hunters who turned out last weekend generally contented themselves with a mixed bag that included homegrown mallards spiced with the usual early migrators: widgeon, gadwall, pintail and a few holdover teal.
How the season progresses depends in large part on two elements of weather – northern storms that move flight birds down from the prairie, and continuing cold sufficient to keep them moving once they arrive.
Most duck species are in good supply, lending promise for a good hunt. But unless waterfowlers can piece together the proper blend of water and weather, they’ll spend too much time watching the clouds.
Charlie Meyers can be reached at 303-954-1609 or cmeyers@denverpost.com.
