The Elusive Pintail

It's just another duck, but the Northern Pintail grabbed my attention the minute I first flipped through the Minnesota DNR's Guide to Waterfowl; a handout that I had received along with my first state and federal duck stamps and waterfowl hunting license.  The picture of the male Pintail had a sleek copper-colored head and bright green patches along the backside of it's inner wings, and the long tail and slender build made this duck stand out among the others.  I was thirteen years old and had recently completed by gun safety course, which was in two parts.  The first part, as much as I can remember, was a few classes at the local junior high school, taught by a local DNR member, probably someone's dad.  He, and his younger assistant, wore off-brand jeans and an over-sized camoflaged shirt with many pockets.  That's about as much as I remember about the classroom content, which is to say probably none of the lecture material, except maybe the part about not pointing a gun at anyone; it was common sense stuff as I recall.

The second part of the course, which led to some form of certification, was an outdoor field test, conducted several miles west of our suburban city, in mixed-woods farm country; it seemed to me to be about as far out in the country as one would ever want to go, probably a 15 minute drive!  But unlike the classroom sessions, the field test was real-life and in the environment that I would experience upon my first hunting trip.  The test included gun safety, loading, and handling as well as proper procedure in a duck blind and hunting alongside others.  It also included field hunting techniques for those kids that might be hunting pheasant, grouse, quail, etc. - requiring demonstration of appropriate hunter spacing, movement through brush and trees, proper technique for navigating over a barbed-wire fence, etc.  Nothing too difficult but necessarily nerve-wracking for a 13-year old new to the sport.