“Apparently drunk as a lord on the wine of the north wind and the mysterious call of the season, bluebills may come in from all sides, at all levels, now skimming over the surface of the water, now swooping down from above. Stand up suddenly in your blind and you’re likely to get your cap knocked off — if not your head.” — Jimmy Robinson
Arkansas has its mallards, with their florid feathering and graceful aerobatics — poetry on wings. But the north country, particularly that part of the north that is blessed with large lakes, is the province of bluebills, or scaup. These birds arrow southward from the subarctic at autumn’s last call, an eyelash ahead of winter and freeze-up. No waterfowlers appreciate these black darts — these “rockets of the north,” as the late Jimmy Robinson described them — more than Minnesotans. Charlie Hays of Princeton is one. “Bluebills are just a wonder to watch and to hunt,” Hays said. “Anyone who loves ducks can’t help but love bluebills. To see a flock of 25 or 30 turn for your decoys with their wings set can scare the hell out of you.”
Hays’ duck camp — bluebill camp — is on Lake of the Woods, near the Northwest Angle. It’s there that, on the first Saturday of October, he will hunker in a plain wooden blind on a nondescript island and … shoot one bird.
“That’s the rule we hunt by at our camp,” Hays said. “Opening day, you get one bird. The thrill is in seeing them, watching them.”
These days, bluebills — scaup (they come in greater and lesser varieties) — are in the news. And not in an encouraging way.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) has imposed a one-bluebill limit on Mississippi Flyway hunters for 40 days of the coming 60-day season, with two ‘bills allowed the remaining 20 days.
The reason: Bluebill numbers have declined significantly the past two decades
Minnesota waterfowlers hollered “foul” louder and more often following the service’s action than anyone else, and the state’s Department of Natural Resources has appealed the reduced limit.
Forty-five days of two birds daily, with one bluebill allowed the remaining 15 days, would be fairer to hunters, the agency believes, and no less protective of the bird.
What’s more, argues DNR waterfowl specialist Steve Cordts, a two-bluebill daily limit would keep most Minnesota duck hunters from running afoul of the law by mistaking bluebills for similar-looking ring-necked ducks — whose limit this fall will be six daily.
• • •
However the impasse is resolved, the fracas that has followed the USFWS bluebill-limit reduction has underscored anew how much Minnesota waterfowlers love this bird.
Such affection might be beyond the understanding of waterfowlers in Tennessee, Iowa, Missouri or even Arkansas.
How, they wonder, can a small black and white bird with a reputation (in the South) for tasting “fishy” entice so many duck hunters?
The answer blows in the cold winds that jump-start the bluebill’s late migration and the wintry weather that washes these birds southward.
In mid- to late October, lakes and rivers near The Pas, Manitoba, about 400 miles north of Winnipeg, will freeze, driving vast rafts of bluebills into the air, where they will circle in great waves, gaining altitude.
Lake Manitoba awaits to the south, a vast inland ocean, and just beyond, Delta Marsh.
It is on Delta Marsh that bluebills will seek food and refuge. It is there also so often over so many years that Robinson and guests at his Sports Afield duck camp hunkered in phragmites on frigid mornings, awaiting these rockets of the north.
Nourishing themselves a final time, the ‘bills will soon take to the air once more, vectoring now for Lake of the Woods — where Hays and scores of other Minnesota waterfowlers have awaited them for generations.
Days — perhaps weeks — later, the birds will continue southward to Lake Winnibigoshish, Leech Lake, a smattering of lakes near Ashby, some waters near Willmar, then, too, farther south onto and over the Mississippi River.
http://www.startribune.com/sports/outdoors/28092844.html?page=2&c=y
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