2023-2024 Season

[jrock75]

As has been the case for the last couple of years, kid activities including an annual overnight campout kept me from the blind on opening weekend. Hunting on our grounds as well as across the area was really good. If you had water, you had ducks. Blind in our mitigation bank that I would have been hunting shot 35 on Saturday and 30 on Sunday. I really love my kids but being absent sure stings less when the hunting is poor. It will be interesting to see how it holds up. My guess is that the combination of pressure and lack of water will move these ducks on out fairly quickly and we will need reinforcements. We are still doing our nightly rain dance!

[Deltaman]

Happy to hear that you have birds, and hope they stick around for a little while. I fished in our delta Saturday, and never even saw a bird.

[Duck Engr]

Models are suggesting some relief is headed your way end of this week.

[jrock75]

Well, I must admit that I am glad to see the 2023-2024 duck season come to an end. I was very deficient in my posting this year. I want to blame it on a slow start to the season due to kids' activities and my early season travel. That was certainly part of it but the reality is that there just wasn't much to post about. This season was a bust!

We were bone dry all summer and fall. When the farmer drained the water off the rice, all our ducks left, and the bayous were too salty to pump it back up. We had no water on the farm whatsoever and the adjacent brackish marsh was super salty and severely stunted the widgeon grass growth. 2,000 acres with either no water, no food, or both. Then we had a huge bull tide in October that pushed 20,000 ppm salt water over the control structures and into the bayous at the farm and the marshes at our other properties. Nasty salt water covering typically freshwater mud flats and marsh ponds with no food = no ducks. Just in the last week or two we got enough rain to flood the rice fields and provide some food but it was too little way too late. This same story played out for just about every property across the ~200,000 acre area that I consider our "local" habitat.

We had a few days in the first split and the beginning of the second split where the birds showed up, but they would be gone the next day. Gadwall, widgeon, spoonbills, pintails, and blue wings were non-existent after the first couple of weekends. A "successful" hunt was almost entirely dependent on whether the green wings showed up.

Looking forward - I am very excited about next year! As I posted throughout this past summer, we took advantage of the dry weather this summer/fall and got 6 new blinds installed, cleared out 300 acres of cattail infested fields at the farm, rehabilitated 100 acres in two reservoirs through spray and fire and rebuilt the levees and water control structures at one of the marsh properties, and rebuilt several eroded blind islands. If we can avoid another major drought we should be set up very well for next year! Now it is time to shift to offseason work. Managing moist soil and making sure the new reservoirs are full of widgeon grass.

Here are a few of the highlights. Grant continuing to grow into a hunter was fun.

Highlight of the season was him shooting his first goose on the first hunt out of one of our new blinds.

Grant Goose 12.9.jpg

Grant proud with his first "diver"

Jackpot - 11.21.jpg

Season ending hunt sums it up. One juvenile Blue and one BWT and we were happy to get that!

Season ending.jpg

[Darren]

Very nice! Looks like you've got a lot to look ahead to next season between your habitat projects and your son. Lot to be proud of there for sure.

[Deltaman]

Great pics dad, and too bad about the lack of freshwater this year. Glad you took advantage of the bone dry earth in this rare time, and improved things on your spread for the upcoming seasons.

[Duck Engr]

Looking forward to the off-season project updates!