re: Beware long read: Young hunter's opinion on down duck season. Blame Mother Nature

It seems to me that every hunting season is different from another and this is normal. Yes, a person strongly influences nature and sooner or later any animals change their areola habitats. My father went hunting for 15 years to the same place, but for the last two years he has been hunting in other place. I rarely go hunting, no more than one weekend in a season. Usually I get more pleasure from being in nature than from hunting. It's also important to have good hunting gear. I use binoculars, rifle, whistles, dogs. I read various reviews, for example https://hikezone.org/, in order to choose the best.

I kind of get what your saying... We would be well suited to have ample ample and quality resources for the birds when they get here.

I'll drive past a million shell stations if theres a bucee's or racetrac in my range.

G Vice,

Sure, I do admit that the birds don't know that our marshes are changing through erosion and other factors are causing them to look differently to the eye. But the effect of these visual changes is exactly what the birds do care about and notice. The visual wasting away of marsh land directly leads to far more saltwater intrusion which kills the feed that these birds come to our marshes for.

I noticed far more birds in the area the first weekend of the season and even into the first week than I have in several years. This was most likely due to the big from that hit opening weekend. We had several good hunts that weekend and into the first week. This leads me to believe that the birds showed up early in the year with the first front just like they normally do. Of course during the early season the birds move out of the area once the front tapers off and the warm weather sets in or high water comes around for a period of a few days. But normally these birds come right on back down to the same marsh with the different fronts that come through each season. I think the birds came down early like they normally do but they quickly noticed that these areas in southeast LA didn't have near the amount of food source needed to draw them back to our areas and surely to keep them around for extended periods of time. This caused them to move further west searching for other areas with more abundant food sources to move down to during cold fronts.

I do not think the ducks didn't come south at all this year. I think they definitely did briefly early on in the season. The marshes weren't as appealing to them as in years past so they didn't stay long or return to our area throughout the year like they normally do. A buddy of mine hunts a levee'd off section of marsh around Houma that is unaffected by tidal flows. They shot 4 man limit after 4 man limit of gray ducks throughout the entire first split and even halfway into the second split until they shot them out of their small area. I hunted with him a few times and the birds would look like mosquitoes in the sky all morning. They were everywhere. The birds definitely came down, but only remained in those areas that were unaffected by the tides and loaded with feed. Which most southeastern coastal areas were not this season. These high water issues will always be around but the saltwater intrusion can be greatly limited by man-made structures. Rock piles similar to those on the Grand Isle beach placed in inshore lakes could greatly limit erosion in these areas and weirs would solve most of the problems with our habitat down here, but how to go about getting some organization to perform these is beyond me. For some reason everyone seems to be far more worried about the practices and regulations of other states and other people to the north of us that we cannot control. But after all the griping and complaining about how awful this past season was, I haven't seen a single thread, facebook post or group, or organization speak about possible issues that we can fix down here. Everyone wants to point the finger at someone else. It's going to be tough to tell people what they can and can't grow, flood, or hunt on their private property in states north of us. I thought that was part of the incentive to purchase private property. Because you can do with it whatever you please. I wish people would be more concerned about the things we can affect and change which is the leases, public lands, lakes and marshes that we have in OUR state. Go download Google Earth and look at the historical satellite images of where you hunting southeast LA from 5 years ago, 10 years ago, and 20 years ago. The erosion issue is as real as it gets. It's no wonder these birds don't want to come down here like they used to. But literally nothing is being done about this. Those projects that go on are minor in their real affects. The duck hunting community down here is so big that they could make a significant change, but the focus needs to turn from the north to our backyard. Decades ago DU started the idea of "If you build it, they will come." This idea has worked out for every other state in the country. For God's sake if we preserve what we have down here and make it more appealing to ducks the birds will come and stay here too.

I will give you a short read. If you grew up driving 10 miles across town to buy groceries and that’s all you knew, you did it your entire life. What if suddenly 5 grocery stores popped up within 5 miles of your house? Most people are going to stop making that 10 mile drive. At some point those people’s kids only know about the stores within the first 5 miles and never venture beyond them. We have 3-4 generations of ducks that haven’t traveled south of Oklahoma /Arkansas. If you want to hunt mallards , go to a grocery store of corn in Oklahoma or Kansas in Dec/Jan. They are everywhere.

I would think that the decrease in birds would correlate to the decrease in habitat but that is not the case. There is plenty of marsh in north plaquemines with more grass than I have ever seen and this marsh does not hold birds any more. There are likely many reasons that the birds stopped coming

I can't speak to the Mississippi Flyway or the Atlantic but I do have some serious experience in the Central and Pacific Flyways in the last few years...and duck numbers aren't what they are being reported or they ain't leaving Canada. There aren't nearly as many birds even in Washington, Idaho, Montana and Wyoming as there should be for the numbers being reported. Combined with intentional management practices that keep the birds comfortable as far north as possible...I have been told point blank by the man responsible in Washington that the management objective is to prevent southern migration as much as possible, meaning as much as weather will allow, because the migration is very hard on the birds AND the season in the south extends into breeding season when young birds are pairing off and hunting them at that time impacts breeding populations.....I doubt many southern duck hunters have not seen breeding activity among ducks and geese late in the season...I know I have. They are most definitely managing the resource with keeping them as far north as possible at the forefront....In Washington, for example, they actively feed waterfowl on refuges from August to March and April depending on the weather....the only thing that forces birds in the Pacific Flyway to go further south than the mid-Columbia valley is a SERIOUS freeze up...which almost never happens. And about 80% of the mallards in the Pacific flyway...no small number....migrate to the mid-Columbia valley region and most do not go any further south. You'd think it'd be a mallard shooting dream....but alas, almost the entire area is closed to hunting.....with only a small % of the area open and a vast regions of suitable habitat for birds to loaf on and wait for the food trucks. I can't imagine why they are doing this....the birds are supposedly near their habitats carrying capacity...and keeping vast numbers of the in small areas is going to be devastating when, not if, a disease hits them. It is truly short sighted, in my opinion....Nature has a way of balancing itself out...its the height of hubris to think we are better at managing wildlife that nature is...we may well be better at manipulating it and puttinig it in un=natural situations but that ain't managing...

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Decades ago DU started the idea of "If you build it, they will come."

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This is part of the problem..DU does a lot of projects, almost all of the money is spent on private property or on public land that is too regulated for duck hunters to actually utilize....but most of what they do is enhance habitat on refuges that aren't open to hunting at all and simply allow birds more area to avoid hunting pressure. I have been involved with DU since the late 1970's and it changed DRAMATICALLY in the 1990s and has gotten worse with every year. The philosophy today is closer to the Audubon Society today than it is its hunting roots. They have done a spectacular job promoting numbers of birds but huge numbers are not tied to great hunting if the numbers are off limits are in another country and traveling 2 days is not something you can do every week.

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Commercialization of hunting in Arkansas is what has pushed birds away from Louisiana. Birds are being pushed West. Once a bird changes migratory pattern they don't change back. Generations of birds now moving west.

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In the 30's there was some seriously good snow goose hunting on the coast of Georgia and North Florida....about the time that rice farming became a thing of the past on the SE Atlantic coast....those birds ate shite that grew in Marshes cause there wasn't enough grain between Nova Scotia and Jacksonville to do anything else....that ended with mechanical harvesting of corn in Maryland and Virginia...all of a sudden waterfowl had no reason to migrate south any longer...even North Carolinas. famed duck and goose hunting nosedived from what it was...food makes a difference....rice fields flooded at the wrong time of year intentionally to attract birds and corn and other grain fields done the same should be outlawed as the baiting that it is....DU and the NFWS can find other ways to use OUR money to enhance habitat and numbers besides water control structures on private land intended to intentionally flood grain fields to attract and hold waterfowl and only a select group of people have acess…..

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DU basically says they are improving habitat and the situation for the birds in states north of us. Lodgedup even says that. We can do whatever we want in Louisiana but if they have it good up north then they won't come south. Then add to it that the ones that do come south have to basically go through Vietnam battlefields in Arkansas (and other Midwest states) to get here. Whatever birds do decide to come to Louisiana have survived some serious stuff by the time they get here in Arkansas.

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Even when there were TONS of ducks on the gulf coast it took a better duck hunter to be successful than it did in Kansas, say, because the damned birds were PhDs in hunter identification and avoidance....I have hunted ducks and geese all of the country and Canada...there is no doubt that even with loads of birds hunting ducks at the extreme limit of their migration, after months of them being hammered, makes it necessary to step up the game...I cut my teeth hunting ducks on the Texas Gulf Coast and then the SE Atlantic Coast and inland areas of Georgia and Alabama....we'd go seasons with a mallard. 10 Ducks a year in 30 trips, not counting wood ducks, would be a GRAND season....but that experience has honed my ability to kill birds anywhere IF I can get close LOL....for all of the talk about being on the X some folks do nowadays you'd think its a waste of time to set up anywhere else....well guess what...it ain't....you can pull ducks and geese if they are migrating and you know what you are doing....but if they are stale as the beer at a DU Banquet then yes, you gotta be on the X....and most hunters less than about 40 years old do not know it is possible to pull birds IF THEY ARE ALLOWED TO DO WHAT BIRDS DO and that is migrate and look for food, loafing and safe areas.....If all that is provided in one small aread then yes, you are going to have to be on the X...if the birds are allowed to do what they do you can create the X with some work and planning and it doesn't require doing anything more than building a proper blind, setting a proper spread and knowing how to call, which usually means shutting the hell up......and you can pull birds unless they are going somewhere unnatural like a refuge with tons of grain tossed on the ground or a private flooded (baited) corn field....then the only birds you can pull are new birds for a few days....