I hunted with Dr. John Poirrier again today. John is the person that I bought C. J. from in November. He also owns C. J.'s mother and trained C. J., so he enjoys seeing how his dog is progressing.

He didn't get to see C. J. perform very much this morning because the ducks are not cooperating too good with us. Again today, only two groups hunted. You guessed correctly, Wayne Owen and me. Wayne went to hole 2 and his group killed one Mallard hen and I think it took the whole group to get the job done. John and I pulled my boat over from the north timber to the south timber and went to hole 12. This is the first time I have hunted it this year and it sure is pretty.

Around 7:00 a.m. a single Mallard drake responded to my call and landed in the south end of the hole. John was outside on the north side of the blind, so it was up to me to shoot the duck. I took care of that chore and C. J. retrieved him for me. About 7:30 a.m. a pair of Mallards worked our hole. All of the ducks we saw seemed to be hole shy and this pair was no exception. They wanted to land in the woods behind our blind, but I kept calling frantically until they got close enough to shoot at coming toward me. I missed one of them coming at me and knocked both of them down when they cleared the timber on my side of the hole. Both of them were crippled, however. C. J. got over to them in a hurry, but not quite quick enough. The hen only had a broken wing and we had a chase which went out of sight. When C. J. got back, she didn't bring the hen with her, but we found the drake which had been hiding while all of this was going on. I shot him on the water as he was trying to escape. C. J. scooped him up and got to carry something back to the blind after her long chase.

We saw several ducks, but only one other pair seriously worked our hole and like the first pair, they not only wanted to land in the woods, they did land in the woods south of our hole. After I tried to stalk them, they saw me and left before I could get a shot off at them.

We wound up with two pretty Mallard drakes. Both of them had bright orange legs. I think that means they are new ducks to our area. I hope they are and we have a lot more of them before the season ends Sunday.

More later,