These 90-something duck hunters from St. Paul are still where they want to be: in a marsh

NEAR GRACEVILLE, MINN. — The other morning, for about the 85th year running, with a two-year hiatus during World War II, brothers Henry and John Ernst hunkered alongside a shallow lake, shotguns in their hands.

Henry, 98, and John, 96, are from St. Paul, and proudly so. But each year in October and November their seasonal residence is a vintage farmhouse in Swift County, whose decoy-strewn living room is testament to the brothers' love of waterfowling.

Both brothers still drive. But on this weekend, Henry's son, Brad, and John's son, Johnny, did the honors, angling their dads west of the Twin Cities for a duck-hunting weekend that for the two families is as much an autumn staple as football and falling leaves.

"In 1935 when I was 10 years old, my father took me duck hunting for the first time, near Stillwater," Henry said. "I shot a teal, and that got me hooked."

Two years later, also at about age 10, hefting a double-barrel 20 gauge, John Ernst first joined his dad Henry, a St. Paul dentist, and brother for a morning's hunt near Christmas Lake in the western suburbs.

During the Ernst brothers' most recent outing, the morning broke clear, with a brisk wind from the north. Struggling against the breeze, pintails, mallards, and a smattering of wigeon and green-winged teal pitched and wheeled above the 5-acre lake, drawn to it by its plentiful arthropods — freshwater shrimp — as well as sago pondweed and other food.

Sometimes the birds were fooled by a 65-block decoy spread over which Henry and John hunted, along with Brad, Johnny and family friends John Knoblauch and his son, Joe.

In those instances, shots rang out, cutting short the flights of one or more birds, their long downward arcs ending in splashes.

"My dad, Joe, who unfortunately died about 10 years ago, went to kindergarten with John (Ernst), and did a lot of hunting and fishing with him and Henry," John Knoblauch, 61, said. "I grew up hunting and fishing with Henry and John and their sons. I was 6 years old when I first made a duck hunting trip with them to Fergus Falls."

In some ways, the Ernsts and Knoblauchs represent old-school Minnesota waterfowling. Some in their families have hunted in Canada and other states. But their hearts are in the Minnesota hinterlands, which over multiple generations they've scoured looking for ducks and the places they favor.

While John Knoblauch and his late father focused on acquiring western Minnesota lakes and marshes for their hunting group, Henry and John Ernst initially spread their duck hunting wings near Fergus Falls, on Ten Mile Lake.

"Sometimes we would leave Friday after Dad and Uncle Henry got off work," Johnny Ernst said. "Other times we would get up at 1 Saturday morning and drive up. We must have done that 50 times over the years."

During their long-ago work lives, John taught math at Humboldt High School in St. Paul and also coached the school's golf team. Henry was in the life insurance business. A scratch golfer for many years, he was the 1953 Minnesota Amateur champion.

"After Fergus Falls we moved to the Glenwood area," Henry said. "A woman in my office was from Glenwood, and I asked her to get me the names of owners of farms in the area that had water on them. She must have given us 20 contacts, and we ended up buying a farm essentially for its hunting opportunities and selling the usable acreage to another farmer."

This was in the early 1970s when the continental bluebill (scaup) population reached its peak of nearly 8 million birds.

"The lake we hunted near Glenwood, which we still hunt, had freshwater shrimp, and sometimes there would be so many bluebills the sky would be black with them," John Ernst said.

But as bluebill numbers declined — essentially crashed, to a low of about 3.2 million in 2006 — the Ernst family's Glenwood-area duck hunting success fell, too.

Faced with such a drop-off, some waterfowlers would hang up their guns. Many, in fact, did. Fifty years ago, Minnesota licensed more than 120,000 waterfowlers. Now about half that number hunt ducks in the state.

Looking for still another duck hunting location, Henry drove a lot of Minnesota backroads. The purchase of the Swift County farmhouse resulted, and today the Ernsts hunt near it, while still commuting to Glenwood to hunker in their old haunt. Joining them, oftentimes, is "Skip" Ernst, another of Henry's sons.

Not far from the Swift County farmhouse, meanwhile, in a home on Big Stone Lake, John and son Joe Knoblauch and their friends headquarter during duck season. From it they fan out to various shallow lakes and wetlands the Knoblauchs have acquired or leased.

"My dad was a high school principal in Hopkins who operated a number of businesses on the side," John Knoblauch said. "He was a dynamic guy who loved to duck hunt, and he worked with farmers to help them acquire cropland while keeping the marshes for himself. My son and I and our group — we call ourselves the Knobby Wings Club — are trying to carry on his legacy."

So it went the other morning in western Minnesota.

Decoys were on the water, ducks in the air, and a good time was being shared among fathers and sons, and friends.

By midmorning, while watching a small squadron of mallards slip air between their primary feathers and settle swiftly onto the far side of the lake, this bunch sheathed their shotguns.

"Anymore, I really just like to watch ducks."

Henry Ernst, 98, said it. So did his brother, John, 96.

"We do not remember days, we remember moments," the Italian poet Cesare Pavese said.

This was one to remember.