5 Tips for Late Season MOJO Use
Ryan Barnes for SPLIT REED
Presented by MOJO Outdoors
Everyone says it; “MOJO’s are only good for the first week of the season then they flare birds”. Sure, ducks may become slightly educated to spinners and decoy spreads, but the truth remains that MOJO spinning wing decoys can be a very lethal tool during the late part of the waterfowl season. You just need to know how to use them.
Everyone usually has the same idea- stick two or three spinners near the finishing lane, to attract the ducks into the hole. This plan works great in theory but after the ducks have seen that in every spread from Saskatchewan to Texas, it may be time to mix it up. This doesn’t mean completely pull them out but you may want to mix up your approach with them. Here are 5 tips for late season success using MOJO spinning wing decoys.
1. Spread them ALL over when hunting a field
Many times, the late season ice-over will push the ducks off the water (or lack thereof) and force them into the fields to find their food with great appetites for life sustaining calories. This gives hunters the chance to hunt them in corn, stubble, wheat, and whatever other fields the ducks may decide is on the menu. When ducks are eating in a field, it’s usually numbers into the thousands, and things can get a bit hectic. Adjust your MOJO decoys accordingly. Don’t have them all centralized on one specific spot. Ducks are graceful enough in flight that they’ll land wherever there’s an opening big enough. Your job is to set the decoys on the ground and create the opening in accordance with the wind well enough that the ducks are landing right in your face. The MOJO’s are simply there to create an attraction, as well as realism. To recreate the scene of ducks flying around looking to beat the next bird to the nearest food. You want to create a scene of absolute madness. Use as many as you can, and create mayhem. That will imitate a scene that ducks are used to seeing, as well as a scene that they are naturally drawn to.
2. Use the MOJO’s as “blockers”
It can be true that ducks get wary of spinning wing decoys late in the season, so use that to your advantage. If you’re hunting an area that has multiple pockets of open water, go set a MOJO up where you don’t want them to land, and just leave it off. For instance if you notice ducks are landing 100-150 yards away, go set up a spinner and possibly a few decoys to block the ducks from landing there and push them to you. Just make sure you’re not interfering with other hunters, of course. Use the MOJO’s as a blocking system to funnel the ducks to you and your spread. That way when the ducks see your spread and your motion system, they’ll suck right into the hole.
3. MOJO’s and Honkers on Open Water
One huge element to killing ducks is being able to attract them in. It’s often said that there’s no better duck decoy than a goose decoy. While there is a lot of truth to that statement, you still need to coax the ducks in. By mixing goose floaters and MOJO spinners, it can create a not-so-common spread that late season ducks will see from miles away, and navigate towards. Again, using the MOJO’s, you’ll want to mix it up. Maybe a teal on the far side, and a few staggered mallards on the other end. Just something to pull the ducks in close. The honker decoys and your setup will do the rest.
4. Use a MOJO “Trail” When hunting an Open Ice hole
A few years ago, I was hunting on a lake where we had hiked out on the ice to an open pocket of water. Usually ducks come screaming in when you have open water on the ice, but this wasn’t the case. There was more open water in the surrounding area and it seemed like the ducks were taking their pick of where to land. We decided that in order to be successful we needed to create a large attention grabber to get the ducks to us. We grabbed all the MOJO’s we could, which ended up being about 6 or 7, spread them about 50 yards from each other in a straight line following the direction the ducks were flying. We augured through the ice, set down the spinners, and slowly the ducks started to follow our trail of MOJOs. It made for a great shoot. With this in mind, this was simply a tactic we used to grab the ducks’ attention, and keep their attention until they saw our pocket of open water.
5. Use them more as Attention Grabbers, less as Finishing Tools
This is one of the biggest mistakes people make with MOJOs all year long. Whether it be on land, or on water. MOJOs aren’t intended to be a finishing decoy. Late in the season, you can set them 100-150 yards off your decoy spread, simply to attract the ducks’ attention. Using the spinners can bring ducks in closer to see you, and from that point, it’s your job to bring the birds into shooting distance.
Bonus Tips:
Take advantage of using MOJO spinners at different heights above the surface of water as well as the surface of fields. It is a good idea when using more than one MOJO to stagger their heights to give the appearance of movement or of a realistic multitude of birds.
If you plan on running a spread with a kill-hole, put a couple of mojos inside the kill-hole over a few decoys to make it look like birds have just set down in there and are continuing to, but also run a couple of mojos in the aggregate of the decoys to add realism. The birds will ‘get in where they fit in’ but you can try to square them up for a shot by giving them something to key in on.
BRING EXTRA BATTERIES! Cold weather will drain the life of batteries, it’s just a scientific fact. Colder weather results in shorter stored battery life. You don’t want to be in a position to shoot a pile of ducks and have very slow or not-at-all moving MOJOs in the mix.
Run a remote. This does a couple of things. first off it saves some battery life, but secondly it keeps you in contention for some geese. Don’t get my wrong- you can finish geese over MOJO’s but with later season hunts geese become more wary and may flare off of spinners.
If the ground is frozen, it can be good to bring a heavy hammer and a couple of feet of rebar or other material to drive into the ground to open up a hole for the stake to ease into. It can be a heck of a time trying to drive a MOJO directly into the ground in a late season corn or other field hunt.
One thing to keep in mind is that just because it’s the late season doesn’t mean that you have to leave the MOJOs home. There’s plenty of ways to use them for your success as the end of the season draws closer. You just have to think of creative ways to implement their use.
Remember, these tips aren’t fix-alls, or guaranteeing your success, however they should give you the groundwork for your own ideas and your own success as the season wears on.
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