Drew Palmer for SPLIT REED
When does the shell you shoot matter? Every time you pull the trigger. With all the work you put in to make a hunt successful, don’t let it all fall apart when you squeeze the trigger. Hunt with reliable ammunition, hunt with APEX.
35˙ and a bone-chilling rain backed by a Northern wind sweeping across the Alberta prairie, not the kind of day for the faint of heart. Life is full of opportunities and those chances are only seized by those ready for them; waterfowlers dream of bands, hybrids, and rare birds alike. That happened to be me on a miserable and dreary morning in a pea field in early October.
Duck junkies and goose getters are obsessed with gear, guns, and ammo. It’s an industry largely fueled by trends and tech bred with fluff and feathers. There are only so many ways to skin a cat and great waterfowlers can kill birds with any call and any decoys. Any nit-picking detail fanatics that have a bone to pick with that need to spend a day hunting over the tarred pop bottles on the lakes of Mississippi or Tennessee. On the contrary, we all wish we were still hunting and shooting lead shot that has the knockdown power that Uncle Larry talks about at Thanksgiving every year.
I was so cold and shivering from sweating on the inside and rain crawling in every crack on the outside, I had fallen oblivious to the wave upon wave of geese migrating and working our spread. That is until a black-headed black-billed goose wheeled out of a flock and pumped his gray wings 50 yards from me on the left end of the spread. I’ve been waterfowl hunting for two decades; I’ve been insanely lucky to shoot two different hybrids and a handful of other bands and oddities. This was an Atlantic Brant that just landed in the middle of a pea field in the Central Flyway and I sure as shit saw it. I sat quietly and worked the next flock of birds and when a pair of specks drifted over the spread, 8 guns rose up and dumped them. I sat up and plucked this lost migrant out of the sky with one smooth crack.
