Ron Wilson knows the score, and it’s not the one scribbled on his golf card.
Three hundred days of sunshine, courses open year-round. Shirt-sleeve days in January, humidity lower than the Broncos’ playoff hopes. It’s the sort of chamber-of-commerce hype that brings people scampering to Colorado from the Rust Belt faster than you can say “30-below wind-chill factor.”
But the Englewood resident, himself a long-ago refugee from Chicago, also knows something else.
“The ducks are here. We’ve got birds all over the place,” he said Thursday from a blind beside the South Platte River south of Greeley.
Wilson hunts often enough to fully grasp the situation – about three days a week on average. He declares his passion on a personalized license plate that reads, “Duknut.”
He calculates that at least 80 percent of the ducks, mostly mallards, that winter along the Platte and other water courses in northeast Colorado have arrived, courtesy of a polar express that two weeks ago plunged the northern prairie into a mind-numbing deep freeze. The thermometer hit 45 below in Edmonton, only slightly less in waypoints south.
The long-anticipated migration has arrived. The trouble, as Wilson and every other zealot who is cracked on ducks knows too well, is finding a match between birds and something remotely resembling hunting weather.
Wilson and his buddies experienced these magic moments the previous week, when the same cold front locked up most casual water, while a layer of hard-packed snow blanketed grain fields. The combination sent these new arrivals flocking toward the river and adjacent warm-water sloughs.
“When you’ve got a layer of snow covering the feed, they’ve got to come to the river corridor to eat,” Wilson said.
At various locations, hunters stacked up limits of fat yellow-legged mallards, with plenty of time for a leisurely lunch.
Now, between storm pulses, the weather had moderated – 18 degrees at sunrise, clear skies, not a breath of wind.
Small lakes had reopened to receive resting birds; wild wings had deserted the river corridor. Wilson, a former collegiate golfer who played in the NCAA Tournament back in the day, might easily have scheduled 18 holes later in what dissolved into a sunscreen kind of day.
But make no mistake: The birds are here, both ducks and geese.
To track them, Wilson joins a network of hunters in exchanging real-time information.
On a morning when diffused sunlight flickers off fog rising from the river, the sound of his cellphone breaks the stillness. A friend somewhere downriver wants a report on duck movement. Or perhaps he’s simply bored.
Early in the conversation, a mallard drake streaks in low through the cottonwoods, sets its wings and glides over the decoys. Wilson bangs down the phone, grabs his gun, drops the bird with a quick shot, then picks up the phone to continue the exchange. Such is life in the modern duck blind.
When he gets back home, he joins a growing gaggle of Internet chatters who track migrations and swap assorted tips on an information highway that reaches all the way to Canada.
Wilson has heard through the grapevine that an even greater concentration of ducks has arrived along the river east of Greeley, in the reach from Kersey to Goodrich and beyond.
“I’ve almost bagged as many ducks already as I did all last season. Man, it’s been good,” Wilson chortled.
He knows full well that the proof of a season that extends through Jan. 28 lies in the seven weeks ahead. If the weather cooperates with pulses of snow and cold, this has the potential to be among the best hunts in recent years.
But if sunshine and calm predominate, Wilson might as well go back to playing golf.
Charlie Meyers can be reached at 303-954-1609 or cmeyers@denverpost.com.
