Big-time waterfowling doesn't have to involve big-time crowds - as the hunters seen here plainly attest. Photo by Bryan Hendricks

As waterfowl hunting grows more popular, it's getting harder to enjoy hunting waterfowl on public lands. If you plan ahead and do a little homework, however, you can still find high-quality hunting on areas that others overlook. Some are hard to reach; others are amazingly close to large metropolitan areas. Either way, the hunting can be phenomenal. Just be careful about whom you share your secrets with - because secrets have a way of getting around.

Throughout the South, public waterfowl hunting areas are crowded throughout the season, especially in a good flight year. Even in poor years, hope springs eternal, and even marginal areas fill fast with people who hope they can find some decent hunting between the cracks, so to speak.

Some places allow daily access to a limited number of hunters through a lottery. Unfortunately, this requires hunters to participate in a pre-hunt drawing. If you aren't selected, your day is pretty well shot, because by the time the drawing is done, it's too late to go anywhere else. Other places with open access can be so crowded that finding a place to park, let alone hunt, can be a challenge. In those areas, you have to compete with a lot of other hunters trying to attract ducks to their spread or, worse, with skybusters shooting at ducks working your spread.

The most obvious ways to avoid these headaches is to lease a place to hunt or to get permission from a kindhearted landowner. Leasing is expensive, and landowners are often reluctant to grant access to people they don't know well. No wonder that regular people are abandoning waterfowling, leaving the sport to become the domain of the wealthy.

But before you retire your retriever and reassign your waders to fishing duty, grab a map of your state or county. Look closely and you'll see all kinds of public areas that offer potentially good waterfowl hunting. Such areas include the banks, coves and islands of major rivers or reservoirs. Smaller rivers and creeks also offer excellent opportunities for float hunters.

Along the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Coast, there's also some fine hunting available in the dredgewater ponds of the Intracoastal Waterway. Your state fish and game department probably manages land close to home that's well known for deer, turkeys or upland game, but totally disregarded for waterfowl hunting. It's likely that they have a number of ponds that seem to attract ducks throughout the year. You've probably seen ducks on these ponds while you were hunting other game and never considered returning to them for ducks.

The point: Excellent, overlooked waterfowl hunting opportunities are everywhere. Here's how to find them.