bill herian wrote:It was a strange year to hear it told by the southerners on the board. Poor Rick was getting on by the skin of his teeth while Comeaux was living high on the hog in that same parish.
If you look at the logs,
http://www.pitblind.com/index.php/forum/dcomeaux-13-14 and
http://www.pitblind.com/index.php/forum/rick, you'll see an example of the vagaries of perception. Dave's duck season was actually much tougher than ours, which sucked compared to most recent years, so it appears I'm just more inclined to piss and moan about it, while he's more happy go lucky. One man's boom may be another's bust.
The logs on that site are archived for the seven seasons they've been offered, and a check of mine will show that 2012-2013 and 2011-2012 before it were actually the best of those seven for me and mine. Having hunted the same morning blind daily for all of those seasons, those logs would seem a very fair gauge for that particular location. And given that gauge, it would be hard for me to turn this year's worst of the seven into a picture of long term doom and gloom.
My best guess is that we suffered an anomaly predicated by last year's late Spring and subsequent late hatch. We began seeing that when our September teal survey reported its lowest numbers on record, some 79% below our long term average, and the region suffered generally poor to terrible teal hunting to support the survey's finding. But the bluewings weren't just a little late moving, as a number of our traveling hunters reported them being primary targets on their Dakota and Canada trips well into November. By similar token, we generally have good numbers of mallards in my area from early November on, so there's a significant part of their population that's not as weather driven as some of us tend to think them, but my blind's first split mallard bag was 70 birds shy of either of its past two first splits.
Still guessing, here, it seems to me that when birds programed to migrate on the urge brought on by shortening daylight hours couldn't do so because their broods weren't ready for the flight, the urge passed and they became part of the more external pressure (feed and security) oriented migration.
So why didn't cold weather push them? My guess is because cold weather doesn't bother ducks much, and it wasn't accompanied by lasting snow cover deep enough to limit their food supply. (Except, of course, in areas too far east to seriously affect our Mississippi/Central Flyway migration.) Ice alone may keep us out of our honeyholes, but ducks are masters at finding and maintain open water when need be.
DU? God bless 'em, they claimed way too much credit for "saving" the ducks when times were good and now that's come home to roost in the form of too much blame when times are tough. The birds affected by their activities are actually a small fraction of the overall population. Would make a lot more sense to cuss no till farming.
Damn I'm windy.
Posted: Sun Feb 23, 2014 2:27 pm
