Years and years ago I was sitting in a deer stand with my dad, and I decided I was tired of deer hunting. I’d taken enough deer to know that I could. I decided to look for a different type of hunting. A couple of days later, some friends of mine invited me to go duck hunting. When I watched my friends blow those duck calls and saw those ducks respond to the calling, change direction and come back and try to light on our decoys, I thought that was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. I bought a couple of duck calls, went to the local city park and started blowing duck calls to the ducks in the park. I could tell that the people in the park thought I was crazy from their reactions to my calls.
Most city parks have ponds, and generally those ponds will have ducks on them. The ducks on the ponds often will call to migratory ducks and pull those migratory ducks down to the city ponds. I decided that the best way I could learn to really talk duck was to listen to the duck calls that the ducks at the city pond gave and see what effects their calling had on the migratory ducks. Then, all I had to do was give the exact same calls that the city park’s ducks had given. I realize many people learn to call ducks from cassette recordings or by listening to other people call ducks. However, listening to the park ducks and attempting to make the sounds they made, I understood how to tell those ducks in the sky that I was a sexy little thing down here in the park, and they needed to come check me out.
Kent Outdoors has many waterfowl hunters from Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama and the Carolinas. Most of them typically want to hunt for about 3 days. They come to hunt with us at Kent Outdoors because they know we have ducks. After they’ve been here the first time, they usually keep coming back. Another drawing card for our north Texas duck hunts is that many hunters like to take a wide variety of ducks. We tend to get more wigeons, pintails and canvasbacks than hunters from the Southeast usually see and take. We have some hunters hunt with us who take species of ducks they’ve never seen before. We had a gentleman from South Carolina hunt with us toward the end of the season and he brought with him a list of six different species of ducks he wanted to take, freeze and take back to South Carolina to have mounted. In 2 days of hunting, he took all 6 species on his list.
I’m often asked, “How long is required for a hunter to get his limit of ducks at Kent Outdoors?” I explain, “That depends on how well a hunter can shoot.” Waterfowl hunting, regardless of where you hunt, is weather dependent. The good news is where we’re located we get ducks coming from the North headed to the South when a cold front arrives, and on a warm front we get ducks coming from the South, moving to the North. The morning before this interview in early January, 2017, Kent Outdoors had about 700 ducks coming in to our decoys.
Day 1: J. J. Kent Tells Us about Hunting Texas Ducks
Tomorrow: Geese, Blinds and Plenty of Waterfowling Fun at Texas’ Kent Outdoors
