Anderson: Duck hunting opener was special for Minnesota hunters celebrating with friends — and cigars

For duck hunters and their dogs, the first day of the season is the best time of year.

That’s because the chance to pull on waders and slog through wetlands and shallow lakes in the still-dark of early morning is an experience like few others.

Coffee is part of these good times, cup after cup, that and setting decoys, hiding in a blind and chitchatting while waiting for a bruise of oranges and reds and tangerines to brighten the eastern horizon.

“You don’t know how many more times you will shoot ducks and do not let anything spoil it for you,” Ernest Hemingway once wrote.

Nothing would spoil Saturday morning, the first day of Minnesota’s duck season, for Mike Arms of Crosslake, a retired Catholic priest, and John Arms, his nephew, of Minneapolis.

Along with Gus, Mike’s yellow Labrador retriever, the Arms boys were hoping to see a mallard or two arrow toward their decoys, or perhaps a wood duck or blue-winged teal.

Surprised by the northwest breeze that had kicked up, they waited and waited Saturday morning, but saw mostly empty skies.

“For us, ducks or no ducks, it’s an opening day tradition, smoking cigars,” John said.

Not far south of Crosslake, Bill Marchel and Rolf Moen clambered into Marchel’s mud-motor-powered boat early Saturday morning and guided the craft onto the Mississippi River.

Marchel, a wildlife photographer and outdoors writer, and Moen, a retired dentist, had piloted the boat on the same waters on countless previous duck openers. This one felt the same — minus the ducks.

“Our expectations were low,” Marchel said. “We scouted the river on Friday and covered a lot of miles. We saw only about 100 ducks. It’s not for a lack of wild rice. There’s a lot of rice this year, and it looks good.”

Sunrise came, Marchel said, and the same northwest wind that rolled over Mike and John Arms bobbed Marchel’s decoys in a quiet bay of the mighty Mississippi.

About as far south as he could be from Marchel and Moen and still be in Minnesota, Fred Froehlich watched the sun rise Saturday morning into a cloudless blue sky.

The longtime mayor of Nicollet, Minn., Froehlich is known even more widely as a duck hunter. On this morning, he, Gary Lunz of Mankato and another of their pals would hear very little shooting.

Still, they ended the morning with four blue-winged teal, a green-winged teal, a wigeon and six geese.

“So, not too bad,” Froehlich said.

Farther north, on Swan Lake — at 10,000 acres, the largest prairie pothole lake in North America — good hunting on Saturday was where hunters could find it.

Dan Thompson, who lives on Swan, and Justin Mettler of Garretson, S.D., had better luck on the big lake.

“We scouted Swan earlier in the week and it was looking pretty dismal,” Thompson said. “But Saturday morning we heard quite a bit more shooting than I expected. Maybe it was the northwest wind that brought some birds in, but Justin and I shot our limits, 11 teal and one wigeon between us. The action was all in the first 20 minutes. After that it was just blue sky.”

Summerlike conditions — a high in the mid-70s was predicted across much of Minnesota Saturday — also prevailed on the opener in far western Minnesota, at Lac qui Parle Wildlife Management Area.

It was there that Win Mitchell and his son John, both of Northfield, rowed onto Marsh Lake early Saturday morning.

Once frequented by some 80,000 mallards during spring and fall migrations, Marsh Lake in the 1930s was saddled with a flood control dam that stifled vegetation and created a world-class carp factory.

“There were ducks everywhere,” Win said.

Helping to make that possible, said Nick Trauba, Department of Natural Resources assistant wildlife manager at Lac qui Parle Wildlife Management Area, was aerial spraying his agency did last year.

The targets of the bombardments were hybrid cattails, which had overrun broad swaths of Marsh Lake and many other southern Minnesota waterways.

“The spraying started killing the cattails,” Trauba said. “Then the high water we had this year finished the job. It’s definitely opened more areas on the lake to hunt. “

A “fair” number of hunters were on Marsh Lake Saturday morning, Trauba said, with hunters generally reporting good success.

Weather — and abundant water — might also explain the good hunting Lucas Van Eps of Raymond, Minn., and his bunch found Saturday morning not far from Willmar. With eight hunters, they felled 31 ducks, mostly teal with a few mallards mixed in.

“There was a decent amount of shooting around the area,” Van Eps said.

Duck hunting continues in Minnesota until the end of November or beginning of December, depending which of three zones is hunted.