On Wednesday morning, Junior Mendoza repeated a pre-hunt ritual unique to Louisiana coastal waterfowlers: He packed fishing rods into his duck boat. "There's always reds in the ponds, and with this tide up, they'll be everywhere," Mendoza said as he prepared for the morning hunt in the Myrtle Grove marsh. "And, for that matter, we've been catching specks, flounder and bass, too.
"You know, when you tell guys from up north you always take fishing rods on your duck-hunting trips, they think you're crazy. But this is another reason why we say this is the sportsman's paradise: We can shoot ducks and catch fish from our duck blinds."
The reason that boast can be made, of course, is that the local duck season happens to occur in the great estuary of the Mississippi river, one of the most productive wetland ecosystems in the world. It is part of the wider habitat used by 70 percent of the continent's migratory waterfowl as a winter home or a resting spot for further southward travel.
Certainly our deltas are not what they used to be. In fact, about half of the wetlands we had just 70 years ago have been lost to the forces of river levees, canal dredging for oil, gas and shipping, and accelerated sea level rise due to global warming. But the fact that it remains so productive in its diminished and declining state is simply more testimony to what we have been destroying.
There's no greater evidence of that than the tradition local sportsmen call "blast and cast" -- they hunt until the ducks stop flying, then search for limits of redfish, speckled trout, flounder or bass in those same wetlands.
And there are few places where that tradition is more rewarding than in the brackish marshes around Myrtle Grove. The reds that are thick there year-round are joined in the cooler-weather months by speckled trout and flounder. And the healthy population of largemouth bass that can be hard to find in the thick grasses of summer are now easier to locate and hungry.
Mendoza had long made blast and cast a staple of his weekends during his first career as a school principal, then in his second career as human resources director for Jefferson Parish. Now it has become an integral part of his third career: fishing and hunting guide.
"Look, if you love duck hunting and fishing equally like I do, then you just don't leave the camp without rods," said Mendoza, who has named his new business Shallow Water Charters.True to that commandment, his duck boat typically carries four rods, each loaded with either a gold spoon, plastic cockahoe with a gold spinner blade, a chatter bait or a plastic lizard.
"I'm ready for anything," he said. "When we've finished with the ducks, we're ready to go after reds or specks or bass.
"And, you know what? There's plenty of all of those in that marsh this time of year."
And that's why a south Louisiana duck hunter always packs a fishing rod -- or four -- in his boat.
