The 'Pit' Blind

One day while hunting down in Argentina, I hunted ducks from a pit blind. Well sort of a pit blind. The terrible drought was making it tough to find a place to duck hunt. The huge marsh/lake/flooded field area where we had been hunting for a couple years was drying up fast. The bird boys were having to build new blinds each day to follow the receding water.

The senior bird boy and guide, Luis, always makes a strong effort to put me in a good shooting location. So, he really got creative one day. He went well out into the middle of what was left of the lake and found an exposed sand bar. It had been under water up until just a couple days before and had absolutely no cover on it. He dug a small pit and put about half of a plastic barrel down in the hole. You could sit upright on the sand and have your feet down in the 'pit'. He put a plastic tarp down to sit on and cut and carried brush from the shore. He planted all the cut brush around the shooting area and made a very effective blind. Well, the day I hunted it the barrel kept floating up and being a big nuisance, but he told me that within a couple days the water had gone down more and there was no water left to float the barrel. So maybe the next hunting party used it with a little more ease. But it was still a deadly blind.

The morning I used it, the bird boy that was assigned to me was the son of my old Argentinian friend Jorge. He was in his first year of working as a bird boy and was pretty nervous. Down in Argentina there are so many ducks that you don't really need much skill to hunt successfully. So the guides and bird boys don't necessarily know all that much about decoying birds. They just go to a spot where the birds are using and let the shear numbers of ducks dictate the success of the hunt. My bird boy, Martin, was a prime example of that. We waded out to the little island and he simply walked off to one side and threw a few decoys out in a big wad. Then he started to come back to the blind and set up the caller and give me my shells. I told him no, it wasn't going to work like that. I grounded my gear and we went out into the decoys and I showed him how to set up. I can't speak Spanish and he can't speak English, but I was able to explain what we needed to do. I explained to him about the wind and how the ducks would approach the blind. I gestured that we didn't want the rising sun to always be in my eyes. We picked up the mess that he had thrown out and went to the opposite side of the little island and set a simple J-pattern. I stuck my Mojo decoy right in the center of the pocket and we returned to the "pit" to start the hunt. The other hunters had been banging away for close to half an hour before we got ready. I guess the ducks had all seen us walking around and me gesturing and pointing so nothing came around for the first 30 minutes or so. I could tell Martin was getting even more nervous. I told him to relax and we'd get our birds. Once everything had settled down the ducks came to us real well. Pochards, Wigeon and Speckled Teal fly in flocks but other than that most all the birds down there fly in pairs or just singles. Makes for a really relaxed shoot if that is what you want.

I shot a few Rosy Bills and Wigeon, but the vast majority of my bag that day was Pintails. Both Yellow Billed and White Cheeked came to us all morning long. They work the decoys just like our Northern Pintails do here in the States, except with only about half the wariness, so it was a great shoot. The little 'pit' blind hadn't worked all that well, but it was a great shooting location. With the bugs ironed out I imagine it was the best location Rancho Salvaje had to hunt that year.

That evening Luis came to me and asked me to come outside. When I went out to see what he wanted, Martin was there and he had a cell phone in his hand. He gestured for me to answer the phone and it was his father Jorge. Jorge can't speak a lot of English but he thanked be over and over again for being patient with his son and taking the time to teach him how to set out the decoys properly. I love teaching new hunters here or there so I told him it was no problem. I told him how hard his son had worked to retrieve all 50 of my birds and that we had a great time hunting together that morning. It worked out well all around.