Feliz Navi-Duck

Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas carry added meaning for us waterfowlers

By Nate Corley

No one embraces the holidays like a duck hunter. Much of this has to do with the calendar. Unlike, say, the bass fishing community or the pistachio face-carving community (Google it), the concentrated window of duck hunting opportunity overlaps for most with the major holiday season. So odds are if you grew up in a duck hunting family, you learned to mark time not by the calendar but holiday-related waterfowl traditions.

The festivities for us commenced in October. Spooky season. Witches and goblins and special offers on pumpkin-spice motor oil at the local auto parts store. But as grade-school friends marked the season by stockpiling Skittles, my father made known that October was for celebrating the Canada goose. 

Compounding the association between Halloween and hunting was the fact that the farmer of our best goose field discovered he could make a lot more cash if he stopped growing cucumbers and converted his highway-adjacent 60-acre plot into a haunted corn maze. Hunting access could continue, he said, as long as we picked up our hulls and stayed away during business hours. 

So to this day, as the nights get longer and the mists of October gather and swirl, Halloween season brings to mind not ghouls but the haunting chorus of unseen Canadas. And sudden dark shapes emerging from the fog. And the unique and unsettling experience of retrieving fallen birds among rotting pumpkins, cardboard tombstones, blank-eyed clown effigies, and plastic zombie hands emerging from the muck. If that doesn’t get the Halloween juices flowing, I don’t know what will.

Next up on the holiday calendar: Thanksgiving. Some in our culture struggle to find gratitude late in November, with the onset of miserable weather and the inevitable crawl toward 5 p.m. sunsets. Not so the duck hunter. Whatever the opposite of seasonal affective disorder is, we’ve got it. Because for us, the death throes of the sun and the biting north wind don’t mark the beginning of a months-long sentence of sedentary solitude, withering indoors in front of a screen—they mark the commencement of peak waterfowl migration. And with it, a summons to sally forth and greet the dawn, miserable weather or not. 

It’s hard to remember a Turkey Day dinner when I didn’t sit at the table with remnants of the morning’s mud under my fingernails. And a feather or two caked to my shoes. And a heart full of joy as the echoes of feeding chuckles and clicking shells and laughing friends meld into a song of thankfulness.

Then, of course, Christmas. If there was a season tailor-made for the heart of the hunter, it’s Yuletide. Others may sing about wandering and wondering, out under the sky—waterfowlers actually do it. Others may wax nostalgic about faithful friends who are dear to us, and may be near to us once more—waterfowlers are shoulder-to-shoulder with those friends, in a plywood blind, remembering the old days and greeting the new. Others may enjoy a steaming cocoa or a thick cup of eggnog as the wet snow slaps the window—but their pleasure is a flickering candle next to the roaring satisfaction of the duck hunter who was out in that wet snow, that very morning, and came back laden with game. Others may tell the story of how, in the holiest of moments, the animals were present as witnesses, and good news of great joy came to those abiding in the fields—waterfowlers understand that great joy still comes to those who keep watch in the fields, and that for those with ears to hear, the song which rings from the winter skies testifies yet to mystery and glory and goodwill toward men.

So happy holidays. Though, if you’re a duck hunter, they already are. 

 

Article originally published in Delta Waterfowl's winter 2025 magazine. 

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