I Am Woman, Watch Me Hunt
In early September, Delta Waterfowl held its inaugural women’s hunt at historic Delta Marsh. The two-day event demonstrated that women, given the opportunity, are ready to embrace waterfowl hunting.
By Tori J. McCormick
Associate Editor
DELTA MARSH, MANITOBA—It’s a couple ticks shy of 10:30 a.m., and Kim Poppel and Jenn Doornink are slouching in a 17-foot-long metal canoe, their eyes spying the sun-splashed sky, their hands clutching their 12-gauge shotguns. Spent shot shells sway in the bottom of the canoe. Farm machinery whirrs in the distance. A dissident flock of seagulls, in a scene that only Hitchcock himself could love, mill eerily overhead.
The ghostly early morning fog has burned off into a near-flawless September Sunday, but the morning flight—mostly graceful sorties of canvasbacks and redheads—has slowed to a trickle, and someone suggests it’s time to pack up the decoys and paddle back to the entry point.
Suggestions be damned. Poppel of Brandon, Manitoba and Doornink of Winnipeg aren’t buying the pitch, and to read their collective body language is to infer a not-so-subtle message: We’re not pulling the pin for any prearranged departure.
“I wanted to squeeze as much hunting time in as I could,” said Poppel, a conservation district manager in Manitoba, after the hunt. “If we had left right then, I would have been fine. The experience was rewarding on so many levels. But I went out expecting I was going to get something, and that’s what I wanted to do.”
Said Doornink: “I didn’t want to leave. I kept thinking, ‘Why not stay all day.’”
Poppel and Doornink were two of 20 women who participated in Delta Waterfowl’s inaugural Canadian women’s hunt in early September at Delta Marsh. The two-day weekend event, headquartered at historic Kirchhoffer Lodge, featured hands-on shooting instruction, waterfowling tutorials, game cleaning and cookery, a mentored hunt, and lots of good, clean fun. It was Canada’s first-ever women’s duck hunt.
Like Delta’s North American youth hunts, the goal of the women’s program was to give participants a “holistic” waterfowling experience, or what Carly Michie, Delta’s field program coordinator, calls “The Package”. The hope is that they will become life-long waterfowlers and conservationists.“My goal was to help these ladies understand that there’s more—much more—to duck hunting than killing birds,” Michie said, noting that most attendees had never hunted waterfowl before. “For many of these ladies it was the first time they were in waders, the first time they paddled a canoe and the first time they truly watched a morning sunrise.
“At first I was worried how they would react to hunting in the marsh. Would they enjoy themselves? Would they get too cold? Would they get scared? But every single woman came back with smiles on their faces—whether they shot a duck or not. The excitement they showed blew my mind. Now it’s time to build on this success.”
You couldn’t have a better, more thoughtful ambassador for women’s hunting than Michie, who works in the Winnipeg office as Delta’s do-it-all-in-chief. A zoology graduate from the University of Manitoba, Michie, 27, a self-described outdoors “gal,” has been hunting waterfowl for three years.
It didn’t take her long, she says, to “connect all the dots” about waterfowling’s rich, multi-faceted heritage—from dog work to field tactics to preparing, and eating, what you kill. She credits Delta’s Director of Conservation Programs Jim Fisher, whom she calls a mentor, for developing her appreciation for waterfowling’s subtle glories.
“Jim has taught me that there are many things to celebrate about waterfowl hunting, and that’s what I tried to pass on to these ladies,” said Michie, who grew up in a hunting family. “It’s The Package, eh.”
Shooting and Skills Introduction
It’s high noon—or thereabouts—at the Manitoba Wildlife Federation Outdoor Education Centre, and hunter education coordinator and shooting instructor Reg Wiebe of the Manitoba Wildlife Federation is holding court. The topic: gun safety.
While those who attended Delta’s inaugural women’s hunt were required to pass a hunter’s safety course, Reg was busy refreshing their memories with an A-to-Z tutorial. “There are no stupid questions,” he barked. “Ladies—if you don’t understand something, please ask. When it comes to safety there are no dumb questions.”
Before long, the women split-up into three groups—two at trap-shooting stations, the other instructed by Fisher, who introduced the women to a mixed bag of waterfowling staples: calls, decoys, blinds, duck identification, waterfowl conservation and more.
At the first shooting station—a difficult right-to-left crossing shot—several women gathered and listened attentively as Reg demonstrated the finer points of shotgunning. “I need a shooter,” Reg implored. “Any volunteers?”
Poppel, who organizes youth hunts in the Brandon area, stepped up and fired several shots, breaking the occasional orange-and-back-hued clay pigeon. “It was harder than I thought,” she said. “You really learn that you have to swing through the shot.”
Watching in the background, Virginia Markus, 42, of West St. Paul, north of Winnipeg, shook her head and said: “Do they really think we’re going to able to hit a duck tomorrow morning?”
Markus, who loves to hunt deer, said she doesn’t recall ever firing a shotgun, let alone killing a duck. Asked why she attended the women’s hunt, she fired for effect. “I got conned,” she said, laughing. “My girlfriend conned me into coming. Can you believe that? I got conned.”
Doornink, who had never hunted ducks before, had a more philosophical take. “I really wanted to get back to my hunter-gatherer roots,” she said. “This weekend is just an updated, more modernized version of how to do it.
“Part of it, too, is my love of nature, and hunting is a big part of nature’s cycle of life,” she added. “I really believe modern society is getting too detached from the natural world. We gather our food now at the grocery store instead of the forest or the marsh and we have lost sight of what nature can provide. I wanted to experience this firsthand. Hunting is something that you can’t learn from a book.”
Doornink is as gung-ho about learning the ways and means of waterfowling hunting as any person—man or woman—you’ll find. To watch her dizzying enthusiasm is to burn calories. At the trap station, she misses several consecutive shots. Undeterred and poised, she listens to some instruction, then tries again.
Her wing-shooting form is rock-solid (she’s shot trap before), but success on this day is fleeting; she’s not resigned, for her real-world profession has prepared her to keep her eyes squarely on the prize: Doornink is training to be a helicopter pilot in the Canadian Air Force.
“I’m having a blast,” she said after powdering a few targets. “This is so great.”
After the day’s training, and as part of “The Package,” everyone—women and male mentors alike—feasted on a wild game dinner of duck done three ways: deep-fried, stir-fried and bacon-wrapped. If only for a moment, Kirchhoffer Lodge was silent. Mostly. The only sound you heard was lip-smacking bliss.
“That was so good,” said Doornink after a post-dinner program. “I can’t wait for tomorrow.”
She wouldn’t have to wait long. First call: 4:20 a.m.
Hunting Historic Delta Marsh
As sun-up nears, Delta President and mentor Rob Olson is rowing the canoe, while Poppel and Doornink ply the inky waters with paddles. Riding shotgun is Olson’s irrepressible eight-year-old springer spaniel Brambles and Delta’s photographer extraordinaire Fred Greenslade. Bags of decoys, shotguns, backpacks and other equipment are wedged between them.
Their destination: a point of hard-stemmed bulrush a quarter-mile away as the crow flies.
Shrouded in fog, the group glides across the water in a dream. Or so it seems. Shards of mist rise from the marsh and coil to the heavens. Ducks—in silhouette—vector through the gauze, their wing beats cutting the silent, windless morning, while others, divers all, skedaddle on water before catching air. The morning sun nudges above the horizon; a ball of orange appears, the color of which, over time, leeches across the eastern sky.
It’s been said that if you truly love nature, you will find beauty everywhere. On this September Sunday, amid the morning fog, stirring marsh and maturing sunrise, two men, two women and a dog found beauty everywhere.
“This is amazing,” said Doornink.
“Guys—isn’t this great,” said Olson
After setting decoys twice and moving, Olson and company settled on a third spot, a ducky point that accommodated the morning’s faint wind. By 10:15 a.m., with Olson working his calls, Poppel and Doornink shot—and missed—a handful of birds.
But the shots were difficult and tricky, for the birds—mostly canvasback and redheads—weren’t decoying to the dabbler-laden spread. “Sorry guys,” said Olson. “We should have brought more diver decoys. These are hard passing shots.”
As departure time neared, Poppel and Doornink continued to survey the sky, hoping against hope that their morning wouldn’t end duck-less. In the distance, other groups of women and their mentors could be heard paddling back to the entry point. “This is good,” Olson said. “They may get some ducks moving. Let’s hold on a minute.” Before long, ducks started bombing overhead from all directions, and one veered from right-to-left over the decoys.
In that split-second, Poppel shouldered her shotgun, swung on the bird and squeezed the trigger. The bird glided and dropped and Brambles, the miniature dog with a messianic zeal to hunt, made the retrieve.
What followed was pure, unadulterated joy. Everyone hooted and hollered and clapped. Poppel raised her unloaded shotgun in triumph. The celebration, we would learn later, echoed across the marsh. Her first duck: a beautiful drake redhead.
“I can’t believe it,” she said. “I can’t believe it.”
The beauty of Poppel’s celebration was its without-motive spontaneity. It bore no resemblance to the soulless, manufactured-for-TV, wack’em-and-stack’em bravado that defines a small subset of today’s North American waterfowling culture. Her celebration was completely genuine and organic, and that made—and makes—all the difference in the world.
The hunt came full circle back at Kirchhoffer Lodge. The women exchanged high-fives and told stories about their morning in the marsh. Smiles—big smiles—creased their faces. After lunch, a cleaning station was set up and the women learned how to clean and puck their quarry, completing yet another part of The Package. Poppel brought her bird home and prepared it for her family. “This is something I definitively want to do again,” she said. “What a wonderful weekend. I’ll never forget it.”
Olson won’t either.
“I have never had anyone appreciate a hunt more than those women did,” Olson said. “It was electric and magical and empowering. It shows me that while we have to continue to introduce the younger generation to our heritage, we also have to target adults—women and men.
“Youth are like planting fingerling trout in the pond. It’s visionary and necessary. But adults are the short- to mid-term solution to our problem. Our women’s hunt convinced me of that.
“The fact of the matter is we have Canadian hunting crisis with waterfowlers,” Olson continued. “Our numbers have dropped precipitously since the 1970s, and Delta is leading the way to turn that tide. Our first women’s hunt is yet another example of our commitment to preserving our waterfowling heritage. We need more caretakers for the birds, like the 20 women we had at our first ladies hunt. Those women can be apart of the solution.”
View more photographs from the 2007 Women's Hunt
