[mobirdhunter]

Originally Posted by Kevin McCormack

I lived and worked in Overland Park KS in the early 1970s and fell in with a couple who wanted to learn how to waterfowl hunt. Being a Chesapeake Bay area transplant, I struck a deal with them to take me on their every-weekend forays up into northern MO and southern IO for quail and pheseant.

It was a marriage made in heaven; they had a great Brittany Spaniel, no children at home, and a "Mini Winnie" (18-ft. Winnebago). On Fridays after work we would drive north from KC into southern IO and park the Winnie either on public hunting lands or private farms they had cultivated good relations with over the years. We made the weekend of it, hunting roughly in a triangle from Adair northwest to Exira then due east to Guthrie Center then back to Adair. There were wild quail everywhere and the biggest pheasants this Eastern Boy had ever seen.

We found a local man about an hour and half southeast of KC who owned a farm within a couple of hundred yards off the mainstem of the river who would cut the dike every fall with his bulldozer and flood about 50 acres of standing milo, then repair the dike for the winter. I taught them everything I could about duck shooting; decoy placement, how to call, effective range of their guns, concealment, lack of movement, etc. There were no divers to speak of in that area but we ran wild on puddle ducks; lots of ringnecks and woodies not to mention mallards and the frequent Black Duck.

They were great people and we both learned a lot. I think of them frequently. I left Kansas in 1973 and moved back east to MD; the lure of the salt air and the Canvasbacks were my siren call. Those were the days!

Kevin, I know the area. It still has decent cover, but not nearly the birds it once had. We still enjoy it.