Anyone ever hooked a duck, goose, or any other waterfowl?  I have -- five so far!  The first time I hooked a duck was when I was fly fishing for panfish at a local pond about a year or two ago.  I noticed that about five or so ducks were coming towards the spot where I was fishing.  I didn't think much about it, as I had never heard of anyone catching a duck before.  I made a cast, and turned my back for one second to talk to my friend.  Then when I looked back at the water, I was surprised to see that a duck had tried to eat my fly.  It got the hook lodged in the corner of it's beak (lucky), so I just decided to land it to shore like I'd land a fish.  When I got it in, it fought with me and and pecked at my hand when I tried to remove the hook (trying to infect me with the bird flu or something ).  When the duck finally got tired, I reached for my hemostats, carefully removed the hook, and set it free.  I came back a week later and found out that it actually survived the incident (I knew because it was the only duck at the pond that looked like it had been half plucked ).  Needless to say, I'm pretty sure I'll never catch that same duck again.  Hopefully it learned it's lesson!

After that incident, a few months later I hooked another duck and about a month after that, another!  Then when spring arrived the next, I hooked my first Canadian Goose!  Man, if he was a fish, he would have been a trophy.  My most recent catch was a sparrow I caught off yet another dry fly.  For some reason it got tangled in my cast.

After all of this, I hope you all don't think lesser of me (or that I'm crazy ).  All the birds that were hooked hooked survived (I could tell by the loss of feathers which bird is which).  I guess the more you go fishing the more these kind of things happen to you.  I'm just lucky I haven't caught a swan yet!