The old days of Ducks

Back when I was 7 years old I began helping the guys on our lake band ducks for the Feds. (1956).

they had formed a group known as the Canandaigua Lake Duck Hunters, and were asked IF they would help out for a period of 3 weeks banding the ducks for the feds.

47 years later we were told they had enough information, and told we could abandon the banding project.

The leader of this group was a man named Rodge Case, a Bee Keeper who led the group for all those 47 years.

I became the secretary for the group at a young age, and stayed in that position until I moved south in 2009.

WE raised money for various projects, one being the Ray Russell Junior Duck Club where eggs were distributed to local school children along with incubators, and they hatched and raised the ducklings until it was time to release them into the wild.

Another project was the dredging of the south end of the lake through the cat-tails to provide nesting areas for ducks.

Here is a picture of our dredging project dedication. Rodge Case is the fellow 5th from the left. Sure do miss those old days. I am the third in from the left in the red jacket.

The lower picture is Dick Russell with his Grandfather's Punt Gun that was used on Lake Ontario. Dick kept thee Junior Duck Club going until his death a couple of years ago.

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I've personally shot a few ducks banded in Canada as well as had hunters I've guided do the same thing. It seems that the new wildlife managers don't think the old ways are important anymore sadly. Nice pictures and good story.

When I lived in Maryland I saw a few of those guns too.

 

Wow! What a gun!
I grew up 20 minutes from the border in St.Catharines, Ontario. We lived on the bank of Lake Ontario. The city of Toronto on the north side of the lake was the view from our family room and kitchen/dining rooms. To the east was the Welland Canal and to the west the old original canal at Port Dalhousie. I used to hunt the big rafts of bluebills that migrated in each November. We used to watch guys working their way out them with their skulling boats and shoot them on the east side of the canal. Those traditional styles of hunting are gone now. We watched the last of that generation of hunters.
As a teenager I used to work some of the bigger shoots like the Can-Am (Canadian & American ) skeet shooting championships loading machines between rounds for the squads at the 3F Gun Club in Lewiston, NY. Those were good times!

 

That old Punt Gun is now housed in the showroom of the Turnbull Manufacturing and Restoration company in Bloomfield, NY.

The fellow who does the checkering, and one of the gunsmiths are members of the club (the Checkering man is now the Secretary) and Doug Turnbull is on the BOD.

Dick Russell felt this was a fitting place for his Grandpa's gun to be on display.

47 pounds, 7 feetlong, and a 2 gauge.

 

My Gosh Hasbeen,

If this is the Fin~Feather~and Fur gun club up in Lewiston you are talking about, I used to shoot registered Skeet at that club back in the 60's.

Great club, and what meals they used to put on evenings before the shoots.

They used to have a fountain spirting out Champaign, and there was a fellow (me) that didn't remember he had to shoot the mornings after...They went first class back then at that club.

Sure miss those old days ~~~

 

Same club I do believe. I had a friend who was a couple years older than me. He was a member at the club and was very involved in their pheasant program. I don't recall the champagne fountain but the bar at that club was where I got drunk the very first time. We spent the weekend working a skeet tournament. There was a big celebration after the shoot and my buddy who was legal drinking age kept buying me drinks, lol. If memory serves I was 17. My memory is a bit dim 40 years later and seeing the website I realized those big annual shoots were called the 3F Summer Classic, not Can-Am as my memory seemed to think. What I remember most about that club was the pig roast they held after the shoot, it was the first time I had seen or heard of a Perazzi and a set of sub-gauge tubes, I remember helping out on weekends at the pheasant pens and bass ponds and I remember the member who pulled in on the rifle range with his fully restored WW2 Willy's Jeep complete with a working Browning M2 .50 and cut loose a few bursts. The noise was incredible. It brought the summer classic skeet shoot to a standstill as it drowned out the noise of the shoot and scared half the shooters to death wondering what was going on! You could feel the percussion in the air from that big gun firing! I'll never forget that! I posted a link to the club.

http://3fclub.org/

 

A few oldies going back to when I still had hair and dogs.

 

Great topic, as I was raised a bird hunter in the PNW (Pacific North West). Dam near every weekend the old man and I were chasing some sort of upland bird from Sept until Thanksgiving, then we’d really settle in on the waterfowl until the remainder of the season, ending in late January. Luckily our area would give us a few banded mallards every year. I’ve got his calls/bands since he passed and I know we each have a band from Great Bear Lake in the NWT’s. Which is a heck of a long ways from Central Washington! I remember my band was at least 8 or 9 years old; that was such fun part of the hunt in the 80-90’s for me, always looking for jewelry on those cupping flocks.

 

I have at least 75 bands I've recovered over the years and given as many away to new hunters or visiting friends that were with me on hunts. I have three reward bands($100). Two were on black ducks and 1 from a drake mallard. The second snow goose I ever shoot I was hunting in QC with an outfitter. The bird was 12 years old. I also shot a Canada with a Miner band and one that was banded in Greenland and I shot the bird on a hunt in Northern Ontario.

 

The reward bands are the green ones. The yellow/black tarsal band was on one leg of the Greenland Canada Goose and the other leg had an aluminum clip-ring band.

 

Early on we had so many re-trapped birds coming for a free meal, we needed to identify these so we didn't have so much paper work to do.

A member of the club who was a Chemist for Kodak in Rochester (NY) came up with a lacquer compound that we painted the bands with a different color each year. This helped us so when we saw that year's particular color we would just send it on it's way and not have to keep recording the same duck over and over that year. Now I remember there were certain colors we couldn't use because of the Reward Bands.

I still have DVDs made from the old 16mm recordings of the 1964 banding project and occasionally look at that again. Funny to see me at such a young age.

Thousands of Cannies, Redheads, and Scaup were on that lake after January, now it's mostly those big white birds.

 

That's the place Hasbeen ! Too many headaches to count were had at that wonderful club. For an 18 year old and his first time drinking Champaign, I really never learned NOT to enjoy that stuff too much the night before the shoots. Thanks for the fond memories of that club !

 

That is a great club. If I am ever in the area I will definitely drop by and see if they allow guests to shoot. Who knows maybe I'll even time it to be there for the 3F Classic Summer Shoot and shoot some registered skeet targets just to participate. I haven't shot registered skeet since 2005. Serving two disciplines (registerd trap & skeet) took away from one to feed the other($) so I had to choose one.....

 

Duck's today.....I am quickly approaching my 60's, won't be much longer until my 70's so I am making as many as memories as I can while I can. I try to hunt as many days as possible from opener to freeze up. Living on the prairies I rarely shoot water any more and when I do it's puddlers in sheet water or very small potholes barely more than ankle deep. I like not having to don waters and chase cripples through reeds and cattails or water deep enough for them to dive and slip away. A few buddies still run dogs so that's the only time I hunt water deeper than my ankles or brush lined sloughs. 99% of my hunting is harvested grain fields nowadays.....