Happy, Happy, Happy: My Life and Legacy as the Duck Commander

high-pitched quack when they’re flushed. Like most women, you’ll know when they’ve been bothered! When you’re calling a green-winged teal, you don’t do it very loud, and you use fine, little short notes while you’re blowing air directly into the whistle. It’s almost like a miniature mallard hen call, but when you get four or five people peep ing at the same time, it’s exactly what teals sound like on the water.
    There are also blue-winged teals and cinnamon teals, and they’re identifiable by the colors their names suggest. The blue-winged teals, which have blue-gray upper wings, are common in the northern prairies and parklands of the central United States. We see a few blue-winged teals every once in a while, but they tend to winter farther to the south. The male has a high-whistled tsee, tsee sound, while the female lets out loud, evenly spaced quacks. The blue-winged teals are a lot of fun to hunt becausethey fly very fast and make erratic twists and turns as they fly low over your decoy spreads. The cinnamon teal, which has a cinnamon-red head, neck, breast, and belly, are common around the Great Salt Lake in Utah and the central valleys of California. They winter in Mexico and other parts of Central America, so we don’t see them in Louisiana. The male cinnamon teal makes a series of chuk notes, while the female gives off more of a quack.
    We see a lot of American wigeons, which are also known as baldpates and have a bluish gray-tipped bill. The males have a white crown on their heads and a green face patch. The wigeon drake gives out three high, squeaky whistles, like whee, whee, whee . To call a male wigeon, you stick the whistle in the corner of your mouth and clench your teeth. You blow three times and make sure you accent the second sound. The female wigeon, which has a gray head with a brownish-black crown, gives out a quack sound. We usually end up seeing a lot of American wigeon ducks; they nest in parts of Canada and are usually the first to migrate south for the winter.
    The northern pintail is a long, slim duck with long, narrow wings, a slender neck, and a long tail. You can’t mistake a pintail for any other kind of duck. Some people call them the “greyhounds of the air,” and the males have chocolate-brown heads with a white stripe on each side of their necks. The male lets out growling, guttural notes, and they’re not easy to duplicate. If youlook in the mirror, you’ll see a round piece of meat hanging in the back of your throat. God gave us that piece of meat to call a pintail duck. If we didn’t have it and couldn’t flutter it as we blew air into a whistle, we’d sound like a backhoe backing up: beep, beep, beep! But because God gave us that piece of meat, we can sound exactly like a pintail duck. The female pintail quacks and sounds nothing like a male.
    Now, I can’t take credit for all the duck calls that Duck Commander has developed over the years. One time when my son Jase was hunting with me, he had a mallard hen call in one corner of his mouth and a whistle in the other and was blowing them at the same time. As Jase was blowing on both of them, a flight of gadwalls turned and came right down to our decoys. After we shot ’em, I asked Jase, “What were you doing down there? It sounded like a gadwall.”

    Jase had a mallard hen call in one corner of his mouth and a whistle in the other and was blowing them at the same time.

    “Why do you think they came down here?” Jase asked me. “They thought I was a gadwall.”
    As with the Mallard Drake Call, we were the first company to introduce a gadwall drake call. Gadwalls are about the same size as mallards, but there’s really nothing very distinctive about them. The male gadwall is gray-brown with a black patch at its tail, while thefemales are patterned with brown and buff. The male gadwall makes short, deep, reedy calls that sound like a burp; the females quack like mallards, but with a higher pitch. To call a gadwall, you give the call one tat every four seconds or so.
    Unlike the gadwalls, wood ducks are very distinctive. They’re the only ducks that perch and nest in trees—they have sharp claws—and they’re comfortable flying through woods, hence their name. They also have a unique shape: they’re boxy with crested heads, thin necks, and long, broad tails. The males have glossy green heads with white stripes, burgundy breasts, and buff sides. The female wood ducks are gray-brown with