2 men are sold on duck hunting

One of the young men was guiding hunters when he was 18.

DALLAS MORNING NEWS

SUNSET, Texas — It’s not easy being a duck hunter, especially on a cold, dreary, rainy day when ducks refuse to cooperate. Duck hunters roll out of their warm beds when most citizens are logging their restful REM sleep.

Urban duck hunters often drive long distances, slog through the mud carrying a shotgun and a heavy sack of decoys, stand in cold water to set the spread, then shiver in a makeshift blind in hopes that a freewheeling flock of teal will give them a look.

The pre-dawn preparations are fueled by copious amounts of coffee and optimism.

Just when you suspect the duck-hunting gene has been mercifully bred out of modern man, replaced by a genetic shift toward video games and golf, along come young guns such as Cory Anderson and Geoff Coffman.

The duck-hunting gene might be recessive, but it occasionally overpowers common sense. Ducks Unlimited would like to clone these guys.

As the popular bumper sticker says, they’re hooked on quack. Spectator sports guys can have their Nike endorsements.

Anderson and Coffman would rather be sponsored by Avery Outdoors or Sportsman’s Warehouse.

They can’t quote Tony Romo’s passer rating, but they idolize Phil Robertson, The Duck Commander, who hunts ducks and promotes waterfowl products for a living, and looks like an escapee from Middle Earth.

Anderson, 26, owns Drake’s Guide Service, specializing in North Texas duck hunts on private property, mostly within an hour’s drive of his Fort Worth home.

In the off-season, he’s a very successful car salesman. Coffman, 29, has a regular job with Denton Parks and Recreation, but he guides duck hunters for Anderson every chance he gets.

Coffman grew up hunting waterfowl with his family in southern Illinois.

At age 4, Anderson was sharing a North Dakota duck blind with his dad. He was guiding hunters when he was 18.

He still leads five corporate duck and goose hunting expeditions a season in North Dakota, but his heart, along with his wife, Tiffany, and infant son, Drake, is in Fort Worth.

“I met Tiffany in a Fort Worth restaurant during a family vacation,” Anderson said. “When she told me that she loved hunting, I jokingly proposed marriage.”

The joke turned into a life-changing reality. Anderson, a natural salesman, started looking for North Texas duck hunting spots. He concentrates on Wise, Montague and Clay counties, leasing lakes and stock tanks from private landowners.

Texas has a split duck season, with the second split for most of the state Dec. 8 to Jan. 27.

During unexpectedly slow hunting conditions Dec. 8-9, Anderson and Coffman drove nearly 1,000 miles, scouting for ducks. They found some, and they also located a new hunting property.

Like many new-millennium duck hunters, Anderson scouts the Internet for potential hot spots.

He finds lakes that are not visible from the road via Google Earth. When he started this process, friends told him he would never be able to gain access to properties where landowners cherish their privacy.

But in six years, he has access to 34,000 acres, and some of the landowners are advocates in the search.

“When I locate the landowners, they invariably tell me they’ve already leased their land for deer hunting,” Anderson said.

“The area where I’m hunting is best known for deer, turkeys, hogs and quail. When I tell the landowners that I’m only interested in ducks, it gets their attention. Nobody around here seems much interested in ducks.”

Anderson and Coffman are interested in ducks.

You can tell from the zeal in their eyes when they talk about those magic days when the mallard tornadoes descend on their decoys, or the Canada geese are hanging 20 yards over the spread when they call the shot.