WaterfowlForum.Net

Enjoyed your reports, sounded like it was pretty darn strong overall. Take care!

Thanks for sharing your season with us MB, and hope your shoulder recovery goes a little smoother now that you won't be getting your upper body thumped in a duck blind!

Marsh Bear wrote:The water is very low in the marsh and with the cold front coming during the week, I am calling it over for the year. I picked up the gear I don't leave at the camp and head home.

Gonna be the teal show to end all teal shows there this weekend...

LOOK AT THE GADWAL! I'd sure like to play with the those again. They were our bread and butter in the marsh (area) I'm hunting now, only years earlier. We just need to make the blind disappear from those we're seeing. We'd hunt from pits sunk in the lush grasses, and we'd walk a good ways on submerged, staked, cyclone fencing across the pond. If you stepped off you'd sink to your hip, or further. It was a lot of work at times, but it was well worth it.

I'm

Marsh Bear wrote:1st split averaged 4.72 ducks per man per hunt
2nd split averaged 3.19 ducks per man per hunt

I'm thinking those numbers pretty dang good for here in the real world.

What a season............and you were cripple to boot Glad you were able to master the one arm shooting, and hope your back is on the mend now!

Rick wrote:I'm

Marsh Bear wrote:1st split averaged 4.72 ducks per man per hunt
2nd split averaged 3.19 ducks per man per hunt

I'm thinking those numbers pretty dang good for here in the real world.

And the true measure of success at least for me. Anything above 3 ducks per man per hunt is a good average above 4 is very good!

For the first 30 years or so that I hunted ducks my average was closer to 1 duck for every twenty hours of misery. (yeah...misery)

It was miserable. My first outfit was 12 decoys, a dove seat,hip boots and a camo hoody. It was rough.
How I ever managed to keep motivated all those years???
I can answer that. In the 1970's and 80's it was common for a flock of 20 greenheads to light in the decoys right at LST. You could bank on it. Mac McGee walk-ins. Go there. It's dead now and you can have it. You can have South Dunn too. LOL

Then I went to Arkansas, got spoiled rotten, and now it's just not sending me anymore. Lost my mojo or sumthin.
This season sucked bad bad bad.
Maybe next season it'll be better. It sure as hell can't get any worse.

On the bright side I grew one glorious beard this season.
The last time I shaved was for a funeral in June.

Thanks very much, Marsh Bear, for sharing your hunts here. I wrote a long, whiny paragraph on Rick's log that I'll spare you, but I wanted to say how much I've appreciated information you've shared with me in past years and the added perspective I get from seeing your, and others', hunts.

Shoot, I'm still getting last season's stuff put up. Just took down the grass mat jig, cleaned the boat and re-riveted its seat hinge and part of the deck a bit ago - and still haven't tackled whatever is inside the seat hatch. And decoys? Ha!

But I am looking forward to September teal.

My boat's ready for teal season. First I got to get it ready for fishing so I can get it back ready for ducks again but let's not get ahead of ourselves. I'll hit the crappies soon enough.

Near as I can tell, the spring teal must all be gobbling someone's early rice seed, because I've been past a lot of pre-planting floods and through a couple marshes this past week and have only seen one little bunch of blue-wings. Scads of poule d'eau still around, though. Maybe waiting for a boost from serious south winds.

Rick wrote:Near as I can tell, the spring teal must all be gobbling someone's early rice seed, because I've been past a lot of pre-planting floods and through a couple marshes this past week and have only seen one little bunch of blue-wings. Scads of poule d'eau still around, though. Maybe waiting for a boost from serious south winds.

The bwt were here and gone already.

Must be where ours are. We should be chunking gators in our marsh and the neighbors' later this week, and it will be interesting to see if we've more than the marsh just west of us had this past week.

What does "chunking" gators mean?

Alligator farms get their stock from the wild, and we have to mitigate the eggs we take by releasing more 3-5' gators than would have survived to that size in the wild. Current market is strongest for the fine-grained smaller ones, so what we're letting go is on the more awkward (chunking as opposed to tossing) end of that scale.

Rick wrote:Alligator farms get their stock from the wild, and we have to mitigate the eggs we take by releasing more 3-5' gators than would have survived to that size in the wild. Current market is strongest for the fine-grained smaller ones, so what we're letting go is on the more awkward (chunking as opposed to tossing) end of that scale.

So you're turning loose a bunch of gators about 5' long, which are too big to toss, but you still want to "chunk" them away from you so they don't take a bite out of you. More or less, that's what you meant?

Zackly.

How old is a 5' gator?

I've been told, but do not know, they're just two, thanks to living in a feed lot. Only know with certainty they're mitigating eggs taken two years prior. They grow much, much slower in the wild and would only be a couple feet long.

That is kind of what my gut was telling me because I couldn't imaging them paying to keep them in captivity for longer than that and then release them, but damn 5' in 2 years is growing quickly. Which is why I asked because it didn't seem possible.

Then again, that is where those 20 lb Canadas people really used to shoot 30 years ago came from. Pen raised birds that were released or escaped that got so big because of what they were being fed.

So they are releasing the most aggressive ones, which is why they are bigger than their 3' siblings

When it comes to aggression, this 3' may have won the "pound for pound" title when he took on the airboat:



Re: the 20lb Canadas of yore, I lived in Ohio during the giant birds' reintroduction, circa late "70s and early '80s, and the two super-duper giants I deemed worthy of the local sporting goods store's certified scale were both a disappointing 13 and change at a time when everybody and his brother was claiming to dwarf that. Don't doubt that there were bigger ones taken, but I probably killed about as many Canadas as anyone then in the Mid Ohio Valley without managing it. (Though had there been an Ebay, the resident's bands might have kept me in beer money.)

'Course they all looked "giant" compared to our mid-continent migrants or their Atlantic population cousins. Remember being tickled by how excited our Eastern Shore guides were over spotting one of the "747s" that were our bread and butter - while we were goggle-eyed over their area's shear numbers.