How to Improve Your Duck Shooting

From our November/December 2025 Issue

In the early days of sporting clays, some clubs set stations where you sat in a tippy boat surrounded by decoys while they threw targets at you. Those stations disappeared once shooters realized they could put more Xs on their scorecards with their feet set on solid ground.

Duck hunters don’t have the luxury of insisting on good footing. We have to shoot ducks where they are. Sometimes that means shooting from a blind with sturdy wood flooring. Just as often it means standing in boot-sucking mud, or popping out of a hole in the ground, or sitting up from a layout blind, or rocking in that tippy boat.

And waterfowling presents shots at incomers, crossers, rising targets, flaring targets and high overheads. You have to take those shots while you’re bundled up, balancing a coffee cup or holding a phone (I am so guilty of this).

In short, duck shooting is hard.

Putting the phone down is the obvious first step. Here are some more hints to help improve your duck shooting.

DON’T OVER-GUN

Most shots at ducks—at least most good shots at ducks—come between 20 and 35 yards, yet waterfowlers gear up for the long shots. I once spent a morning with three hunters who brought Patternmaster chokes and tight-shooting HEVI-Shot to a hunt where mallards were making their last downwind swings out of sight, then popping into view at 20 yards. My blindmates shot and shot and shot. They bagged limits, but at hunt’s end the blind was as close to ankle-deep in empties as I have ever seen.

A Light Modified choke and 3" or 2 3⁄4" steel No. 2s are enough for ducks and the random goose out to 35 yards. More-open chokes might be even better for over-decoy shots, but birds can get out of the hole so quickly on a windy day that I want to err on the side of slightly longer range for follow-ups and lapses in judgment.

PRACTICE YOUR GUN MOUNT

A smooth, unrushed gun mount is just as important in waterfowling as it is in upland hunting, and it’s more difficult to perform properly. You have to remain still and hidden until the last moment, and then get your gun into action before birds flare. Practice your mount with an unloaded gun. The first move is always to push the muzzle out and toward the bird. That push away helps prevent snagging the gun butt in your many layers of warm clothes.

If you’re lying down or crouching under the lid of a pit, remember the good advice a guide once gave me: “Get up in a hurry, then take your time.” There’s a temptation to rush, especially when everyone else is rushing. Get up fast, then find a target and make a good mount.

USE POSITIVE SELF-TALK

Borrow a trick from target shooters, and bolster your chances with positive self-talk as the birds approach. I learned this years ago after standing up and announcing to my cousin, “I’m going to kill this duck,” before futilely emptying my gun. Actually, I didn’t learn it completely, because a couple years ago I made four honkers spin 180 degrees, stand on their wingtips, drop to water level and fly right into the decoys. The pompous thought popped into my mind, “I live for this.” I then made a complete mess of what should have been a triple. At least I got one of them.

It’s much better to tell yourself something specific like “be smooth” or “look at the head” or whatever thought most helps you. Target shooters talk about keeping their thinking “performance-oriented” (i.e., what you have to do to hit the target) rather than “outcome oriented” (“I’m going to kill this duck,” per the above). Stay engaged in the present. Think specific, positive thoughts, and reflect on how you live for these moments afterward, when you have the birds in hand.

DON’T SHOOT TOO SOON

Watch resident ducks fly in the offseason to help you learn to judge what a duck in range looks like. On a hunt, when a duck looks like it’s in range, it’s at the edge of range. When the duck looks huge, it’s in ideal range: 15 to 20 yards. Teal are the exception. They are tiny, and if a teal looks just out of range, it’s usually shootable. I have passed up teal as too far only to realize afterward that they were at 30 yards.

As long as a duck is coming to me, I let it come closer . . . up to a point. I once hunted with a guide in Saskatchewan who liked to call the shot at five yards. When a flock is that close, you stand up to chaos, with ducks twisting and flaring in your face, and it’s hard to hit anything. Ideally, I’ll set my decoys so the landing hole is 18 to 20 yards from the blind and put none of them farther than I want to shoot.

PICK A BIRD

Pick a bird, either as the flock is coming in or after you stand but before you mount the gun. If you flock shoot, you’ll hit the air between birds almost every time. After you pick a bird, dial down your visual focus to its bill, its eye, its head. You’ll be rewarded with hits in the front end and birds that fold up dead. “Pick a bird,” by the way, is a very good self-talk phrase when ducks are working.

Ideally, when the hunters stand to shoot, they keep their muzzles inside their own 10:00-to-2:00 shooting windows and they aren’t blasting the same duck. Even so, there’s often one drake that’s hanging lower and looking bigger than the rest. I usually leave that one, figuring it will attract multiple shooters regardless of whose lane it’s in. Find a different duck, make sure it folds and then look for another. Some shooters plan doubles. I take them as a bonus.

FOOTWORK

If you hunt where you have solid footing, footwork in duck hunting is like it is in any other shooting discipline, except that you start sitting on a bench or a bucket. Even sitting, you can set your feet before the shot. Set up favoring the right side of your shooting window, if you’re right-handed. Then when you pop up to “take ’em,” you don’t have to move your feet; just mount and shoot.

Sometimes, though, your feet are stuck in the mud. Then you have to put them where you think they should be, and don’t try to move them before the shot. If you’re in a layout blind, where footwork doesn’t apply, angle the blind so that you’re pointed slightly to the right (if you’re right-handed) of where you’re most likely to shoot. It’s much easier to swing to your left than to your right.

SWITCH UP YOUR METHODS

Churchill-style shooing—essentially a swing-through method where you swing and mount with one motion and without apparent lead—works well until it doesn’t, which for me is past 30 yards. Up close, it’s all instinctive shooting when birds are in the decoys and as they flare out of the hole. As ranges get longer, it’s much easier to pull away or even shoot maintained lead, especially on crossers and overhead birds. If you never let the bird pass your barrel, you feel a lot more in control and less rushed. The longer the shot, the slower you should move the gun.

PICK YOUR SHOTS

The best way to improve your duck shooting is by taking only shots you will make. My favorite shot is at a backpedaling duck just before its feet touch the water. The challenge of duck hunting shouldn’t be the shooting; it should be the challenge of fooling a duck so completely that the shot is a foregone conclusion.

Overhead and crossing shots give you lots of opportunities to put pellets into a bird’s vitals. Going-away shots, on the other hand, present very little to shoot at. Unless a bird is inside 25 yards or it’s been hit already, I try to let the going-away birds alone.

I hunt without a retriever, which limits the shots I am comfortable taking. When I do slip up and drop a bird in the heavy cover that surrounds the ponds I hunt, my penance is a trip home to grab my shorthair, Zeke. he hates water and sitting still, but he will point a crippled duck in the long grass. It’s much better to skip risky shots to begin with, even when you have a good retriever by your side.