The first retrieve Crown checked off the list was a drake mottled duck in 2016. His last was a cinnamon teal in 2025. Between those two birds, there were nine years and 40 other species brought to hand, making Crown one of the most accomplished duck dogs of all time. The black Lab retrieved the 42 species of North American waterfowl before he died on Feb. 14.
“I came up with the idea to do this long before the waterfowler challenge was a thing,” says Rhett Riddle, Crown’s owner and the owner of Bay Creek Kennels in South Carolina. “I didn’t know anyone that had done it with a [single] dog.”
Riddle, Crown’s human, trains retrievers in South Carolina. He says he’d already achieved the North American Waterfowl Slam on his own, but he started over a second time so he could accomplish it with Crown. The dog came from a long line of retrievers that Riddle has trained since high school.
“Everything had to work out perfect,” Riddle says. “I had to shoot every bird where Crown could find it for me. He had to be involved in every single bird I shot.”
The original Ultimate Waterfowlers Challenge, which some hunters refer to as the North American Waterfowl Slam, includes 41 species. Some would include up to 47 species on their own versions of that list, and there is no official organization tracking the UWC, as there frequently is with other hunting slams, like sheep and turkeys. Riddle’s version — what he calls the North American Waterfowl Slam for dogs — counts 42 species. He includes the Mexican duck, which is not included in the traditional list.
This journey took the pair all over the U.S. and beyond, although Crown’s favorite hunting grounds were along the Platte River in Nebraska. It required him to make some adventurous swims in places like the Bering Sea, the Labrador Sea, and the Pacific Ocean. The dog had to avoid alligators in Florida (black-bellied whistling duck) as well as sharks in the North Atlantic (common eider), where only short retrieves for Crown were allowed.
One of the pair’s biggest and most challenging adventures was to Greenland. Riddle says it took him two years to get permission to travel there with Crown so they could hunt king eiders together.
“He wasn’t the first dog to pick up a king eider, but the first one to be going for all species [when he did it],” says Riddle. “That set it apart as something no [dog] has ever done before.”
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Since March 2024, when Crown was cleared to travel to Greenland, Riddle has helped another hunter, Luke Ballam, do the same with his duck dog, Widgeon. The yellow Lab collected her king eider there last year and completed her own waterfowl slam in April 2025, just four months after Crown finished his in January.
Riddle says the accomplishment required two things: commitment and discipline.
“You can’t do this with a basic gun dog. You have to have a finished dog,” he says. “You need [complete] control over them because you don’t know what you’re going to encounter … Safety is number one. There was never a single time when I thought I was putting Crown into anything super dangerous.”
Crown turned 11 last year, and he was diagnosed with lymphoma in the fall. But the Lab wasn’t done hunting just yet. He and Riddle went to Alaska together in December. This was after three months of chemotherapy, and when Crown was in remission. Soon after they hunted Maryland and New Jersey, though, the cancer came back. Their last hunt in January was for northern shovelers in Arkansas.
“I knew it was getting close and it would be the last time we’d do anything together,” Riddle says. “Arkansas was the best place to go because the rest of the country was frozen, but it all went perfect. He only had one more week after that, and then he went downhill.”
Riddle had Crown cremated, and most of his ashes are going into two decoys: a Harlequin duck and a cinnamon teal. Some ashes will also be loaded into a few special .410 shells, because the ducks tend to work close at Crown’s favorite spot on the Platte.
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“My advice for someone who loses a dog: You better have another one,” Riddle says. “There’s no way to get through it without the love of another dog. I’ve got four of Crown’s puppies living in my house with me for a reason.”
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