SpinnerMan wrote:DComeaux wrote:Seeing ducks walking on ice in flooded standing corn speaks volumes about it's holding power.
I still want to see some data that more than a small fraction of the duck population is using flooded standing corn as a primary food source. My perspective is seeing 10's of thousands of mallards flying out of the cooling lake in January when there is no significant flooded corn anywhere in area.
However, we are talking about 10,000,000 mallards breeding population in the traditional survey area, so probably 15,000,000 or more mallards overall at the start of hunting season. That's a lot of birds. Even if holding 100,000 birds, which is a massive number of birds, that is only 0.67%.
I don't believe the ducks are roosting on the ice. There needs to be large bodies of open water to hold massive numbers of ducks. There are more of them now because there are more warm water discharges, especially large cooling lakes, but also those dumping into natural rivers. It's not uncommon to see ducks stacked deep on these. 5,000 here, 10,000 there. It's still hard to see how the distribution of 15,000,000 birds can be changed that much.DComeaux wrote:This, foiling mother natures plan.
Mother Nature's plan went out the window with the advent of the modern age. Warm water discharges and millions of acres of agricultural land was not the doing of Mother Nature.
Although I find this abstract interesting.
http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.2193/2007-028?journalCode=wildThe mallard (Anas platyrhynchos) is the most harvested duck in North America. A topic of debate among hunters, especially those in Arkansas, USA, is whether wintering distributions of mallards have changed in recent years. We examined distributions of mallards in the Mississippi (MF) and Central Flyways during hunting seasons 1980–2003 to determine if and why harvest distributions changed. We used Geographic Information Systems to analyze spatial distributions of band recoveries and harvest estimated using data from the United States Fish and Wildlife Service Parts Collection Survey. Mean latitudes of band recoveries and harvest estimates showed no significant trends across the study period. Despite slight increases in band recoveries and harvest on the peripheries of kernel density estimates, most harvest occurred in eastern Arkansas and northwestern Mississippi, USA, in all years. We found no evidence for changes in the harvest distributions of mallards. We believe that the late 1990s were years of exceptionally high harvest in the lower MF and that slight shifts northward since 2000 reflect a return to harvest distributions similar to those of the early 1980s. Our results provide biologists with possible explanations to hunter concerns of fewer mallards available for harvest.
Throughout all of my years as a waterfowl hunter mallards were never a major contributor to my harvest numbers. The places I've hunted weren't places mallards wanted to be. Gadwall, teal, spoon bill, wigeon, wood ducks, pretty much in that order, made up the bulk of my straps, so I've never really concerned myself with the mallard. I think they will go the way of the Canada goose migration and become northern park ducks. They seem to be heavily and easily manipulated, and I'd not like to see this happen to other species.
Hearing and seeing the wigeon this past weekend was a treat. I hadn't heard the live call from that species in a long while. It actually put a smile on my face.
It is palatable all winter long. Per our discussions, this spring I went and walked the corn field by my house. This is a suburban field that has a ton of song bird, doves, geese, and a few ducks and anything else that eats corn had been feeding in all winter. It's probably got a lot more feeding pressure than your average farm field. I could still find good solid kernels in the spring. Not as many as I thought, but there was still some in the field.
