DComeaux wrote:So you agree the north is short stopping or has changed the migration?
That's not even close to my thinking. I want people to stop baiting and let the natural migration return to what it was. We stay open until the end of January here in LA, and where I hunt we lose our birds the first week or so in January. It has been this way forever. It's part of migration. Should I plant corn to see if I can keep those all to myself until our season ends?
My point is that the migration has changed and it is little to nothing to do with baiting. I just went for a walk this evening. I normally walk on the path next to the cornfield, but decided to walk through the corn because of our discussion. I didn't find as much corn as I expected, but even now in May there were kernels of corn in perfect shape to be found. And this is a small field in the suburbs that has geese, ducks, doves, wrens, and every other type of bird that eats corn feeding in it since it was picked last November.
I know what happened to the geese in Illinois and clearly to a lesser extent the mallards. It had nothing to do with baiting. It was three things that happened simultaneously that will not be undone. These were the cooling lakes, the no till farming, and resident geese. Southern Illinois use to be a Canada goose mecca and all the guides and outfitters were pretty much put out of business. Now a lot of them were able to shift over to ducks and now snow geese, but Northeast Illinois is where these migratory geese mostly stop, if they even make it this far south. As Betty mentioned earlier, where the snow line is is where the geese are. Actually it depends on the depth of the snow. A lot of mallards do the same thing.
Goose decoys make good mallard decoys, so I assume real geese make even better mallard decoys. I would be surprised if the same thing is not playing out all across the flyways.
I really think the primary thing baiting does is concentrate ducks that were going to be in the area anyways.
DComeaux wrote:We stay open until the end of January here in LA, and where I hunt we lose our birds the first week or so in January.
Which species? Obviously the BWT are not heading to points south of you because of lack of food or weather. There have always been a large fraction of mallards and black ducks that move no further south than necessary. When I hunted on the Susquehanna River in the mid 80's. The river would freeze up to my town. South was open water. North was froze solid. Duck season was closed and we'd see lots of ducks and geese. Nearly all the ducks were mallards or black ducks. That was their "natural" migration. Then the season went to 60 days and there is no refuges in the area. Now you won't see a single duck on the river or geese even any more.
DComeaux wrote:Should I plant corn to see if I can keep those all to myself until our season ends?
If you want to invest the time and money, why not?
I really don't think that is the primary factor though, at least for mallards. I think it's the three things I mentioned earlier.
Any mallard that head as far south as you is going to have a much higher odds of dying than the mallards that have always naturally stopped short. They get banged on for over month longer if they go that far south. Lots of them have always stopped short. This wasn't true in the past when the food supply up north was much lower quality.
Then came the other two factors.
No-till farming provided an unlimited supply of high energy food for the birds that feed in dry fields. So the short stopped birds are much better fed now than they used to be. That means they have bigger broods and greater breeding success. Not unlike what happened to the snow geese, but not nearly as dramatically.
The third was the cooling lakes, warm water discharges, aerators, etc. leaving a huge amount of open water where there used to be very little. It was always natural for many mallards to go no further south than necessary and now it's only necessary when the snow is deep since they can find open water without a problem at least in this part of the world.
I might be wrong. I just now what I see around here and what I saw where I grew up.