I love duck hunting but I don’t get to go very often. We have good duck hunting around here but down South they are really fanatical. If you’re a duck hunter then no doubt you’ve heard of the flooded timber mallard hunting down at Stuttgart, Arkansas. Along with hunting in the rice fields. That area is legendary.

But I’ve got a buddy who has a ranch in East Texas that rivals any spot that I’ve duck hunted. He is Charles Allen, the owner of DiamondBlade Knives and Knives of Alaska. If you read last weeks article then you remember that I flew down to Texas for a writers hunt south of San Antonio.

But I had to fly down a couple of days early and stay a couple of days later so we could hit Charles’s ranch and hunt ducks. Allen’s ranch is in the Trinity River drainage so it is primo country. Charles’s got his master’s degree from Stephan F. Austin University in Biology and his master’s thesis was on Waterfowl Management.

He has done extensive work to enhance his property into a duck management area. He built a dam and has a 40-acre pond which is duck-infested, plus he has some controlled flooded timber. He has created the ultimate duck environment.

I always learn a lot when I duck hunt with him — what vegetation ducks like best, his strategy in throwing out his decoys, etc. etc. The first day he was a little worried about how well that we would do due to the drought-like conditions this summer. He didn’t need to worry. The first morning we had unbelievable duck hunting.

If you’ve never duck hunted, it is the closet thing to a video game that you’ve ever seen. The first morning a few of us were hunting the blinds on the tail end of the big pond. When teal come zipping in at Mach 5 about 8 to 10 feet off the water with the far brush line camouflaging their movement, they looked like a blip moving across the screen.

One flew by the blind at Mach 5 about 10 feet in front of us. I didn’t hardly even see it but Charles threw up his shotgun and drilled it. It was going so fast that it didn’t even hit the water until it was 100 yards past us. (Charles says it was only 60 yards, but this is my story).

Wow, Charles can shoot. I used to shoot a shotgun a lot but don’t get to anymore and I am now a horrible shot. Embarrassingly so.

A lot of the pleasure in bird hunting is if you’re hunting with a well-trained bird dog. A good dog is a joy to watch and Charles has an English Cocker named Bo that was over the top fun to watch. In camp he is a loving, sweet playful dog but when he jumps in the duck blind, it is game on. He is all business.

Charles has a slot cut out in the bottom wall of the blind so Bo can sit on the floor with his head out. When ducks come in, he is watching them and when we shot and one dropped, he had it pinpointed. He is relentless when hunting for a downed bird.

If you had a crew of employees that worked as hard as Bo, you wouldn’t even have to go to work to manage them. Just show up Friday and give them their paycheck.

It didn’t take all of us long to get our limit. I can’t remember now for sure but I think that we were limited out by 8:30 a.m. or 9:30 a.m. After our exotic hunt, we hit it again. Not as good as our first hunt but still in the “great hunt” category.

Now, for the big question. Did you eat all of those ducks? OK, to be honest, used to when I shot ducks I’d dutifully eat them. But a few years ago while hunting with Charles he showed us all how to properly cook duck. Oh my gosh. I have never eaten that good. It was to die for. I’ve never been at a party where people were fighting over the last piece of duck.

To begin, he ages his ducks for 10 days. He has a walk-in cooler and after the hunt he hangs them in there whole. He doesn’t pick or clean them until he is ready to bone them out. So that I don’t screw up the recipe, here’s a TV show the High Road With Keith Warren did on Charles cooking duck. Skip over to 10 minutes to get to the duck cooking part: www.highroadhunting.com/the-high-road/how-to-hunt-and-cook-ducks.

If everyone learns to cook ducks like Charles does, lowbreeds will be stealing ducks instead of catalytic converters!