2017 Texas Teal Season Recap

Last season (2016-17) was our first real attempt at hunting the early blue wing teal season. We knocked down a few birds and Mack got in her first duck retrieves but it wasn’t quite dialed in. We weren’t quite in the right spot and watched most of the birds zoom right past our spread out of range. We shot about an equal number of teal and rattlesnakes – fun times!

This year we started off in similar fashion on our first hunting only getting a few birds but some post-hunt scouting ended up paying off. We found a few hundred teal stacked up on a larger pond and decided to come back the next weekend and hunt the far side of the water – quite a hike with decoys through snake infested terrain. We arrived the next Saturday evening and were quickly greeted by a skunk that my almost 2 year old lab Mack thought was going to be her new friend. You can guess how that turned out. The other fun problem that evening was bugs. Specifically gnats. Thousands of them, everywhere. It was brutal.

We had decided to haul the decoys across the pond the night before so walking across the levy watching for snakes and swallowing gnats added to the fun. We would soon know if all of our suffering was worth it. After a night in the tent with a still-stinky dog we were up and ready to go around 5am. We had camped pretty close to where we were going to hunt so we got to sleep in by duck hunting standards!

After grabbing a bite to eat and some coffee we made the hike to the decoys we had hauled over the night before and quickly set out about three dozen teal and a few pintail for good measure as well as some teal mojos. We also brushed in our spots a bit but really nothing more than trimming the tops of the bushes off that we were sitting behind to make sure we had open shooting lanes. It was a slow start and we didn’t get the usual flurry of activity at dawn that usually happens. As we were discussing the possible errors of our plan everything changed and within 10 minutes we had a two man limit of teal. We ended up with a mixed bag of green wings and blue wing teal. It was our first DIY limit on early season teal and the extra adventure was all worth it!