These easy concealments will keep you in the birds.

Story and photography by Robert Sloan

Duck blinds are as different as night and day. And some times you don’t even need a duck blind to have a quality hunt. But for the most part a well camouflaged blind of some sort will allow you to bring in more ducks.

I’ve pretty much hunted ducks all over Texas. Some of the blinds I’ve used were huge and set up for holding about six hunters. One that was really impressive was on a ranch south of Winnie, in Southeast Texas. A friend of mine was a guide on this particular ranch and had access to a blind that was used by the owner of the ranch and his guests. We plowed through the boggy rice field and came up on what looked like a concrete box. It was actually our blind, and was a sink box. The lid was jacked up and we filed in and sat down on a comfortable bench. The decoys were already out, and once we poured cups of hot coffee, we kicked back and waited for legal shooting time. The unique thing about that blind is that we were at eye level to the water and decoys. The ducks that came in didn’t have a clue as to our whereabouts. The shooting was easy and we quickly collected easy limits of widgeon, gadwall and a couple of green head mallards.

Over the years I’ve spent a lot of time hunting on various rivers in Texas, with the Brazos being my favorite. It’s always attracted a fair number of ducks like teal, gadwall, pintails and mallards. We’ve never used a blind on that particular river. Instead we simply cut brush and hung it from limbs of trees along the edge of the river. There was always an abundance of brush, and after building a makeshift blind we would hang sheets of camouflaged mesh to totally conceal us from incoming ducks. The thing about river hunts is that getting to the best spots can really take a lot of effort, as in pushing and pulling a boat across rocks and sand bars. And once we were at the hot spot there was the issue of constructing some sort of blind.

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