Ducks provide Armistice Day bounty
FOX LAKE – At dawn the sky was a woolly, inert dark gray mass.
Then, like the flip of a switch, things changed.
The clouds above became a living canvas of black, feathered streaks.
They came in bunches, a group of four, then nine, then a heart-rending 50 or more.
They weren’t silent, either. A chorus of feeding chuckles rained down from above.
Our group of four hunters and three dogs looked up through the dim light, mesmerized as dozens of mallards circled the farm field near Fox Lake.
“Wow, I really didn’t know what to expect,” whispered Lucas Villwock, 28, of Kekoskee. “We’ve got ducks.”
Our party – Villwock; his brother Eric Villwock, 26; of Oakfield; Bryan Muche, 50, of Barrington Hills, Illinois; and me – sat four abreast on stools in flooded corn field.
We were joined by a trio of retrievers, two Labradors (Fern and Mara) and a Chesapeake Bay (Dutch).
Of course, no one knew what the day – Nov. 11 – would hold.
Would it bring 70 degree temperatures and conditions more suited to beach volleyball? November had already set dozens of warm weather records in Wisconsin.
Or would the water have turned hard by an influx of Arctic air?
And in any case, would there be waterfowl in the area?
Only one thing was certain. Muche and I would renew our tradition of hunting on Armistice Day.
The date has primary historical significance as the end of the Great War, or World War I. The armistice was declared in Europe at the 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918.
But it’s also well-known in the fields of meteorology and waterfowl hunting for the Nov. 11, 1940, storm that crashed down on the Upper Midwest.
The weather system first brought great flocks of migrating birds and “circus shooting” for hunters and then turned deadly as the wind howled, precipitation fell and temperatures plummeted. One-hundred-fifty-four lives were lost in the storm, including 13 in Wisconsin, according to a Milwaukee Journal report.
Waterfowl hunters, including two on Big Muskego Lake in Waukesha County and many on the Mississippi River, were among the dead. The death toll also included sailors and passengers on several ships sunk on Lake Michigan.
This year marked the 80th anniversary of the storm.
Bryan Muche holds a drake mallard retrieved by his dog Dutch as brothers Eric and Lucas Villwock search for additional ducks during an Armistice Day hunt in a flooded cornfield near Fox Lake.
For the last decade, Muche and I have ventured out to give thanks for the freedoms won by previous generations of Americans as well as pay homage to our waterfowl hunting heritage.
Most of our outings have been on or near Horicon Marsh. Several years the world-renowned wetland has been frozen on Nov. 11 and necessitated a field hunt.
In 2017 after the marsh locked up early we joined Ross Villwock, 22, of Mayville (brother of Eric and Lucas) for a layout hunt in a cut corn field near Mayville.
This year the marsh was open, but in another nod to traditions, we opted to continue the connection to the Villwocks and hunt with Eric and Lucas.
The Muche and Villwock families have links back to the early 1900s. Walter Muche Sr. (Bryan’s grandfather) had a farm on what is now Horicon Marsh National Wildlife Refuge, just up the road from one owned by Lawrence Villwock (Eric and Lucas’ great-grandfather).
Several years ago Bryan Muche had the treat of interviewing Lawrence Villwock about the history of waterfowling around the marsh, as well as memories of his Muche relatives.
Lawrence Villwock had clear memories of Walter Muche’s fervor for hunting, much of it for subsistence reasons, as well as the severe weather that visited Horicon on Nov. 11, 1940.
Lawrence Villwock was busy milking cows and taking care of business on the farm that day and didn’t get stranded
like many hunters did. Still, he described it as a “huge snowstorm” that no one would alive at the time could forget.
The days preceding our 2020 Armistice Day hunt were marked by historical weather, too, but of the hot and windy variety. Many Wisconsin locations reported record high temperatures topping 70 degrees.
But the pattern broke Nov. 10 and a cold front swept the state. The wind peaked at 79 mph that day at Mitchell International Airport in Milwaukee.
When we gathered at 0-dark-thirty on Nov. 11, it was 30 degrees and an 18 mph northwest wind rattled the trees. We donned headlamps and walked out to a low corner of a corn field flooded by recent rains.
Eric had scouted the spot and saw a few ducks dropping into the area to feed.
We set out just two decoys on posts in an open patch of shallow water adjacent to the standing corn.
The first minutes after dawn showed our grand fortune. Huge flocks of migrating waterfowl had winged into central Wisconsin on the weather system.
Thousands of newly arrived ducks likely spent the night roosted on the water of Horicon Marsh and Fox Lake.
Now, as the sky lightened, group after group buzzed overhead, looking for a breakfast stop.
The first flock of mallards to drop into our spread came 15 minutes after legal shooting time. Shotguns sounded and the dogs sprinted out to retrieve a bounty of three drakes and two hens.
Five minutes later a group of 25 birds came into range. Two American black ducks and two more mallards were added to the bag.
The next hour featured flocks in view at least every five minutes, with many circling our spread multiple times. Some decided to depart, others were convinced to drop in.
The vast majority were mallards, but we also had one flock of northern pintails strafe the field and a lone northern shoveler pass by.
The sheer magnitude of ducks was something out of a Wisconsin waterfowler’s dream. Analysis of one photo I took of a flock over our spread revealed it had 122 ducks.
As the morning wore on the clouds parted and revealed a cobalt sky.
We kept track of our individual limits and, under the brighter conditions, were each able to take another drake mallard.
By 8:30 the flights had subsided; we pulled the decoys and walked out. We ended up with four birds each.
The well-fatted northern birds will provide excellent meals over the winter.
We gave thanks to the military veterans who so richly deserve to be honored on the holiday as well as Mother Nature, who provided a bounty that surpassed our wildest expectations. And we vowed to continue the personal tradition that binds friendships and families.
“What a morning,” Muche said with a smile as he walked out with Dutch at his side. “This will be tough to top.”
Come what may, we already have Nov. 11, 2021, circled on our calendars.