2024 Prep work and training

[Duck Engr]

Pretty cool concept. Could see a lot of Dave’s concerns coming to my mind every time he said “simple” and “simply”

[Deltaman]

Pretty damn creative, and the motion is very realistic. Like y'all, I would have concerns of leakage as well, but what a cool concept!

[DComeaux]

This was a local outdoors program that ran during the late 80's early 90's. The commercials are neat to see.

[Rick]

Gettin' pissed off just thinking about Provost.

[DComeaux]

Gettin' pissed off just thinking about Provost.

I had dealings with him as well.

[5 stand]

Gettin' pissed off just thinking about Provost.

The good old days, weren't they special...

Not sure what can of worms I'm getting involved in, so I'll try to divert, don't get mad at me, DC brought it up...

[Rick]

The good old days, weren't they special...

Surprising, and disturbing, that someone who's been dead for years could still stir such vitriol in me. Fellow was that kind of special, and the day I ran him off was, indeed, a good one.

[DComeaux]

Curious which rail?

KPLC had this on the rail.

https://www.kplctv.com/2024/05/29/groups-join-forces-protect-eastern-black-rail-cameron-parish/

[DComeaux]

It’s confirmed. Ducks are getting into new rows. More specifically, U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Ducks Unlimited scientists found that over the last 60 years, the autumn and winter ranges of three species of dabbling ducks have shifted.
Before you ask, no, the scientists don’t yet know why. But they are already looking into it.
Importantly, the autumn and winter ranges of the mallard, northern pintail, and blue-winged teal are different, but scientists did not find evidence of wholesale abandonment of large wintering regions or switching between flyways. This research used 60 years of bird band data contributed by waterfowl hunters in one of the longest-term community science efforts in North America.


“This research was in direct response to public concern that duck winter ranges had shifted northward,” said Lisa Webb, Southern Regional Supervisor for the USGS Cooperative Research Units Program and study co-author. “It was made possible by over half a century of work and investment by numerous waterfowl banders and supporting agencies in the United States and Canada.”

https://www.usgs.gov/news/national-news-release/60-years-data-show-shifts-winter-ranges-three-duck-species-midwest

Study
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ece3.11331

[SpinnerMan]

It's interesting how the BWT October distribution shifted a lot south. There were few teal far south in the '60's but now a large chunk of them are. It also looks like the area has expanded a lot.

I just wish they would use this to move our duck season into January. It's really aggravating not having a split season and watching large numbers of ducks in January when we had relatively few when the season was open in November.

[DComeaux]

Oh my!!

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[Rick]

And, yet, one might still pull a Marcel Ledbetter, shoot up amongst 'em and not cut a feather.

[Deltaman]

Would be hard not to shoot amongst'em for sure

[Darren]

And, yet, one might still pull a Marcel Ledbetter, shoot up amongst 'em and not cut a feather.

Been on both ends of that spectrum; once had my lone gun take five from a little cluster of GWs landing, but way more often than not have seen 2-4 guns get 1-2 birds total from a similar wad.

Surely Rick's seen it all !

[DComeaux]

The lone drake in the front must be a youngin. He hasn't learned how to approach decoys yet.

[DComeaux]

This little gal is in need of a good home. She's 6 and does hunt, name is Zoey. PM me for more details. No cost involved and is up to date with all shots.

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[Rick]

Wishing her a wonderful new home. Looks like a sweetheart.

[MallardBay]

This little gal is in need of a good home. She's 6 and does hunt, name is Zoey. PM me for more details. No cost involved and is up to date with all shots.

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PM sent Dave.

[DComeaux]

So much rain. Never stops.

[DComeaux]

This little gal is in need of a good home. She's 6 and does hunt, name is Zoey. PM me for more details. No cost involved and is up to date with all shots.

123_1(1).jpg

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PM sent Dave.

I replied.

[Rick]

So much rain. Never stops.

On the one hand, it's made our yard a marsh (complete with ducks). But on the other, it's replenished and cooled the crawfish water enough that it's late July and we're still able to use it to burn some edge off a crazy pup...

[DComeaux]

So much rain. Never stops.

On the one hand, it's made our yard a marsh (complete with ducks). But on the other, it's replenished and cooled the crawfish water enough that it's late July and we're still able to use it to burn some edge off a crazy pup...

I need two weeks of drying before I could cut my yard. I have to wear boots to work with Remi. She's enjoying the water.

[DComeaux]

https://www.houmatoday.com/story/ne...o ... 541873007/

A Belgium-based company wants to harvest water hyacinths, the bane of south Louisiana boaters, to create fibers for products ranging from insulation to cat litter.
Water hyacinths are invasive floating plants that obstruct waterways, and disrupt ecosystems, and can severely damage boat motors and marine structures. Rebeka Bahadorani is the founder and CEO of In-Between International, a company eyeing the aquatic nuisance as a resource for producing fiber. She and her colleagues are talking with the local and state officials about the project, and seeking investors in late August. If all goes well, Bahadorani said, they will build a $5 million factory in Gibson, potentially creating scores of jobs.
The fibers derived from the water hyacinths has been dubbed "Cynthia."

“Now in Louisiana we are launching the first ever production unit of Cynthia fibers to demonstrate that it works," Bahadorani said. "I hope this will be an alternative to the use of pesticides or chemicals and give us an amazing, alive, almost inexhaustible resource all over the globe."
The floating menace​
Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries biologist Michael Coulon pulls Cuban bullrush from a patch of water hyacinths, Tuesday, July 23, in Turtle Bayou.

Water hyacinths are a world-wide aquatic nuisance that if left unchecked take over waterways, Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Biologist Michael Coulon said. The biologist is in charge of overseeing the management of invasive aquatic plants like the hyacinth, with a budget of approximately $5 million for Louisiana. He drove a small boat through Turtle Bayou showing hyacinths and how they affect the ecosystem as he spoke.

At the local level governments have to spend thousands combating the plant's growth as well: in Terrebonne this amounts to about $150,000-250,000 a year, and in Lafourche its managed by the Bayou Lafourche Freshwater District which spends $40-50,000 a year.
Coulon said there’s primarily three methods for dealing with the water hyacinth: manually removing them, unleashing critters like weevils that eat the plant, and spraying. Spraying, he said, is the most cost and time effective method, but the plant is mobile and reproduces so quickly that the number of hyacinths in a body of water doubles in number roughly every 10 days.
This creates a two-fold unique problem for the agency: the mobility of the plant means that is can drift into private areas where officials cannot spray only to reproduce and float back later, but, Coulon explained, even if they could spray the private areas, the department's budget wouldn't be able to keep up.
"Last year in South Louisiana, we sprayed somewhere around 22,000 acres," he said. "So we could expend our entire budget just spraying this marsh if we included the private properties."

Control of the plant’s numbers is a never ending battle, because to not spray at all just isn't an option.
If left unchecked, Coulon said, the water hyacinth's ability to reproduce will completely cover the surface of a body of water. This mat of hyacinths will bully out other vegetation and block out sunlight to an area. Low sunlight diminishes dissolved oxygen levels in the water and drives away fish. Overall, the plant will disrupt the natural ecosystem of a body of water.
"Its not good for other aquatic plant diversity and to that extent not good for most aquatic environments," he said. "If you want a balanced system, you don't want something that's basically dominate the entire system and more or less take over."
The mass of hyacinths would also impede boat traffic by damaging motors, and Coulon said there are reports of the clumps of hyacinths getting so out-of-control they damaged bridges in Florida.
The plant is similarly a problem in many other places such as the aforementioned Florida, Vietnam, Australia, Africa, and more. It was in Africa that Bahadorani encountered the plant, completely covering a body of water and completely shutting it off to human travel. Where others saw a problem, Bazadorani saw potential.

Seeing green​
Her company found that by capturing the plant, separating the stem from the roots, drying the stem, and then grinding it up, they could harvest a fiber useful as insulation, flower pots, and as an absorbent.
That part of the process is proven, Bahadorani said, now she’s trying to prove that this technology can turn a profit. She said her search led her to America, and from there Terrebonne, where last year she established an arm to her company named Cynthia Louisiana LLC. In late August she will return to Terrebonne Parish to scout the area for locations to harvest water hyacinths. According to Bahadorani, her company needs 300 tons of the plant every day to reach her goal.
Officials from both Terrebonne and Lafourche think that shouldn't be a problem.
"We can certainly provide them with the crop here in South Louisiana," Bayou Lafourche Freshwater District Executive Director Dustin Rabalais said.

If Bahadorani can find a reliable source, she said she will build a factory in Gibson. The factory will house her machines that processes the plant into the fiber. The amount of the plant she can secure will determine the number of factories, and those factories, in turn, will determine how many employees she will need - about 20-35 each.
More:Teen's report that Thibodaux policeman choked him reach Lafourche District Attorney
More:LSU football's three most important games in 2024 season
Some will be full-time employees and others will be seasonal. The seasonal employees would only be needed during the harvesting season, but she said the harvest season would coincide with the end of the sugarcane harvesting season, so there may be potential for partnership there.
“The interesting thing also about the seasonal employment is that we need seasonal labor when the sugar cane industry stops," she said. "So my idea was to go and meet some people from the sugarcane industry and say 'we can work together here, and we can offer a fulltime job to people with a change of activities half-a-year.'"

Terrebonne Economic Development Association’s CEO Cohen Guidry said he thinks her company could acquire a supply of 500 tons per day. Guidry intends to give Bahadorani and others from her company a tour around Terrebonne of possible locations they could harvest from, and said there may be potential for her to pick up the plant from areas the parish removes it from the water.
According to Guidry, the parish will be removing the nuisance from its waterways regardless if her company moves in, so there may be potential for a public-private partnership that would help keep Terrebonne Parish’s waterways clean.
Correction: This version of this story has been corrected. An early version said the number of employees would be determined per machine. That has been corrected to per factory.

[BGkirk]

https://www.houmatoday.com/story/ne...outh-louisiana-plants-into-money/74541873007/

A Belgium-based company wants to harvest water hyacinths, the bane of south Louisiana boaters, to create fibers for products ranging from insulation to cat litter.
Water hyacinths are invasive floating plants that obstruct waterways, and disrupt ecosystems, and can severely damage boat motors and marine structures. Rebeka Bahadorani is the founder and CEO of In-Between International, a company eyeing the aquatic nuisance as a resource for producing fiber. She and her colleagues are talking with the local and state officials about the project, and seeking investors in late August. If all goes well, Bahadorani said, they will build a $5 million factory in Gibson, potentially creating scores of jobs.
The fibers derived from the water hyacinths has been dubbed "Cynthia."

“Now in Louisiana we are launching the first ever production unit of Cynthia fibers to demonstrate that it works," Bahadorani said. "I hope this will be an alternative to the use of pesticides or chemicals and give us an amazing, alive, almost inexhaustible resource all over the globe."
The floating menace​
Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries biologist Michael Coulon pulls Cuban bullrush from a patch of water hyacinths, Tuesday, July 23, in Turtle Bayou.

Water hyacinths are a world-wide aquatic nuisance that if left unchecked take over waterways, Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Biologist Michael Coulon said. The biologist is in charge of overseeing the management of invasive aquatic plants like the hyacinth, with a budget of approximately $5 million for Louisiana. He drove a small boat through Turtle Bayou showing hyacinths and how they affect the ecosystem as he spoke.

At the local level governments have to spend thousands combating the plant's growth as well: in Terrebonne this amounts to about $150,000-250,000 a year, and in Lafourche its managed by the Bayou Lafourche Freshwater District which spends $40-50,000 a year.
Coulon said there’s primarily three methods for dealing with the water hyacinth: manually removing them, unleashing critters like weevils that eat the plant, and spraying. Spraying, he said, is the most cost and time effective method, but the plant is mobile and reproduces so quickly that the number of hyacinths in a body of water doubles in number roughly every 10 days.
This creates a two-fold unique problem for the agency: the mobility of the plant means that is can drift into private areas where officials cannot spray only to reproduce and float back later, but, Coulon explained, even if they could spray the private areas, the department's budget wouldn't be able to keep up.
"Last year in South Louisiana, we sprayed somewhere around 22,000 acres," he said. "So we could expend our entire budget just spraying this marsh if we included the private properties."

Control of the plant’s numbers is a never ending battle, because to not spray at all just isn't an option.
If left unchecked, Coulon said, the water hyacinth's ability to reproduce will completely cover the surface of a body of water. This mat of hyacinths will bully out other vegetation and block out sunlight to an area. Low sunlight diminishes dissolved oxygen levels in the water and drives away fish. Overall, the plant will disrupt the natural ecosystem of a body of water.
"Its not good for other aquatic plant diversity and to that extent not good for most aquatic environments," he said. "If you want a balanced system, you don't want something that's basically dominate the entire system and more or less take over."
The mass of hyacinths would also impede boat traffic by damaging motors, and Coulon said there are reports of the clumps of hyacinths getting so out-of-control they damaged bridges in Florida.
The plant is similarly a problem in many other places such as the aforementioned Florida, Vietnam, Australia, Africa, and more. It was in Africa that Bahadorani encountered the plant, completely covering a body of water and completely shutting it off to human travel. Where others saw a problem, Bazadorani saw potential.

Seeing green​
Her company found that by capturing the plant, separating the stem from the roots, drying the stem, and then grinding it up, they could harvest a fiber useful as insulation, flower pots, and as an absorbent.
That part of the process is proven, Bahadorani said, now she’s trying to prove that this technology can turn a profit. She said her search led her to America, and from there Terrebonne, where last year she established an arm to her company named Cynthia Louisiana LLC. In late August she will return to Terrebonne Parish to scout the area for locations to harvest water hyacinths. According to Bahadorani, her company needs 300 tons of the plant every day to reach her goal.
Officials from both Terrebonne and Lafourche think that shouldn't be a problem.
"We can certainly provide them with the crop here in South Louisiana," Bayou Lafourche Freshwater District Executive Director Dustin Rabalais said.

If Bahadorani can find a reliable source, she said she will build a factory in Gibson. The factory will house her machines that processes the plant into the fiber. The amount of the plant she can secure will determine the number of factories, and those factories, in turn, will determine how many employees she will need - about 20-35 each.
More:Teen's report that Thibodaux policeman choked him reach Lafourche District Attorney
More:LSU football's three most important games in 2024 season
Some will be full-time employees and others will be seasonal. The seasonal employees would only be needed during the harvesting season, but she said the harvest season would coincide with the end of the sugarcane harvesting season, so there may be potential for partnership there.
“The interesting thing also about the seasonal employment is that we need seasonal labor when the sugar cane industry stops," she said. "So my idea was to go and meet some people from the sugarcane industry and say 'we can work together here, and we can offer a fulltime job to people with a change of activities half-a-year.'"

Terrebonne Economic Development Association’s CEO Cohen Guidry said he thinks her company could acquire a supply of 500 tons per day. Guidry intends to give Bahadorani and others from her company a tour around Terrebonne of possible locations they could harvest from, and said there may be potential for her to pick up the plant from areas the parish removes it from the water.
According to Guidry, the parish will be removing the nuisance from its waterways regardless if her company moves in, so there may be potential for a public-private partnership that would help keep Terrebonne Parish’s waterways clean.
Correction: This version of this story has been corrected. An early version said the number of employees would be determined per machine. That has been corrected to per factory.

In college I had to take an English writing class. Our biggest assignment was to write about “solving a problem” and we had to pretend to pitch our solution to a company that would ultimately invest in our solution.
I picked water hyacinth as my topic. If I recall
My only solutions were mechanical harvesting to clean the waterways.

Let’s just say I passed. I remember wanting to do salvinia but there was probably more resources about water hyacinth so I went that route. I was all for just “getting by” in some classes.

Will be a neat deal if all that works out. Mud motor sales may decline !


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Rick]

Fellow I knew had a grant to raise and study multiple uses for duck weed, and when I asked him if salvinia wouldn't be a better choice, he said "invasive" regulations made it prohibitive to do so. Reckon the cited project will have regulatory hoops to jump, as well.

[DComeaux]

Remi and I are still plugging away at it daily. She has made great strides in training considering her still puppy like demeanor. She's following commands very well (most times) and I have her sitting at long distance with the whistle and following hand command signals. The first time doing this outside of that specific training was a retrieve she made from my side, tossing the dummy into way longer than normal grass in my yard due to the non stop rains we'd had. She couldn't see it and over ran the bumper. She then searched left of it by 20 yards or more.
I gave a long single whistle blast, she sat and looked at me intently . I gave her a right cast and she headed in that direction. When she got to it she was excited to see it and pounced on it like a fox in the snow over a buried mouse...... I laughed.... At that moment I felt really good about everything we've done to get her to this point. It's so damn rewarding.

We're currently working on "force fetch", but in my own way. I took bit's and pieces from things I've read and seen and doing it in a gentler way. I plan to do this in short 5 minute sessions daily, sometimes twice a day, for another 3 weeks or more if need be, incorporating this with other obedience work to end our secession. Gloves are coming in handy again especially with my crepey skin. After 7 days of this I think she's finally starting to understands what I'm looking for.

Shell be 9 month's on the 19th of this month.

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[Ducaholic]

[Rick]

Remi and I are still plugging away at it daily. She has made great strides in training considering her still puppy like demeanor. She's following commands very well (most times) and I have her sitting at long distance with the whistle and following hand command signals. The first time doing this outside of that specific training was a retrieve she made from my side, tossing the dummy into way longer than normal grass in my yard due to the non stop rains we'd had. She couldn't see it and over ran the bumper. She then searched left of it by 20 yards or more.
I gave a long single whistle blast, she sat and looked at me intently . I gave her a right cast and she headed in that direction. When she got to it she was excited to see it and pounced on it like a fox in the snow over a buried mouse...... I laughed.... At that moment I felt really good about everything we've done to get her to this point. It's so damn rewarding.

She may have surpassed her elder, Call, whose handling is still loose - or worse. Good goin'.

[DComeaux]

Remi and I are still plugging away at it daily. She has made great strides in training considering her still puppy like demeanor. She's following commands very well (most times) and I have her sitting at long distance with the whistle and following hand command signals. The first time doing this outside of that specific training was a retrieve she made from my side, tossing the dummy into way longer than normal grass in my yard due to the non stop rains we'd had. She couldn't see it and over ran the bumper. She then searched left of it by 20 yards or more.
I gave a long single whistle blast, she sat and looked at me intently . I gave her a right cast and she headed in that direction. When she got to it she was excited to see it and pounced on it like a fox in the snow over a buried mouse...... I laughed.... At that moment I felt really good about everything we've done to get her to this point. It's so damn rewarding.

She may have surpassed her elder, Call, whose handling is still loose - or worse. Good goin'.

She's no where near perfect, and lose is a good word to use. She has to be tightened up from time to time when she wants to ignore her training.

[MARSH BEAR]

She is a good looking dog
Keep on Keeping on