Andy Mink

Guide

 

I grew up on a farm between Lincoln and Omaha Nebraska. My passion for hunting started as a boy shooting rabbits and squirrels with a pellet gun around the farm. I had a good friend who introduced me to bow hunting and waterfowl hunting when I was 12 years old. I’ll never forget that first invite to the Platte River. It was a cold November afternoon on a big migration day. At the time, I didn’t know what a migration day was.  I just remember big mallards, with their orange feet kicked out, hovering above the decoys. After that, I was hooked for life. During high school, a few buddies and I went in on some decoys and started hunting together. At first, we weren’t very successful, but we worked hard at it and put in our time. The hunting seemed to get better and better. Not long after, I went off to college at South Dakota State University. I knew it would be hard leaving my home state hunting grounds, but I had a feeling it was for the best. It didn’t take long for me to realize that the prairie pothole region of South Dakota was a hunter’s dream place. Playing football for SDSU made it tough to hunt as much as I would have liked. But after my first year, I learned to make my class schedule fit around hunting. The more involved I got, the more I realized my old lab wasn’t meeting my needs. I bought a puppy my sophomore year of college. All summer long, all I did was work out and train Suzie.  So far, the dog has done more than I thought possible. College seemed to fly by, and I needed to start thinking of what I wanted to do for a living. I really enjoyed working with my grandpa, but the family farm isn’t quite big enough to support us both, so I decided to try supplementing my income with guiding. This gave me the chance to offer people some of the amazing opportunities that I’ve been able to experience firsthand. I guided duck and snow goose hunts at Habitat Flats for a couple years where I met Alex. Alex seemed to be a really down to earth guy that loved the sport of waterfowling as much as I do. We hit it off right from the start. Not long after we met, he offered me a job in South Dakota at Flatland Flyways. It was impossible for me to turn down such an incredible opportunity to do what I love with a great group of people.

People often ask me what I enjoy hunting most. That is never an easy question for me to answer; I enjoy at all so much. From early season teal zipping through the decoys, to late season geese dropping in the snow covered fields; it’s hard for me to pick just one. I don’t know if there is anything better than getting rewarded from the long days, late nights and early mornings than a monster flock of loud snow geese finishing at my feet. Fooling all those eyes and ears is tough to do, but when it happens, it is one of the most amazing things I’ve ever experienced. Other than hunting, I enjoy dog training, walleye fishing, bow fishing, farming or just anything that involves being outdoors.