CHESAPEAKE DAWN
BETWEEN A GREENHEAD’S FEEDING CHUCKLE and the hailing call of a hen mallard, Garrett Mullaney muses about the future of waterfowl hunting in America. The twenty-seven-year-old software sales executive is in the middle of a conversation about raising new generations of hunters when mallard and teal bomb in over Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay marshes. We hunker down in the blind as he segues seamlessly between talking about duck hunting and talking to the ducks, the mallard call never leaving his lips.
“I love the wow factor of taking new people out,” he says, then breaks off to keep track of the flock.
Birds at twelve o’clock moving to two o’clock quack-quack-quack.
“And the first step of getting new folks on their first hunt is critical…”
Turning now, watch them…
“But how can we empower hunters to take new hunters out? Is there a way to incentivize how we pass these traditions along?”
On the right now, coming in, coming in!
And come in they do. Mallard, teal, pintail, and wigeon, by the dozens and by the hundreds. They set their wings and drop into an impoundment ringed with standing corn,
