Duck Hunting in Louisiana

At the last minute, there’s another pre-departure check of headlamps, a methodical sorting and re-sorting of gear. Inside a barn south of Natchitoches, a dozen hunters adjust their shell bags and wader straps. They pack duck calls, gloves, more and more shells, and for a few moments, all chatter ceases. It’s late December, not yet 6 a.m. Already, the temperature creeps toward 70 degrees. Fragments of conversation linger, a mosaic of details.

“That’s where I got a feel for it, in Canada.”

“Whatever you do, always start with salt, black pepper and garlic powder.”

“Up there, you can’t load your shotgun fast enough.”

“You’ve got to marinate that in milk and Louisiana Hot Sauce.”

“It gets into you.”

These last words, Richard Armstrong’s, settle over the silence. Five minutes after he speaks them, they continue to resound, emphatic, an archetypal definition. Hunting: Something that gets into you, often at a young age. Hunting: A skill, typically handed down from one generation to the next that involves guns and ammunition, the sporting pursuit of wild game and the proclivity to rise at hours others consider dreadful.

Through their actions, hunters provide another definition, a vital core. Hunting: to gather as community. And when hunters gather, they trade tales, shuffling through the plot points of hunts past and dreams of those that await. For at the back of a hunter’s mind thrums this certainty: Life is short and the desire to hunt is boundless.

Collin Tubre, Gage, Hudson Methvin, Jack Campbell, and Camille Armstrong listen for wood ducks at Lake Chicot outside of Natchez, Louisiana. “In flight, or when flushed, females utter an ‘oo-eek’/ ‘cr-r-ek,’ and males have a thin, rising ‘jeeeeee,’ states the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. “Vocal in groups or when in flight, they can also become very vocal when feeding.”

Headlights flicker on and off. One set gets swapped for another. Two hunters exchange gloves, and in the corner of the barn, 16-year-old Hudson Methvin kneels to check his chocolate Labrador’s insulation vest. If Gage didn’t know he would lead a hunt with Hudson a few minutes ago, he certainly does now. Straps secure, Gage darts through the barn, his tail allegro. Alongside his panting rises a new sound. Armstrong and his 16-year-old daughter, Camille, hear it too. The forecast predicts heavy rain by 10 a.m. Morning mist becomes drizzle.

“The nastier the weather, the better the hunt,” Richard says. Camille nods. She began hunting with her father at age five. Eleven years on, a competitive shooter who engages in 4-H shotgun competitions throughout Louisiana, Camille’s world already contains a library of hunting stories. She carries the details of those hunts, most of which she has made with Richard, those many mornings when the hunting gods were on her side and she couldn’t reload fast enough, others when they weren’t, but she remained certain of a next time.

“But it can be too nasty,” Camille says. “This is just nasty enough.” She inhabits this life, moves with ease inside the skin of a hunter and all it entails, starting and ending with a deep respect for safety. She’s also attained the kind of knowledge of nature and wildlife that one earns only through experience. Imagining her without a hunt or shooting competition on the calendar is like imagining Caitlin Clark without a game to dominate.

In pairs, the hunters step toward four UTVs, or side-by-sides, whose engines hum in the nearby dark. Richard and Camille grab their shotguns and follow. Beside them walk Christie Griffin and her son, Drake, who has recently completed his first season as a tight end for Arkansas State University. “Football is hectic,” Drake says. “It’s a job. Hunting is what I do to get away from it.” At 6’1” and 215 lbs., Drake’s presence fills the dark. And as he walks beside Christie, it’s easy to imagine him at age three, when he first accompanied her on a hunt. Nearly two decades later, Drake smiles at the memory. “At that age, you learn to watch,” he says.

Drake did just that. He studied Christie’s movements, also his father’s. His hunting education involved learning what each hunter must eventually master: the art of patience. At age three, Drake received a lifetime hunting and fishing license. This became a rite of passage in the Griffin family. Drake’s sister also received one when she turned three. “We knew the kids might not love it,” Christie says, “but we also knew that hunting would be a significant part of their lifestyle.”

Richard Armstrong began taking his daughter Camille hunting when she turned five. Wood ducks are among Camille’s favorite waterfowl to hunt because, she says, they come in “fast and furious. That’s how I like it.”

At age four, Drake got his first pellet gun. The next year, he began duck and deer hunting with his parents. They’ve never stopped. Once his fall semester finished, with football on pause, Drake and Christie flew to Arizona to fly fish. They returned to Natchitoches two days ago and on their first morning home set out to fish along the Cane River.

Now they’re on the same land where Chad Methvin began hunting with his father when he turned 14. Methvin brought his oldest son here when he turned that age. By then, Hudson had already been hunting with Chad for nearly a decade. “The killing of ducks is secondary,” Chad says. “Hunting is about spending time with your kids in the same place you hunted with your dad and passing on stories from that time.”

Witness, now, another central aspect of hunting as Chad pulls Hudson aside. The two confer about this morning’s flooded timber hunt. Chad will stay behind to let Hudson lead the way. With this plan, the group will return to a feast, but what Chad has set in motion — a rite of passage in a hunter’s life — proves more meaningful.

Hudson turns from Chad. He slaps his leg, and Gage leaps into the side-by-side. White lights flood the fallow field, and they depart, four engines droning across the muddy trail. Richard sits in front with no windshield to guard him. Like a boxer, he ducks and weaves to avoid the onslaught of branches that jab and hook from everywhere and all at once. After 800 yards, the engines go silent. The drivers cut the lights. Beside Lake Chicot, a 250-acre swamp, the world returns to darkness.

Gage is first to reach the water’s edge. He drums his paws in anticipation. The day before, Hudson and his cousin Collin Tubre set out with Gage from this same spot. For 200 yards, they waded waist-deep in water, returning with tales of wood ducks and a clearing big enough for a dozen hunters to spread out.

Onto his back, Hudson hoists Gage’s “lift,” a flat adjustable chair that will allow the dog to sit above the cold water and rest when he’s not retrieving ducks. Hudson then steps into the swamp with Gage beside him. The others give them a 10-yard lead before following. Beams of headlamps arc over murky brown water, cypress and tupelos, and somewhere in the impenetrable dark, one hunter says, “Alligator,” causing the others to break into laughter.

Hudson Methvin estimates that his chocolate Labrador, Gage, averages more than 50 hunts a year. “Field and Stream” magazine ranks Labradors among the best duck hunting dogs: “Intelligent, highly trainable and eager to please, Labs make great duck hunting dogs and excellent house pets.”

Behind them, Camille moves with caution. For the past two years, she’s been a trainer for the St. Mary’s High School football team in Natchitoches. She knows there’s a similarity between the roots and stumps that reach for the ankles and knees and those players on the field whose vocation is to tackle. She grips her 20-gauge shotgun, a Benelli, which she deems “smoother” than the 12-gauge many duck hunters prefer. Camille and the others call out warnings: cypress knee here, sunken limb there and watch out for the hole.

This continues for 15 minutes until they reach Hudson as he adjusts Gage’s lift. In the clearing, the hunters spread out. “Now we wait to see if the ducks will cooperate,” Camille says.

And so they wait. For half an hour, they listen. Cool water laps against their waders. When not clearing drizzle from their brows, they’re drying sweat. And they’re watching, listening. One moment, the swamp is still, silent. The next, they hear the first stirrings, sonorous whistling like an orchestra tuning up before a performance. Camille steps forward. She radiates adrenaline. “When they come, it will be fast and furious,” she says, eyes scanning the oyster-colored sky. “That’s how I like it.”

Three minutes later, the first pair sails across the tree line. And then it comes, report from three shotguns in quick succession. One wave of wood ducks, a second, a third, and during brief gaps, Gage slips into the water to search for downed ducks that he returns to Hudson. Then, just like Camille said, it ends. The early morning wake-up, the preparation, the travel, and after 15 minutes, it’s over.

The hunters begin their walk back to land. “This is a lot of water,” Drake says, laughing even though he didn’t bag any ducks today. In place of wood duck whistling, it’s that sound, laughter, that fills the swamp, a certainty that there will be another hunt.

Inside the kitchen at the farm, they fill their plates with eggs and bacon, muffins and fruit. Camille and Richard settle beside Drake and Christie. They eat and resume their hunting tales, stories of what this life has taught them, all it has given.

Hudson Methvin, Gage, Camille Armstrong, Christie Griffin and her son, Drake, linger to discuss the morning’s hunt. Based on federal harvest estimates, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries reports that 55,000 active duck hunters harvested 95,000 wood ducks in the state during the 2023-2024 season.

“You learn how not to shoot at everything that moves,” Camille says. “You learn to be quiet.”

“Oh, you’ve taught me to be quiet?” Richard says, and there it is, more laughter as they continue eating.

“Ducks also taste pretty good,” Drake says, “especially when you kill a banded one.”

“Every hunter hopes to catch a banded duck at some point,” Christie says.

“You get to see where it comes from,” Drake says, noting that the banded duck he shot in Indiana — the one that wore “jewelry,” as hunters call U.S. Geological Survey waterfowl ID bands — tasted better than any other. After killing banded ducks, at once legal and the white whale of waterfowl hunting, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife & Fisheries encourages hunters to report the tag number for migratory tracking.

“Louisiana has approximately 3.5 million acres of coastal marsh that winter large and diverse waterfowl populations,” reports the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. “During 2023-2024, LDWF banded 3,261 wood ducks, a 5% increase from the 3,097 banded last year.”

Camille looks on with a glimmer in her eye, a yearning to someday score her own jewelry. Beside her, Richard says, “There’s something about being in the water, the sun coming up. You’re out there in nature. You start reminiscing. You think about your grandfather, your father, and you remember all the things you did together, all the stories they told you. You see a different side of people when you’re hunting. Everybody has a job, but when you take them out of that job and put them in God’s creation, it brings out a better side of their nature.”

“You get to pass something on,” Chad says. “That’s the real reason most of us hunt. The quality time we get to spend with our kids is second to none when you’re out there in the woods and learning life lessons.”

“If you grow up with it, you can’t get away from it,” Christie says. And at that, they begin planning the next one.