The Old Duck Hunters Association, Inc. (ODHA), as documented by Gordon MacQuarrie, is Wisconsin’s finest hunting and fishing club.  If you have not read its history, contained in MacQuarrie’s Stories of the Old Duck Hunters Association and other volumes, please do yourself a favor and start soon.  In the meantime, SWTU asks any old, young or middle-aged duck hunters to help in a great stream restoration project by donating some unused duck-hunting material. We think the ODHA would approve this request and your response.

The material is the old fashioned decoy cord. It’s a strong, thin, rot-resistant and often colored brown or a vegetative green. It is also an ideal string for binding brush bundles, which are used to provide fish cover and feeding edges and to stabilize and expand stream banks in Wisconsin trout streams. We will be installing several huge brush bundles in the Sugar River on the Ziegler property, now owned by the County and open to the public.  We need hundreds of feet, spools and spools, of the decoy cord.  If you have some of this cord available — maybe you’re not duck hunting so much or have switched to more synthetic material, please consider donating it to the chapter.  Bring it to the February meeting and give it to Jim Hess or Topf Wells.

Gordon and the ODHA  President would be proud of you and happy to claim you as a member.  SWTU and the brown trout of the Sugar River will be grateful.

A historical note on MacQuarrie:  He was the long-time and beloved outdoor editor and reporter of the Milwaukee Journal.  He often publicized and supported the ecological teachings of a UW Professor named Leopold.  The second ODHA President was Harry Nohr.  MacQuarrie’s last set of stories included several trout and smallmouth bass fishing stories  set in the upper Pecatonica watershed, where the DNR, Pecatonica Pride and we hosted our landowner dinner last fall and where the DNR is securing stream easements.  In those last stories, MacQuarrie notes the beauty of the region and documents Nohr’s angling success but he also calls for better protection of those streams.