Old-time carvers Abe Nelson of Heron Lake and Ole Gunderson of Lake Christina are among the state’s many whittlers whose waterfowl renditions are still peddled at decoy shows up and down the Mississippi River.
Painters Les Kouba, Dave Maass, and Jim, Bob and Joe Hautman are among the many Minnesota artists whose widely admired paintings harken to waterfowling’s good old days, while inspiring hope for better times ahead.
Minnesota retriever trainers Tony Berger, Billy Wunderlich, Wells Wilbor, Charlie Hays, Bob Wolfe and Dave Rorem, among many others, set a national standard for dog work in the field, ensuring that fowl that are dropped from the sky are recovered for the table.
As testament to the goodwill most Minnesotans have for the outdoors, these and similar achievements continue to flourish, even though many Minnesota ducks — and duck hunters — have gone missing
In 1961, about 127,000 duck hunters went afield, killing 376,000 mallards. Today, about 55,000 Minnesotans waylay between 60,000 and 100,000 mallards annually.
Counterintuitively, perhaps, when Minnesota had a lot of ducks decades ago, hunting started at noon, so hen mallards in particular had a chance to survive the opener and return to Minnesota the next spring to breed.