COTEAU HOLMES — The 21-year-old diehard duck hunter heard shotguns booming to the north and south of Coteau Holmes on opening day of the special teal season Sept. 15.

Jay Jay Louviere of St. Martinville had enough shooting going on in the rice and crawfish ponds around him to quench his love for duck hunting. After all, it’s been since midwinter he last gunned down a duck.

Louviere, born and raised in Loreauville, rated the opening day of teal season “average” while enjoying the morning immensely with Brylan William of Lydia, Laine Barras of Catahoula, and Jacob Cyr and Tyler Prados, both of St. Martinville.

On a scale of 1 to 10, Louviere scored the first duck hunt of 2023-24 “probably about a six or seven.”

“It was average. It wasn’t one of the best (teal season opening day) hunts. They pulled the plug and cut the rice,” he said.

“I wasn’t aware they pulled the plug. I went from expecting 12 to 14 inches of water and get there and there’s one-half inch of water. They had plenty of birds. Just a lack of water that day.”

Louviere and his duck hunting buddies, two of them co-workers at Gator-Tail in Loreauville, knocked down 14 teal and recovered nine of them that Friday morning. Linn, Prados’ golden retriever, got a workout in tough field conditions.

Louviere was hunting an area owned by his father-in-law, Charles “Chip” Fuselier. He’ll hunt there again, for sure, when the regular waterfowl hunting season opens in the West Zone on Nov. 18.

Top gun among those five area outdoorsmen on opening day of the special teal season was Williams, Louviere said.

“For sure,” he said, emphatically, adding the Lydia outdoorsman was on his game so early in the season.

Louviere, a three-year veteran mechanic at Gator-Tail, works with Cyr, another mechanic, and Barras, who runs the online store and purchasing for the company founded by Kyle Broussard and his father, Blaine Broussard. Williams was a high school buddy at Loreauville High School and Prados is a friend of Louviere’s cousin, John Michael Theriot, who had to miss opening day because he was called offshore Thursday.

It all worked out as the local waterfowlers got into the ponds before legal shooting time one-half hour before sunrise. They got their shots in on the migratory birds that showed up twisting and turning in flight.

Louviere said he heard shooting in other nearby hotspots.

“We heard some coming from Catahoula, Derouen’s Pond (area, and either the (Atchafalaya) Basin or the lake, Lake Dauterive. But at Catahoula, it sounded like a war,” he said with a chuckle.

The group changed duck hunting sites on Sept. 16 by hunting at Prados’ pond in Catahoula, Louviere said. The duck hunters hoped a Friday evening rain would put more water in that area.

“We were hoping it’d fill it up his puddle a little more” but the water level still was too low, he said, noting in hindsight they should have returned to where they hunted the first day. They failed to kill a teal Saturday/

That Louviere was hunting could be attributed to another one of his friends, Landon LaGrange. Louviere has hunted ducks with a passion since he was 12 when a friend of his father’s, Leroy Begnaud of St. Martinville, started showing him the ins and outs of duck hunting.

He feels like he was born to hunt ducks.

“Oh, it’s my heart and soul,” he said.

However, Louviere inexplicably stopped hunting late in his teen years to take up bowhunting for deer. LaGrange got him back into duck hunting with an invite that “lit the fire back in me.”

“I’ve found a common ground. I’ll be bowhunting when it starts Oct. 1,” he said, noting he’ll bowhunt until the “big duck season” opens, then put the bow back in its case.

Naturally, he can’t wait. He plans to hunt big ducks in much the same area as he did Friday and Saturday.

“We’ll be in the same rice fields, just different rice fields, me and my friends, in ponds closer to St. Martinville. Hopefully, we’ll get mallards (and not just diving ducks),” he said.

Louisiana’s 2023-24 waterfowl hunting season begins Nov. 11 in the West Zone and Nov. 18 in the East Zone. The West Zone’s second split starts Dec. 11 and the third split opens Jan. 13 while the East Zone’s second split gets underway Dec. 16.