Nebraskaland

October 2020 • Nebraskaland 33 up in the middle of the lake, and the crop fi elds they're feeding in. Watch that fl ight at sunrise and set up on the same pathway, he said, and sometimes you'll get yourself into the birds. Like anywhere ducks and geese and hunters share the same area for an extended period of time, birds can become increasingly diffi cult to decoy. "There are times when they just pick out those boat blinds," he said. "So that's why we go to an A-frame blind and go back on a sandbar somewhere and stay away from that boat if we can't blend it in real good." That type of hunting is closer to what he and his college buddies did when they started hunting off the old Ferry Landing Road on Bazile Creek WMA near Niobrara in the 1980s. Back then, they would sleep in tents, in the back of a pickup, or, when it was really cold, rent a mobile home for $20 a night from a gentleman they met at the bar in Niobrara. They would wake up early, throw on their waders and pull a canoe or bag full of decoys through the shallows to a good spot. "Back then, there was a lot of mud," he said with a laugh. While sand has fi lled some of those areas and the bottom is more conducive to wading, Kostinec said that other than a few young and energetic high school kids, he doesn't see many people hunting the river that way these days. Commission conservation offi cers who work the area say they don't see many people hunting from shore either, but they do see some hunting from kayaks, and there is plenty of room for either type of hunter. Kostinec has only missed hunting the area one or two years since his college days. With the COVID-19 pandemic scratching his annual trip to Canada, he plans on spending more time there this fall. He will be there when teal season opens. And unlike most years, he will be there in October when that fi rst big push of small ducks comes through. He might even mix it up and fi nd a backwater he can hunt from his kayak. He'll be back in November when the shallow waters in the Dakotas start to freeze and the big push of mallards arrives. And he'll watch plenty of other birds of various shapes and sizes pass, too. "The neatest thing about it is there's always a migration going on the Missouri River, starting with the shorebirds in August and the teal in September," he said. "You've got little birds and you've got sandhill cranes occasionally coming through there. It's just a migratory corridor. Even if you're not shooting birds, you're seeing birds migrating. That's what makes it fun." N During the peak of the migration, the delta can provide a mixed bag for hunters. On this hunt in 2019, Kostinec and his partners harvested three goose and six duck species. PHOTO COURTESY OF TERRY KOSTINEC

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