JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2018 • NEBRASKAland 49
S
ome people go to great lengths to hunt waterfowl.
While at Calamus Reservoir last February
photographing trumpeter swans, I ran into one of
those people.
It was late-morning when I bumped into him at a parking
lot on the wildlife management area at the west end of the
lake. We exchanged a few words as he unloaded two sleds
from his Jeep, loaded them with goose decoys and his
shotgun and donned his waders. As he headed south across
a pasture toward the Calamus River, sleds in tow, I headed
southwest up a big hill, hoping to get a view of the river and
any swans that might be on it.
I'd never been to this part of the area. What I found
was that hill gave me a sweeping view of the river and the
remains of what was an oxbow lake when the Calamus was
dammed in 1985. When full in the spring, the reservoir
reaches this far west. In the winter, it is a shallow, sprawling
river, minus the oxbow, which removed from flowing water,
was ice covered.
I watched from that hill as the man I'd seen in the parking
lot dragged his sleds 250 yards across the oxbow to the edge
of the ice and the river. One at a time, he pulled the decoy
Tim Schuckman of Broken Bow pulls two sleds full of
goose decoys across a frozen backwater at the upper
end of Calamus Reservoir last February, heading toward
open water and a late-season hunt on the Calamus River
on the wildlife management area.
