Annual Mississippi Flyway Council Meeting

wonderin the same thing my self and cant wait to fry no till farmers arse this year was to bad to so im gonna say what no body else will

@Lreynalds




Tracking collar on a brown pelican? first time I see this. Took the pic in Montegut

helluva explanation there Larry

That's a great photo of a solar-powered GPS transmitter on the pelican! I'm not aware of who's doing that work.

I wonder if that affects their diving at prey?

There was a cool presentation at the North American Duck Symposium last week regarding marking birds with transmitters that reported on apparent effects of "marking" those birds. It went something like this:

"It's a death sentence. Marking a bird with these devices kills them much sooner, but it appears that we get good information on migration, local movements, activity, and habitat use ..... representative of birds in the population ..... until they die."

quote:

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helluva explanation there Larry

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I guess it was a little over-blown, but I wouldn't want folks, especially dedicated waterfowl hunters, showing up expecting to hear a lot of talk about duck hunting. It just doesn't happen, especially at the state level.

One of the things that perplexes and angers many duck hunters is that waterfowl are managed at the flyway level, NOT the state level. Consequently, it just isn't a big concern if ducks are being killed further north or further south in the Flyway. The factors affecting that are largely out of our control, and when we examine those "concerns", they are almost always exaggerated. For example, see Green and Krementz in 2008: LINK

Instead, we talk a lot about harvest strategies, the large-scale models and packages that set regulations flyway-wide for pintails, canvasbacks, scaup, white-fronted geese, etc. We will have a big discussion about funding and staffing the banding station because many states are NOT sending staff when they are scheduled to and others (like LA and MO) are having to make up for them. We will spend hours discussing adapting, condensing, or scrapping the mallard AHM models based on the last 20 years of data.

Equations, statistics, optimizations, accounting for variance and predicting effects on hunter activity and harvest ........ For most hunters that is a huge YAWN.

But there is one thing that might interest Louisiana hunters. There will be discussion about setting coot seasons with the rails instead of with ducks. Why? Coots are rails, not waterfowl, and because rails can be hunted for 70 days instead of 60, we are losing opportunity on coots by setting the season concurrent with ducks. However, we in Louisiana open the rail season during the teal season, and the rail season can only be split once, which is why rails and gallinules remain open during the split in the duck season and close the first week in January. Can you imagine if we closed the coot season say January 4th while the duck season remained open until the 22nd or 29th?

Exciting stuff, eh?