Or perhaps they were new arrivals from a long migration, lean, buff, and ripped, still driven to move, hard and fast. Or was this a phenomenon unique to the Klamath/Tule lake marshes, arguably the L.A. or Big Apple of waterfowl gathering areas in North America. For a duck, waddle here and sooner or later you'll see everything, everyone. Or was I just nuts. I approached the one person I would consider as a hunter a Mallard expert. Steve, who has sunk more money into his private pond yards from the Finley Reserve than he will admit to any human being, especially his wife, shoots with his friends more Mallards in one morning than I bag in a season on public lands. "Steve, have you ever noticed there are two kinds of Mallards?" My question caught him off guard and was out of context. He looked puzzled, drew back in thought, puzzled some more. As seconds passed I decided I was just nuts. There was only one kind of Mallard. "Yeah," he said eventually, uncertain he was grasping my question. "Big ones and little ones." Well,..OK......Maybe. One year later. We've set up our decoys on a slough off the Columbia River in eastern Oregon west of the Umatilla refuge, an area recently made Mallard-famous with the advent of a large coal-fired electrical plant. The warm water outflow into a reservoir created, as an winter alternative to the big Columbia itself, not just more non-freezing, open water, but steamy, WARM open water. And guess which species of duck discovered it possessed abundant hot tub skills. Our slough is the delta of a seasonal creek, eroded from the circle crop fields on the flat plateau down two hundred feet to Columbia level. We are in a deep, quarter mile wide ditch which Mallards, returning from the wheatfields or seeking refuge from a wind-whipped Columbia, spot, circle, and drop in to from great height. Our blind is our 12 foot boat pulled into winter bare willows grown across the whole delta to a consistent ten foot height. We are exposed from above and will have to sit very still. Looking over our decoys in the hundred foot circumference pond, our backs are to the Columbia a half mile away. We should still see approaching birds at height as they circle over the narrower, upstream mouth of the canyon. We have, in full daylight of a late arrival, just placed the last decoys, covered the boat with camouflage, and settled my Lab between us. The ripples of disturbed water clear, sounds evaporate. In seconds we hear the ring of expectant, charged, hunting-silence, and shiver the fragility of stillness. Minutes pass. Some days, the rare days, Mallards in pairs, groups, flocks, and even squadrons,
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