Dennis Anderson: Ducks, many or few, are at the heart of it

When Denny Kumlin was a kid growing up in south Minneapolis, everything west of Hwy. 100 was fair territory for bird hunting. This was in the 1940s, and Kumlin, his dad and brother had received a double-barrel shotgun in the mail from the boys' grandfather, who lived on Rainy Lake, near International Falls.

"When that gun arrived we took it apart and looked it all over," Kumlin said. "My father had an interest in hunting but didn't have a gun. This one got him started."

Kumlin, age 73, has in the years since seen some of the best that Minnesota has had to offer, measured by the breadth and health of its farmland natural resources, and some of the worst. Saturday, when the state's duck season opens anew, he is hoping for something resembling the former, hunkered down as he will be with his sons and a few friends near a west-central Minnesota duck shack he's leased or owned for a half-century.

"It's not so much whether I actually shoot birds, that's not so important anymore," he said. "But seeing birds and being in their environment, that's very stimulating."

Kumlin is among Minnesotans, fewer now, who bridge the present with a very different past. Everyone hunted, or seemingly so, when he was a student at Minneapolis Washburn. And for good reason: Most families were only recently removed to the Twin Cities from small towns or farms, so hunting was still an important part of their lifestyles. Also, back then, pro sports teams weren't around to occupy people's time. Nor, in the numbers they are today, were golf courses.

And ducks. In the country south of Willmar, and to the north, too, toward Glenwood, ducks at times when Kumlin was a kid blackened the sky.

"I recall one opening day when my dad and I stayed in the Paris Hotel in Benson, right along the railroad tracks," Kumlin said. "We paid a farmer $1 a day to hunt that weekend. In the hotel there was only one bed in our room and my dad and I slept in it together. During the night, thinking it had begun raining, I jumped up and ran to the window. But it was only the old radiator gurgling. I can still hear my dad chuckling."

"We eventually bought it for $1,800," he said. "Our first year we got a few ducks. But the six guys in the shack next to us, they had 48 greenhead mallards and canvasback drakes hanging on the north side of their shack after opening weekend. So it was pretty good."

Few if any hunters will kill those numbers of ducks in Minnesota this weekend. Kumlin knows that, as does everyone else who will go afield. And yet ... and yet: So strong is the seduction of the "environment of ducks," as Kumlin puts it, that something approaching 100,000 Minnesotans will hunt nevertheless.

Why? Because in the end, some things haven't changed so much since the 1940s, fewer ducks or not.

A sun rising over a dank marsh, with its muskrats and red-winged blackbirds and blue herons, those are the same. Similarly, a blind shared with a son, daughter or friend. So, too, much of waterfowling's accoutrements, from old boats to patched waders, vintage guns to wet dogs. Additionally, waterfowling's challenges remain generally unchanged; the calling, the shooting, the care and assemblage of decoys.

Denny Kumlin and other hunters of his generation saw lots of ducks in Minnesota in the old days and with their tired Winchesters and Remingtons felled proportionate numbers. The late Rollie Johnson had an outdoors TV show on WCCO back then and each week as Kumlin watched intently the famed Jimmy Robinson would call in from wherever he was in Canada, talking as fast as popcorn popping and reporting that ducks were everywhere, everywhere: bluebills, cans, mallards, wigeons and gadwalls.

All of it dependent on ducks, few or many notwithstanding.