AVIAN SPECIAL FORCES COMMUNITIES

It’s hunting season, and regardless how you feel about that you should also know that tofu is regularly hunted in the central portion of the United States. The blocks wobble their way down to Mexico from Canada in one of nature’s greatest migrations, second only to the flight of the Monarch butterfly. Thus from North Dakota straight down through Texas riflemen and riflewomen set up their tree blinds and pick off the squishy blocks one by one until their daily bag limit is reached and they can return home to make pho.

Tofu hunters are a weird lot, thus I prefer to stay away from them and hunt pheasant and duck instead.

Pheasants are directly related to velociraptors, which is why we’re allowed to hunt them (the Departments of Fish & Wildlife absolutely does not want to see pack-hunting dinosaurs return to our verdant wheat fields and scrub lands any time in the foreseeable future).

Pheasants prefer to walk/run on the ground over taking flight, only becoming airborne when a predator flushes them from cover. So basically you need a dog to encourage flight…if you just walk around the pheasants keep walking/running away from you, never leaving the ground, kind of chuckling to each other in the process, which makes you look like an idiot.

Finally, you can only shoot the boy pheasants. The girl pheasants are protected, which is obviously discriminatory. So you better be good at telling the boys from the girls. It takes a lot of practice – identifying bird genitalia at 50-yards as they take fight requires years of study and subsequent certification, from apprentice to journeyman to…whatever the last one is. Plumber?

Oh, last thing – to hunt pheasants you need to wear a bunch of neon orange clothing, from hats to vests to pants, so you don’t get shot by other hunters. Fun! It’s worth it, pheasants taste like exotic chickens. And literally anyone can do it. You just need a birth certificate from somewhere on Earth.

Ducks are an entirely different matter. Most people don’t realize that ducks are the Special Forces of the bird community, closely related to the Navy SEALS in particular, given their ability to operate on sea, air and land…and quack. Most people also don’t realize Navy SEALS quack to indicate when a threat is approaching. Just like a perturbed duck.

Ducks have incredibly good eyesight. Before we continue we should point out there’s a huge difference between a wild duck and that big fat bread-eating duck in the park next to your house. The latter has great eyesight too, but can’t be bothered to even muster a squint because he/she is coddled into obesity and complacence by cute, sourdough-wielding children or that eccentric guy in the overcoat who goes to the park by himself to smoke cigarettes, mutter under his breath and drink fortified wine. While feeding ducks.

The incredible eyesight of wild ducks requires duck hunters to spend thousands of dollars on truly terrible looking camouflage pants, jackets, hats, gloves, masks, hip boots, waders, blinds, guns, thermoses, coolers…everything.

It’s actually a form of economic warfare wild ducks have learned through evolution. Chipping away at the credit rating and financial stability of their pursuers has led to increased duck birth rates for the past two decades. Fact.

Some hunters have actually tried building their own customized giant duck costume to save some money. It’s a head-to-toe, zip-in-the-back type outfit, including a three-foot bill, the recess of which frames their human face. It works to a degree, but inevitably those cagey wild ducks sense something is awry as they witness their 6-foot cousins reaching widely around their beaks with their feathered arms to smoke, drink a beer or eat a sandwich. Normal ducks don’t eat with their wings. Or smoke.

The other burdens duck hunters bear are ungodly hours, dismal weather conditions and inhospitable terrain. Pheasant hunting is a spa day in comparison, what with its potential to walk around wheat fields in 75-degree sunshine with Snickers bars in your pocket and a 12:00-sharp lunch date at some small-town diner.

Duck hunters have to get up before dawn, march around a marsh or estuary or soggy field in the dark to find a blind (thing you hide behind), basically stay perfectly still for 6-plus hours no matter how freezing or rainy it is (it’s that eyesight thing), make sure the tide doesn’t trap you there all day (or night) if you’re near saltwater…so on and so forth.

Maybe duck hunters are as weird as tofu hunters after all. All the bizarre clothes, financial and physical hardships…who takes part in that voluntarily?

Regardless, if none of these appeal to you, or you just don’t want to harvest an animal, there’s all sorts of other hunting you can do. Truffle. Chantarelle. Spouse. House. But don’t kid yourself. Think about the absolute weirdness inherent in these activities before you get all judge-y. I feel safer walking around a field full of shotgun-wielding, camouflaged nerds than getting between two Realtors® at an open house.