Well, shoot - many families have duck hunting in DNA

By MICHAEL R. SHEA
mshea@modbee.com

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THE GRASSLAND -- Three generations whispered in hushed tones as waterfowl sliced in and out of a dense early morning fog.

Ten-year-old Ryan Vierra shouldered his Christmas present, a 20-gauge pump shotgun, as a flock of ducks moved into sight. His father, Ceres City Councilman Chris Vierra, had given him a single shell.

"Wait," the boy's grandfather, Vernon Vierra, said in a quiet hush, "not yet."

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Three green-wing teal zipped across the family hunting blind.

"OK!" said his grandfather, and Ryan pulled the trigger.

"Did I get it? I don't think I got it!" Ryan said.

"Nice shooting, Ryan!" said his grandfather. He rubbed the boy's shoulders. "Nice shooting! Your first duck in the air!"

"I got it?" the boy said. "I got it!"

Ali, the Vierras' 5-year-old black Lab, brought Ryan his first duck -- ice crystals forming above the dog's brow.

Vernon has been hunting the Featherstone Duck Club off Gun Club Road since 1964. Chris learned to shoot with a youth-model pump and a single shell and is passing it on to Ryan.

Hunting is steeped in the family bloodline like DNA -- father to son, father to son.

It's also entrenched in the Grassland around Los Banos and Gustine.

A sport with rural, agrarian roots, hunting now is turning into a pastime of the well-heeled. There's state and federal land open to the public, but most of the hunting in the Grassland Ecological Area is done on private clubs that can cost several thousand dollars a season -- about 45 shooting days a year in most places.

For the tried and true, it's worth it.

Just down the road, 450 life-sized plastic ducks float in three feet of water around Bob Hansen's tiny island, off Highway 165, at Zimmerman Duck Club. Hunters capitalize on the gregarious nature of ducks and geese -- the pull to collect in bigger and bigger groups.

Waterfowl have very good eyesight and spook easy, so near the decoys hunters hide in groups of twos and threes in upturned sewer pipes 3 feet across buried in the ground. They plant tule and bulrush and cattails around the little hideouts. They wear camouflage. They sit motionless with whistles in their mouths.

They wait. And they wait.

Duck hunters are a very patient lot.

Hansen is pushing the limit of his 50s. He's been hunting since the seventh grade.

Glossy ibis fly 60 yards over his blind, the outer limits of a shotgun shooter's knock-down range, but the sleek black shore birds are protected, which doesn't bother anyone who's ever tried to eat them.

"We just call them black things," Hansen, who lives in Denair and retired from the Modesto Irrigation District, whispered in the morning fog. "This time of morning, there sure are a lot of them. I shot some in Argentina, but I didn't like it much. They want you to shoot anything that moves there just to burn shells."

California regulates what shells can be burned and everything that can and cannot be shot. Hunters then impose stricter regulation on themselves. Duck hunting is legal from the middle of October to the end of January, but most private clubs impose state refuge system rules, which only allow hunting on Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays.

Red-winged blackbirds flutter around the cattails and a Northern Harrier with its half-moon face glides on a two-knot wind. Coast Range foothills make a dark serrated knife blade on the horizon as the sun cracks up in the east.

Low light or no light, if a hunter pulls the trigger, he must know what he's shooting.

There are more birds in the Grassland that cannot be shot than can. Among the hunted class there's further regulation still -- one pintail, two canvasback, two redheads, two hen mallards and three scaup. Across the genus, seven is the most any hunter can take on any given day. Serious practitioners are out a half- hour before sunrise every shoot day and take more than 150 ducks a year.