Teal season a little slow? Then turn your attention to gallinules and rails for some sure-fire action.
Robbie’s face lit up. His eyes bugged. A crazy grin creased his face. He’d just answered the cell phone from the passenger seat as we passed the Greater Macedonian Baptist Church on the way down to Venice.
“REALLY!” he blurted. “WOW! MAN! Sounds like a blast! Man, we can’t WAIT! Yeah. Fine. We’ll pick up some ice, some peanut oil and fish fry. See y’all in a little bit.”
“Well?” I gasped. “Let’s HAVE it? What did they do?”
Robbie turned toward me with a giddy grin.
“Pelayo says they WORE ’EM OUT! Says it was UN- real! Flocks of a dozen birds were blazing in while they chunked out the dekes! Says four of ’em limited out in half an hour! Then they rode herd on the reds in Main Pass and the river!”
“YEAH, YOU RIGHT!” I whooped, and we high-fived, causing the truck to swerve onto the shoulder.
“WATCHIT DAD!” Robbie yelled as his eyes bugged again.
I jerked my arm back, gripped the wheel with both hands and jerked us away from the ditch in the nick of time. My heart just missed jumping through my throat. An oncoming Suburban leaned heavily into his horn as he passed. Right behind him a truck had swerved onto the shoulder, thinking to avoid us.
It was opening day of teal season, and it was five in the afternoon. We’d missed the opener for the first time in history. The reasons and rebuttals had caused enough family strife, screaming and ugliness. So we’ll bypass them here.
Suffice it to say we meant to make up for it big time, hunting the next three days straight. Doc Fontaine’s houseboat would serve as base of operations. Delta National Wildlife Refuge would serve as the next morning’s set-up, as it had for Pelayo, Paul, Chris and Doc that morning.
At precisely 10:35 a.m. the previous January 21st, the anticipation started. A minute before, three greys were gliding in on locked wings.
“Only two more,” I had whispered to Robbie. “Take the lead drake.”
He nodded without taking his eyes off the ducks.
“Shoot the one in front,” I had whispered to Mikey.
They weren’t coming in to land — just for a look-see, as usual. They were hovering over the farthest decoys, and the lead drake started veering off over the open water. The others followed.
Whoops, I thought. They ain’t getting any closer.
“NOW!” I said and remained sitting. Blam! Blaaaam! Guns rose from either side of me. Two greys crumpled — the rear ones — and the lead drake flapped off unscathed.
“That’s it, gang!” I howled. “Til next year!”
Smiles and high-fives all around. We couldn’t have asked for a more pleasant finale.
Robbie and Mikey got in the ’rogue and started on the dekes as I sloshed out to retrieve the greys, beaming. We’d set up perfectly.
Late-season greys and widgeon, even mottled ducks, and a pair of wayward mallards had decoyed like on the opener. We’d shot like champs, and lost no cripples. Had pintail been legal and 10-pointers like in the old days, we’d have piled up 30 easy. These suckers seem to know the season’s closed on them the last couple of weeks. In Delta, they pour in like dos gris used to outta Delacroix in the ’70s.
I finally got to the greys when — “Look Dad!” — Mikey pointed from the ’rogue just as a swoosh of wings passed overhead. Four blue-wings buzzed us a farewell, resplendent in their late-winter plumage, those white crescents gleaming in the mid-morning sun. These were probably on their way back north from the Yucatan.
“See y’all next September!” I waved.
Now here we were, turning into Main Pass from the river with the sun rimming the clouds to the east with a red glow. The duck potato and three-square sprouted in vivid green from the fresh sandbars near the bank, the darker elephant ears on the older, higher bars behind. The leafy roseau and willows swayed from the northeast breeze.
What could be more glorious than an early front for teal season?
Mullet, reds and gar pushed their wakes through the weedy shallows as we paddled into the pond.
No need to hunt the big expanses of water with the roseau islands for teal. We hunt these on low-tide situations for greys during the big season. No reason for that now.
Teal like the shallow, weedy, seedy ponds surrounded by wild millet, three-square and duck potato. These are created by the new mini deltas just off the main passes.
“Check ’em out!” Mikey pointed above.
Yep, pintail, in a ragged V formation. I didn’t say anything, but we hadn’t seen any actual teal, and I was getting a little concerned.
“There’s some!” Robbie pointed from the point of the ’rogue.
“Those ain’t teal!” I laughed. “Those are gallinules.”
Five or six of them, and we watched them scurry into the grass, looking like anorexic pould’eau.
“Can we shoot ’em?!’’ Robbie beamed.
“Maybe later,” I said.
Actually, if we’d had a gun ready, I would have said blast away. Nothing wrong with gallinule, believe me. The meat’s nothing like its close cousin, the pould’eau. It’s much lighter and milder, pink almost.
Yet they eat the same vegetable matter as coots — a little heavier on seeds though. That probably does it.
“DOWN!” Mikey motioned just as the last decoy went out and I shoved the ’rogue into the bullrushes. A huge flock of teal, maybe 30, had seen the dekes, and were making a wide circle. What a sight. Eight months of anticipation glowed from every face. Anxious eyes followed the flock as it neared. As it swerved. Back. Forth. It was too much for the nervous system. I had to stifle a guffaw. Not yet … not yet … O.K. NOW!!
Blam-Blam-Blam!…Blam-Blam! They rocketed skyward, and we wrenched our necks trying to follow them. Blam! Blam!
Two fell from the fusillade. We were in hysterics.
“We waited too long!” I howled. “Geezum! Will we ever LEARN!!”
Two hours later, those were the only two teal in our bag. Oh, we’d seen more — a grand total of two other bands in the far distance. That’s teal for ya. Fickle, fickle, fickle. No duck gets wanderlust like teal. Here today, gone tomorrow.
And sadly, for the past couple of years, they’ve been mainly in the “gone tomorrow” mode. Sometimes not even going through the “here today” part. Lately the teal season seems to pretty much mirror the regular duck season.
Not that it stops us from going out — not by a long shot. The skies had been empty (of teal that is; pintail swarmed) over Delta NWR that morning.
But the shallow water mudflats and weedy shorelines had not. Besides the usual mullet finning and swirling around in the shallows, we’d seen dozens of gallinules poking about the shorelines and paddling around, necks bobbing.
“Dad, can we blast them?” Robbie and Mikey kept asking while watching them scamper through the reeds.
“Not yet,” I kept saying, vainly holding out for teal. I knew the second we’d open up on them I’d look up to see a huge flock of teal flaring off.
Finally I gave up.
“Gentlemen,” I rose and announced. “Let’s get after the gallinules. Mom will want us to bring home SOME meat.”
Actually I’d been planning our gallinule assault for about the past hour of sitting in the blind. We sacked up the decoys and dumped them in the big boat. Mikey opted for redfishing, and Robbie and I for a gallinule stalk.
So we took off the black bungee cords that strapped down the ice chest, and stretched them tightly around the pirogue. The tightness was just enough to hold a few willow branches and roseau stalks. We stuffed these between the rubber cords and ‘rogue near the bow, and set off.
The plan was to paddle about scanning the reedy shorelines and hyacinth clumps for the wily gallinule, Robbie in the front with his gun, me paddling from the back. We were a sight.
Gallinules aren’t the wariest of fowl to begin with. During teal season, you can sometimes just slosh into range and blast the living hell out of them at will. They get a little warier come the big season.
Gallinules are a freshwater bird, unlike clapper rails (marsh hens) that inhabit the salt and brackish marshes. In fact, John James Audubon himself labeled clapper rails as “saltwater marsh hens.” You know them, they sound off right after your first shot at dawn — “KEK!-kek-kek-kek-kek.”
Places like Pass a Loutre WMA, Delta NWR and especially Salvador WMA contain ideal gallinule habitat with good numbers of birds. I’d say Biloxi WMA is about tops for rails, because of its more saline marsh.
In late September, gallinules are often bunching up. These are family groups, the broods having just matured, which makes them tender, perfect for the skewers and grill.
We’d just rounded some bullrushes growing on a point when Robbie looked back at me and pointed ahead excitedly. I peeked over his head, and sure enough, saw about a dozen gallinules, grouped up tightly, swimming awkwardly from a little roseau island toward the main shoreline. Robbie started positioning his gun. He looked back again, grimacing and hissing: “hurry up!”
He was right. We didn’t have long. Another 10 yards they’d be in the bullrushes and completely safe. Time to act.
Call me greedy, but I wanted to get in on the action too. The ducks had given us the slip, so we needed every one of these gallinules for the barbecued appetizer. I decided we’d “cross the T.”
That’s Navy talk, folks. Admiral Bull Halsey pulled it on the Japanese fleet in Leyte Gulf off the Philippines, and destroyed it in a holocaust of firepower from every gun in his fleet. It means positioning your ships to where EVERY ship can train EVERY gun on the hapless enemy.
We had two shotguns on board, and there’s no way I’d ever shoot over anyone, much less my son. So I shoved hard with the paddle — backwards — and the ’rogue turned sideways to our prey. The T was crossed.
“FIRE WHEN READY!” I howled
“BLAM!” Robbie raked them with the first shot. Sha-wuck, he pumped and — BLAM! — sent another wall of deadly steel at them.
BLAM-BLAM! I got off two quick shots into the flurry of flapping wings and flying feathers.
Sha-wuck — BLAM! Robbie raked them again.
“BLAM!” I finally emptied my gun. Silence. Feathers danced on the water’s surface. A couple of our prey were doing those crazy circles, but with heads submerged. A scene of total carnage lay ahead. We sat there grinning and trembling giddily.
We picked up eight from the massacre. The limit on these things is 15 per person. So we had more fun ahead, and as I said, an early front had barreled through on Friday.
On this Sunday morning, the breeze was still nice. The marsh was green and gorgeous. Pintail kept winging overhead. Mullet and reds blasted through the shallows at our approach. I was mesmerized by the scene, by the ambiance.
Who’d want to sit in a camp when you can do this, I was thinking when a blast from Robbie’s gun ended my reverie and almost jolted me overboard. BLAM! Another shot, and I looked over to see two more gallinules sprawled in the shallows next to a clump of hyacinths.
“Nice shootin’!” I bellowed as I paddled over to retrieve them. “And good eye, I hadn’t even seen ’em.”
Maybe because I’d been watching a flock of pintail overhead. We ended up with three more gallinule in the next hour.
The purple gallinule is somewhat migratory, but the common gallinule is the one you’ll mostly run across in our fresh marshes, and he’s a Louisiana local, here year ‘round, like our mottled ducks.
Over at Doc’s Cocodrie camp, after duck hunts during the big duck season, we’ll often go after rails. This is a more saline marsh and holds good numbers. What’s perfect is that the low tide generally comes mid-day or afternoon in this area in November, and that’s the best time to hunt rails from a pirogue.
Now you’ve got 2 or 3 feet of exposed mud bank between the cordgrass and the water. That’s just where the clapper rails like to poke around.
Unlike gallinules, rails eat animal matter — little snails, mollusks, worms, crabs. They poke for these on the exposed mudflats.
But rails never venture far from cover. You won’t find them in the middle of big expanses of mudflats with all the shorebirds. Rails are always skirting the edges of the cordgrass.
Limits on both rails and gallinules are 15 each. Robbie and I could legally have come home with 60 birds! Not bad.
But it never happens this way. For us a dozen is a good hunt.
Now what would Audubon, the patron saint of birdwatchers, say at this carnage? About 60 legal birds a day for two hunters?
He’d sneer. He’d call us pansies, wussies and chumps for such a pathetic bag. Audubon was a notorious hunter himself. He mowed the very objects of his famous drawings down like wheat, really piled ’em up.
In a book titled “Migratory Shore and Upland Game Birds,” he savors a hunt for plover and snipe outside of New Orleans in 1821. Two-hundred gunners took part:
“Several times I saw flocks of a hundred or more destroyed to the exception of five or six birds,” Audubon gushes on page 84. “Supposing each man to have killed 30 dozen birds that day, 144,000 must have been destroyed.”
Amazingly, rails, with their mollusk diet, are even pinker-meated and milder-tasting than gallinules. Heck, they’re pinker and milder than a specklebelly!
I like to simply broil both them and gallinules or barbecue them basted in a little butter and Worcescescescesccesces-tershire sauce.
Humberto Fontova is author of The Hellpig Hunt (discounted copies available at lasmag.com) and the newly released Fidel; Hollywood’s Favorite Tyrant, described as “Absolutely devastating! An enlightening read you’ll never forget,” by David Limbaugh and “A great book about Castro and the Hollywood pinheads who admire him,” by Bill O’Reilly.
