THE SMARTEST BIRD IN THE WORLD?
Rivers and lakes were clean enough to swim in and teemed with ducks and trout and I was just an innocent teenager.Well known hunting identity Geoff Thomas produced a VHS tape called ‘Shooting Secrets’.
On the tape was all sorts of things like how to call ducks, clay bird shooting with instructions from a national champ and some duck hunting. Towards the end Geoff and his mate hunted in Hanmer Springs with John Gemmell, NZ’s first waterfowl guide. They shot a heap of Parries, the odd Mallard and did some Canadian goose hunting. After a few unsuccessful hunts they managed to jump shoot one bird at extremely long range and the next morning from memory they got a huge total of four geese.
To my then untrained eye they looked like they were doing everything right. John could call, they had a good mixture of shell and silos and were well camouflaged and hidden. With a lifetime of hunting ducks and geese, John would have been considered an expert in his time, yet the geese they got were very unlucky birds. In later years John went from his home made goose silhouettes to the Outlaw photo silhouettes with great results.
At the end of the tape John mentioned he considered Mallard drakes to be the smartest of all
