Free: Contests & Raffles.
Quote from: salt n sage90 on January 04, 2024, 10:00:49 AMThose numbers show pintail #s are down. Not in the pacific flyway from what I see.There are reasons to despair about duck hunting:1. loss of public access and the rise in leased property. (not alot of free private permission these days.)2. Crowded areas due to #1.3. Weather seems to hit later and later every year. ( for instance take now its January, the season closes in ~3 weeks and its just now getting cold.)I don't think the actual #of ducks in the pacific flyway is making hunts unsuccessful. Its a combo of the reasons above.That isn't to say I don't worry about Avian Influenza, nesting issues, and the populations of ducks as a whole going down, I do.I have never thought by the end of January that I hadn't seen as many ducks as I usually do in a year.I don’t know about despair. Concern might be a better choice of word. I think we can all agree that there are issues with Waterfowl. However I don’t agree with going into every thread and bitching a moaning on and on about these things. It’s gotten so old and repetitive from the one member who cry’s on every thread. He has been offered to be taken hunting, given multiple other options, been shown that it can still be fun and yet keeps crying. I think we all understand why his old hunting buddy doesn’t hunt with him anymore. I wouldn’t want to sit in a blind and listen to someone complain all morning either.
Those numbers show pintail #s are down. Not in the pacific flyway from what I see.There are reasons to despair about duck hunting:1. loss of public access and the rise in leased property. (not alot of free private permission these days.)2. Crowded areas due to #1.3. Weather seems to hit later and later every year. ( for instance take now its January, the season closes in ~3 weeks and its just now getting cold.)I don't think the actual #of ducks in the pacific flyway is making hunts unsuccessful. Its a combo of the reasons above.That isn't to say I don't worry about Avian Influenza, nesting issues, and the populations of ducks as a whole going down, I do.I have never thought by the end of January that I hadn't seen as many ducks as I usually do in a year.
Don't get me wrong, the last couple years have been hard on waterfowl. Avian flu hammered them last year and I read that a late freeze severely hurt nesting this year. Its evidenced in the Skagit snow geese where there are virtually no juveniles. That said, everything is cyclical and nature tends to check populations in its own way. And I very much do not agree with the application of macrodata, in this case nationwide numbers, being used to represent trends on a local level. I don't know how many times a nonhunter has told me that deer numbers are out of control because they read some article about whitetails in the eastern US. Oh and passenger pigeons? Really? As if that correlates AT ALL to waterfowl.
also the king of ducks isn't the Mallard it's the canvasback. Those birds are so fricken cool.
This has been my first season hunting McNary. Obviously we have not had any real winter weather yet, so I am curious with this cold snap setting in earlier than I would have liked will the slough be frozen over for tomorrow morning?
All im hearing from you is no, no and more no. Go grab your gun and shoot some birds. Do you need a hunting partner for that? Borrow a dog if you don't have 1. And maybe stay off the huntwa forum with your GD negativity. Getting old, actually its really old...
