A few wood duck decoys set in these places before sunrise, combined with setting up early waiting the arrival of legal shooting hours, solved the problem. Even later in the morning, if other hunters were also moving along the creek, flushed wood ducks would decoy to my small spreads with consistency. I used no more than 18 decoys because that's all the one-man boat would hold. Over time, I used fewer decoys, with four a favored number. I'd even use just a single decoy if it was a motion decoy.

Wood ducks are suckers for motion decoys. Standing in a swamp and sloshing a foot works well at attracting them. A spinning wing dove or teal decoy is also extremely effective. But the best decoy of all is one that has a pull string attached. Simply take a fishing reel, tie the line to the decoy and play out the line to the hunting location. A tug on the line to make the decoy bob and wiggle is all it takes to entice wood ducks into landing right beside the decoy.

Calls are important and can be used with decoys or without them. I have blown some calls wood ducks aren't interested in and others they answer before they swarm down through the trees like the monkeys in the Wizard of Oz. The only way to determine which call works best is by trying several because each hunter/call combination sounds different.

I had a long out-of-manufacture call, which had fooled hundreds of wood ducks, when a custom callmaker, Ralph Jensen, hunted with me and witnessed its effectiveness. He "stole" the call to try to duplicate its magic against my rather boisterous protests when I searched for it and couldn't find it. Eventually, he presented me with the No. 1 Jensen Wood Duck Call, which had been carved from Riverwood, the trade name for the company that mines old growth saw logs that sunk a century or more ago in the Cape Fear River. It has a flying wood duck on the side. The first day I used it, I called two drakes and a hen to a single decoy set in a swamp. I shot a drake and squealed on the call as the other birds flew on. They set down and swam back, allowing me to take the second drake. The hen flew away, circled and then returned to the call. My dog whined as she swam around before I flushed her away. Ralph had created a "keeper" of a wood duck call, which is only a tube of some sort wrapped around a child's rubber ducky bathtub toy squeaker. A wood duck call can't really be tuned. If you get a keeper, cherish it. If it doesn't work well, toss it away.

Over-calling to wood ducks is a novice's mistake. Most hunters blow the two-toned squeal of an alarmed hen flying, which only scares them. A true highball is a slower cadenced version of the alarm call, and it will elicit an answer from flying ducks, make them set their wings and descend.