Birthday in the blind

RENO COUNTY – Landen Snyder is the kind of kid who always seems to be smiling. But early Saturday morning he was wearing a full-fledged grin as if it was his birthday.

Well, actually it was his 13th birthday, but the bigger reason for his smile was the sight a green-winged teal he’d shot coming back in the mouth of a retriever.

“I’ll play paintball later, but I wanted to go hunting,” said the boy, whose birthday handily coincided with Saturday’s opening morning of the low plains late zone duck season. He later said the hunt was “a lot more fun” than any birthday cake.

For decades there has not been much in this world that’s more fun to his branch of the Snyder family than duck hunting. Landen was in a duck blind with his father, Russ, and grandfather, Bob.

As a boy, Bob Snyder helped his parents run two large duck hunting clubs amid in the then private marshes of what’s now the Quivira National Wildlife Refuge. At 8, he often rowed a boat hours before school began to place decoys for paying hunters. After school he cleaned ducks for hours.

Despite all of the work at such a young age, he’s spent about every possible minute of the last 60-plus years duck hunting. On the first year of his retirement 14 years ago, he hunted every day of the duck season except for one. He quickly forgave his wife, Judy, for needing a trip to the hospital that day.

Born in the summer, Russ Snyder didn’t celebrate any birthdays at a marsh, but he did many holidays.

“When I was a kid, we had to get up in the middle of the night to open Santa’s presents so we could be still get to the duck blind in time,” he said. “Man, I’d hate to think how many years we did that. It was a lot.”

Landen was tagging along on family duck hunts years before he was old enough to carry a shotgun, often sleeping on the floor of the blind. But he certainly wasn’t asleep when the first small flock of green teal zipped over the decoys minutes into legal shooting time Saturday morning.

Even despite the little bird’s speed, the boy fired one shot and folded the nearest drake as neatly as a clean pair of socks. A few minutes later, he did the same to a super-sized mallard drake. He shot both with the same well-worn 20 gauge pump his father shot as a boy 30 years ago.

With the exception of his 20 gauge’s limited range, Landen largely kept up with his grandfather and father when it came to shooting ducks Saturday morning. Flights weren’t nearly as common as the previous Saturday, when Landen and a friend easily shot limits of six ducks apiece, during the zone’s special youth season, from huge flocks of mallards and teal. On that day, they had hunted a friend’s pond about two miles from where they hunted Saturday, a marsh where they have opened the season for decades.

As of two weeks ago, the pond his grandfather manages had more than 1,000 ducks. By the middle of last week the number was down to about 500 birds. Still, there were enough flocks of mallards, blue-winged and green-winged teal, widgeon, and pintail ducks to make for a fun hunt.

Landen finished the morning with two teal and two mallards. His hunting group of four, which included friend Andy Fanter, shot 22 ducks. As they were packing to leave, game warden Hal Kaina stopped and said the Snyders had done better than any group he’d checked in the area that morning.

“Now I still get to do the paintball,” Landen said, still smiling, after a few minutes up playing with the Lab.

But being a Snyder, the best part of his birthday was probably over.

This story was originally published October 31, 2015 at 4:08 PM with the headline "Birthday in the blind."