Duck Hunting Trips

It’s time to book your bird hunting trips for the upcoming season. We only have a little over 20 weeks to research, make reservations, save up the cash and request time off of work. Talk to your buddies. Post online. Put a plan together. Then fully enjoy the best 60 days of the year.

    Sunset over ND Marsh

It was about this time last year that me, zeus and two buddies booked our trip to Bisbee, North Dakota. We had talked about a destination hunt for two seasons but couldn’t decide where to go. With limited budgets, Arkansas, Maryland and Texas were out of the question. Research online narrowed our focus down to Missiouri along the Mississippi River, Nebraska and North Dakota. Posting my deilema on the Waterfowl forum on MichiganSportsman.com (link in sidebar) got the answer we thought…NoDak.

Next we picked the town we could use as home base. We stumbled upon Bisbee, ND, through the chat room my buddy found called Nodakoutdoors.com. Bisbee looked great on the map. Desolate. Close to the Canada border. Surrounded by potholes on public hunting grounds. We quickly found cabins that allowed dogs and booked them for about $25 per night. When we arrived, the town’s population sign said 27. They had two bars and a place to sleep. It’s everything we needed.

   Me and Zeus share a bed in the Bisbee, ND, cabin

NoDak has plenty of public hunting opportunities on P.L.O.T.S. land. Landowners offer up private property to hunters. It’s a first come, first serve situation, but we only ran into another group of hunters once during the entire week. A P.L.O.T.S map book is available from the ND DNR. I called them and they mailed the booklet to my house in the matter of a few days. They were all very helpful and nice folks.

The duck hunting in North Dakota turned out to be pretty awesome. Waterfowl are abundant and the amount of public land makes hunting easy and successful. We got around 70 birds in 6 days of hunting between three guys. We tried some upland hunting as well with limited results. Hunting the edges of a sunflower field, Zeus flushed this Sharptail and Dan crushed it.

    Zeus, Dan and a NoDak Sharpie

Be prepared. Bring pots/pans, spices and other cooking stuff. The crockpot was very useful. Take at least a frying pan and a pasta pot. Bring lots of towles and a boot dryer for your waders. Wearing waders everyday is fine…when they’re dry!

BE PREPARED TO SCOUT….A LOT. We spent 2.5 hours scouting for every hour we spent hunting. Sometimes it worked out. Sometimes it didn’t. But that’s duck hunting.

The adventure of hunting new places filled with many different species of birds made for a great week. Check out the Video tab for a video of our trip put together by Dan Huff.

    Redheads, a Greenwing Teal and my favorite shotgun after a successful hunt in NoDak