There's a lure of wood ducks beyond the fact that they're predominantly Texan | Leggett

Sometimes we forget — or I forget — just how cool wood ducks are.

Now that deer seasons are all but over, I’ve been spending some time thinking about these brilliantly colored, smallish native ducks. They do migrate but spend most of their off time hanging out in the woods and creek bottoms of East Texas.

They can show up in Oklahoma and Arkansas at times, even down in Mexico, but they are predominantly Texans in the winter. Back in the late ‘70s, after Rana and I had gotten married and had no money, wood ducks made up a significant portion of our diets.

I had a small deer lease close to the house we rented outside Marshall. It sat close to a big bend in the nearby Sabine River, my home river, so to speak. I could slip out there in the afternoons and stand about 50 yards from the southern edge of the lease, which was mostly just a big clearing in a pine plantation.

About 15 minutes before the close of shooting time, the little speedsters would come zipping just above the tree tops, squealing in the way that earned them their nickname “Squealers,” headed for the river just to our north where they would spend the night in a massive roosting raft.

By timing my shots carefully and with a big lead, I could knock down two of them that we could have for supper. Back then, the daily limit of wood ducks was no more than two. They were 70-point ducks under the 100-point rule Texas was using. And since woodies were the main duck we had to choose from, they were perfect for us.

Those guys were essentially native and had lived near there all summer and fall. They had grown fat on acorns, which they would suck up off the surface of sloughs and creeks. I’d brown them in a cast iron Dutch oven and then move them into the regular oven to finish cooking in their own fat.

The result would be tender, delicious ducks that were high-hog eating for me, and Rana got her first taste of wild ducks. There would be a layer of fat under the skin that made them look almost like balloon animals once they were plucked.

Back in high school, the LaGrone brothers and I would drive down into the flooded Socagee Creek bottom close to the site of an 1830s community known as Pulaski. There is a state historical monument on the bank of the Sabine where we would launch a boat to run trotlines in the summer.

The town played out more than 100 years before we started hunting around there, but there was one place where the river would flood, and we’d wade in there just before dark. It wasn’t really legal, I don’t think, but just about sundown, wood ducks would begin raining down through the trees.

They would be landing mere feet from us, raising hell as they renewed their friendships for the night. I don’t think I ever actually killed a single duck back then, but it was unbelievable to be standing in waist-deep water with ducks literally swimming between our legs.

Nothing could keep them out of their roosting spot, not even three goofy teenagers in leaky waders, hoping to kill a couple for food.

Not long after that, somebody came up with the idea of building Toledo Bend down below Lufkin. That changed the flow of the Sabin River, which moved the ducks elsewhere and that exciting wood duck experience went away. I have not been back in 60 years, but every January I get a hankering to revisit Panola County and just see if some of those wood ducks might be back.

A man can dream.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Recalling with fondness the lure, searching for native wood ducks