Two sisters from Lafayette eager to make a duck hunting trip got their wish recently and one of them notched a first in her life as a waterfowler.

Audrey Wheeler, 14, shot at birds on the wing and, for the first time, knocked three down during the trip with her maternal grandfather, Jimmy Shea of New Iberia. Audrey, a student/athlete who plays volleyball at St. Thomas More, gunned down a pintail, a gray duck (gadwall) and a spoonbill (shoveler).

“She never killed ducks in the air,” Shea said, proudly, a few weeks after the duck hunt Nov. 22 on his property along the Boston Canal near Boston in Vermilion Parish. He started hunting there 58 years ago and still manages and also leases some of the 6,500-acre area in southwest Louisiana.

Audrey and her younger sister, Eloise, who also enjoyed their duck hunt that morning but did not shoot, then went to their grandpa’s deer camp near Woodville, Mississippi, where he hunts on 850 acres.

The Wheeler girls are the daughters of Kerby and Rhyan Shea Wheeler of Lafayette. They fit right in with an extended family of ardent outdoorswomen and outdoorsmen.

Shea, retired vice-president of operations for The Bayou Companies, said that morning duck hunt with the girls was one to remember. He was impressed with the way his oldest granddaughter tracked and led the flying ducks with the shotgun barrel.

“I’m very proud of both of them,” he said.

He added three ducks to the strap that Tuesday morning near Boston Canal. The veteran outdoorsman and his granddaughters were joined in the duck blind by his retriever, Mick.

Shea had reason to be proud later Thanksgiving Week. His grandson, Luke Hodges, the 10-year-old son of Trey and Brie Hodges of Lafayette, killed his first buck on Nov. 26 while hunting with his dad on the back end of the 850-acre property in southwest Mississippi.

“He (Trey Hodges) had been seeing this particular deer and another deer coming to the food plot,” Shea said about the deer hunt that led to the 10-point, 190-pound buck downed with a double-lung shot by Luke.

All seven grandchildren converged with their respective families at the camp for the holiday week, he said.