Pretty slow on the coast. Pockets of birds but not the numbers that are usually around especially the redheads.
I might have shot the best looking blue bill hen I've have seen. i actually thought it was a drake.
And a golden eye. Which is the first for me.

DG96 said:

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Pretty slow on the coast. Pockets of birds but not the numbers that are usually around especially the redheads.
I might have shot the best looking blue bill hen I've have seen. i actually thought it was a drake.
And a golden eye. Which is the first for me.

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Not a bad day today. We were covered up with Ringnecks for some reason. I was trying not to shoot them but ended up with one.

2 mallards
1 Gadwall drake
1 Greater Scaup hen
1 Ringneck drake

North TX (Grayson county)

Got back yesterday from Kansas. We covered a lot of ground and didnt see much. 95% of ponds had no birds. Nothing came to the rivers or lakes when it froze. The canada geese are thick but I bet we drove through 500 miles of corn and winter wheat and didnt see a total of 500 snows and 200 specks the whole way. Saw one dry feed and that was canadas. No duck dry feeds. Talked to multiple other groups of hunters that had tried door knocking about ducks on ponds and the answer was the same every time. "Its already leased to an outfitter." Id guess we saw a total of about 50 other groups of hunters. South Carolina being the most common. Even two groups from Florida. All young guys in their 20s. Two groups looked to be in their 30s. And we seemed like the grandpas in our 40s.

Drove through Cheyenne Bottoms on Thursday. Habitat looked great, the season had been closed there for almost two weeks, and we might have seen 300 ducks total. Was expecting to see waves of birds but nope. Drove through the refuge at salt plains on the way home. Water is low but was enough water that there should have been more than the 200-300 mallards. Sat in the parking lot for the hunting area for 15 minutes at shooting time. The four trucks from Arkansas fired zero shots.

I definetly learned some things on this trip. 9* weather will freeze stuff 2.5" thick. And two short days in the 50s wont thaw it out.




We did find a lake with a pile of greenwings. Probably could have stuck around and shot limits of teal for a while, but kept moving after one hunt.





Busting ice so it would be melted for the next morning. I learned a lesson about never trusting a cold front forecast on the plains. At 9pm, the forecast called for north at 15 at shooting time the next morning, increasing to 40 by lunch. It was blowing 40 when we woke up at 4am. They missed it by 8 hours. Could have been catastrophic in the boat.




White caps on the Cheyenne Bottoms refuge pond. There were dead and dying snow geese all along the ditches. I have to wonder if ducks are dying from the bird flu also but are less noticeable.




We had a lot of fun even if the hunting was slow. The draw of seeing and tackling new areas is still strong, even if it does seem to wear on us more than it used to.

We hunted a couple mornings in Kansas last weekend and had pretty good luck. Could have been a lot better if we could have figured out best way to hunt them. Lake we were on had thousands of mallards but the vast majority were gone by shooting light.

Nephew came with me who has got the duck bug this year and was ecstatic.

Very mixed bag, mallards gadwal, wigeon, woodie and even a teal.

Also got on some upland bird. It's like the mecca for my draht.

TarponChaser said:

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The big question seems to be where the birds went and IIRC, the DU and Delta Waterfowl population studies from the summer put the various duck population counts as really high this year.

Is it the weather patterns that have kept the birds up north on all that food? Are they dispersing when they get down here due to habitat loss?

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My opinion, the ducks dont exist. The people reporting numbers have a vested interest in the numbers staying high. DU, Delta, USFWS. All their jobs rely on people buying duck stamps, going to banquets, buying memberships, and hunting ducks. If duck numbers drop then incoming funds will shrink, and their budgets will too. Their existence relies on high populations. They may not be able to complete that pet project they had their eye on, they might have to fire their five assistants and actually do some work themselves, or ultimately, they could be looking for a new career. Experienced duck hunters all across the country are screaming for something to be done but the people that are actually supposed to be protecting the resource are pulling a Baghdad Bob. The whole thing stinks.

I also have a theory that a lot of the counts are misleading, even if the count is accurate. We know pressure has exploded in the last 10-20 years, while hunter success has been on a steady decline. People are seeing a small fraction of what they used to see. Yet, we're told the counts are only down 10-20%. A lot of the national wildlife refuges just did counts last week and told us the same thing. Numbers down only 10-20% from their localized long-term averages. So they come out and use that as evidence that populations are ok. My theory- Due to hunting pressure, a much higher percentage of the overall population is sitting on the refuges. If populations havent dropped, then refuge counts should have exploded. But they havent. If you're only counting birds on the refuges, it doesnt look too bad. Count birds in an entire state and you'd get a much different picture.

I think the "ducks are somewhere else" angle is just wrong. Talk to people EVERYWHERE and we've all come up with our excuses of why the birds left wherever HERE is. But no one ANYWHERE will say more birds showed up where they are. It's much bigger than one areas anecdotal evidence. Fact is, they dont exist. North, south, east, or west. They didnt shift flyways, leave sooner, or get short stopped up north. Talk to people in Nebraska and they'll tell you the birds dont winter there anymore and just pass through in a week. People in Kansas and Oklahoma will tell you the pressure from out of staters have pushed the birds further east, back into Arkansas and Missouri. And of course, people in Louisiana and Texas will tell you they're being short stopped and being held by all those people up north. The same people that are also reporting the worst seasons of their lives.

For me, this is how Ive always known the short stopped theory is bunk- Do yall know why we see very few banded wigeon, spoonies, gadwalls, cans, etc? Its because they are hard to net. The reason they are hard to net is they dont really eat corn. They drastically prefer subsurface aquatic vegetation. A flooded corn field is going to do nothing to hold them up north. Yet, they're huntable and observable populations have cratered starting around 2000 and been on a steady decline ever since. The east Texas lakes used to be black with these species feeding on hydrilla. The food is still there but the birds arent. And very few of the lakes to our north contain those types of food sources.