doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Sneak Shooting for Canvasback

MarketHunter,

Nice bag! Hope to shoot some myself tomorrow.

Best,
QD

Now I'll have to get some Cans and try them for myself. We have blues and old squaws on the lower Niagara River, I'm guessing there are Cans too. I need to talk with some duck hunters.
Chris

Nice hunt and photos, thanks for posting.

It may interest you to know that canvasback hens are not all that abundant. Drakes make up about 70% of the population and hens only 30% due to the hazards they face while nesting. My friends and I try to avoid shooting hens, especially canvasbacks. It's kind like catch-and-release fishing; shooting drakes really doesnt hurt the population.

Thanks again for the neat pictures,

CK

We have witnessed large 50,000 plus groups of Canvasbacks where the ratios are closer to 8 or even 10 to 1, drakes to hens.

The day in the pictures it was about 30 degress, ice was making on everything. We had a sheet of slush ice drift in the decoys twice and screw them all up. I don't know what the water temperature was exactly but I know that you didn't want to get into it. That boat is actually amazingly stable. It's 19 feet long, and wide enough that you can get into it without tipping. We haven't swamped it yet.....

As far as the canvasbacks being 70% drakes, we don't see anything like that were we gun for them. The flocks are about 50/50 drakes and hens. We try to go for the drakes but on a rough sneaking day like that we were keen to get finished up and head back to the duck shack. We were all solid ice from the belly down, ice on the gunbarrels, and wet from the waves blowing up our sleeves and down our necks.

The canvasbacks from there are excellent on the table. They feed on the wild celery that still grows where we shoot. Further south you get them occasionally that are a little strong. I think they get into the mussells once they get into country that doesn't have the vegetation they like the most.

And you're all exactly right about the old time price of canvasback. I've got some commission merchant price sheets in my collection that list mallard at $1 or less and cans at $5.


Destry

I believe those prices were per brace, meaning per pair. Amazing the cost of a pair of wild ducks at the turn of the century were the price of several pounds of steaks.

Cans routinely raft on the Miss. right north of the bridge on 70. Not the canal, the river. In the 1000's.
I wonder why I've neer seen a boat down there.
Any of you guys notice them when driving west?

When sneaking can you power up above the raft, and then let wind and current take you back to it? I noticed the motor.

Your talking about west into St. Louis on HW 70?

These guys anchor up wind and when the cans land in the decoys, then release the anchor and drift into the decoy set. Like the old time market gunners in the upper Mississippi and Great Lakes did.

We just use the motor for running back to the anchor buoy after a sneak and for picking up birds. I've seen guys over there motor down on a sneak if there was no wind. But we just don't do it, it doesn't seem right, plus I'm sure it's illegal there same as it is here. If there's no wind you just paddle, though we usually don't go out sneaking if there's no wind anyway.

The motor mount isn't original to the boat, though it was added a long time ago. Originally these boats were rowed, this one still has the big set of removeable iron oarlocks. We use the oars for picking up decoys if the water is too deep to wade.

As far as the price of canvasbacks, it depends on who was selling them if it's singles or pairs. I've got about 20 different price sheets ranging from in the 1870's to the late teens from all over the country and it was different depending on who you were dealing with.

And the prices on these sheets are usually what they were buying them for, not the sale price. I've only ever seen a couple price sheets where the birds were priced to sell and don't own one. They're scarce, think because most of the selling was done out of shops, whereas the birds to be bought were shipped in by train. No need to have a printed price sheet when somebody was just walking in the store.


Destry

I grew up in a fishing village of subsistence hunting. Ducks around Christmas were $2 a pair.