A few seasons ago a friend of mine and myself had set out to duck hunt in a public greentree area on Lake Oologah in northeast Oklahoma. It was a Cold overcast December day in the second half of the season. We had motored our boat to one of John's favorite spots under darkness and had placed out the decoys. This area is known for its large concentration of Mallards and we had killed several Mallards that morning. About midmorning John began telling me a story how last year about that same time of the year, he had been sitting in the same hole and he believed that he had a flock of black ducks decoy to his blocks, they had decoyed with a group of Mallards and had passed by just out of shotgun range. This was intriguing to me as I don't believe that I had ever killed or had even seen a Black duck. Nor had I even heard of another hunter in our part of the central flyway that had ever killed a Black duck. Sure we know that Black ducks are mottled in appearance like a Mallard hen but from what we had read were darker in appearance than a Mallard hen.

John and I go to great lengths to avoid shooting a hen as we believe you kill some of next seasons flight each time you kill a hen. Fifteen to twenty minutes had gone by and a flock of mallards began working the decoys. As they began to circle for the second time, this time heading straight for our decoys, it was obvious that there were several ducks that were darker than the hen mallards in the flock. As our conversation a few minutes earlier was still on our minds about the Black ducks, John shouts BLACKS just as we started firing. As we raised and fired our guns he and I each tried to pick out a darker bird. After we fired and birds flew off, John had managed to drop a few Mallard drakes and I had managed to drop one of the darker birds.