Wake Early and Be Ready to Shoot Fast -- It's Wood Duck Season

It's now less than a week to a hallowed date on the calendar. Wood duck season opens Thursday in Virginia, nine days later in Maryland. What, you didn't know?

Well, it's a small fraternity, but for those who have enjoyed a good mid-Atlantic wood duck hunt, few pleasures compare. They are our prettiest ducks, for starters, particularly the compact drakes with their bright, harlequin plumage and distinctive crested topknots.

They live in the prettiest places, deep in the woods where they feast on acorns this time of year, and they fly fast in mysterious ways. Woodies are twice-a-day fliers. If left undisturbed, they go from safe places where they roost at night to tangled inland bogs and beaver ponds where they paddle around feeding all day, arriving at first light and staying till last light.

They have a distinctive call, a high, insistent "peep, peep" that gives them away an instant before they whoosh into sight. And whoosh is the right word. Of all the ducks we see, the speed of woodies is only surpassed by lightning-quick greenwing and bluewing teal.

Eat? Bless my soul, an acorn-fattened wood duck, roasted rare, is as good as it gets.

In fact, the seasons that open hereabouts this month are not just for wood ducks. It's general duck season, with only the wary black duck protected until November. But because woodies buzz off for warmer climes as soon as the air gets cold, it's our last and best chance to pursue them. In Virginia, they're actually nicknamed "summer ducks."

Wood duck hunters have special places to go and don't share the coordinates with anyone. In the morning, it can be a little wooded stream somewhere, or a pond or a tidal marsh ringed with trees, the more tangled the better. You have to get there early. Legal shooting time is a half-hour before sunrise and if you're lucky, they won't beat the clock.

The flock usually pours in all together. The shooting lasts a matter of minutes and you're home for breakfast. It's the same if you hunt an evening roosting place. The birds roll in right at dusk in a bunch, silhouetted against a charcoal sky.

I don't like to hunt wood ducks in the evening for two reasons: Legal hunting time ends at sunset and woodies often don't fly till later, and if you do knock a duck or two down in thick cover, it's a lot easier to find them as the day grows brighter than as dark closes in.

The time to scout a wood duck hole is right now. Woodies establish flight patterns and stick to them unless somebody scares them off with a fusillade. But patterns change, year to year and week to week. I have a nice wood duck spot in a creekside oak grove a few miles from home, but when the dog and I busted briers to get there last week on a scouting foray, we found nary a bird. Two weeks earlier we'd rousted a dozen.

Wood duck hunting is not terribly productive for novices. You don't get many second chances as the birds whizz by at warp speed, dodging through trees, which makes for difficult shots. If you're going to get up at 4 a.m., don waders and forge through the greenbriers by flashlight to a place nobody else even knows exists, then await the dawn in hopes of a few passing shots -- you'd like to bring back something.

This year, opportunities are greater. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has upped the daily allowable limit for woodies from two to three, and both Maryland and Virginia took the feds up on the increase.