re: Duck Decline Solution

quote:

---

I don’t know how old you are, but there was a time where soybeans were treated like a Red-headed stepchild in the delta. They were put in bottoms where cotton couldn’t get harvested for most years. Seldom were they able to harvest the beans and they would always get flooded.

---

Old enough to be around before Crp and WRP.

Hunted a place off of HWY 61, across from BoBo brake between Clarksdale and Cleveland.

Nothing special. The field we hunted naturally held water, sit back in the tree line and pick out greenheads, usually took about 2 hours to get a few limits.

Now you are lucky to get a few spoonies at that place.

quote:

---

Much like the swallow and coconuts.

---

Much of that depends on the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow. Which, of course, differs greatly between the African and European swallows.

I hear you, I like texting buddies from the deer blind. But nothing beats the camaraderie of a duck hunt with family and friends, limits or skunked out. Mosquitos, freeze, you name it. Misery loves company.

Venison meat > duck meat 100%

quote:

---

Duck hunting was more about being in the blind with guys cutting up and laughing.

---

yeah, for me it was breaking groups of green tops from 4000’ and getting them to gunning range.

Haven't killed decent amount of ducks in anywhere around Avoyelles in years. I refuse to pay the ridiculous prices to sunken blind hunt. I wake up at my house, walk down my driveway before daylight, cross the road, stand by one of my oak trees and shoot wood ducks in the bayou. I have a bamboo pole about 25' long with a nail at the end to retrieve the ducks. I do this once a week. No boots, mud, cold and I'm done to be back in bed with the wife before 7:30.

This thread makes me depressed and to think about my old man stories of the glory days of the 70’s though 90’s.
He hunted whiteville most of the 3/30 days and would kill 2 mallards and either a canvasback or pintail as his off duck plus his limit of specks.
Shoot in the late 00’s we had a rice field blind in Henderson which produced 400 birds a year that I heard now hardly gets a duck.
There’s still a few places that whack em but they are far and few between and they even have their down moments.

quote:

---

Please expand on this. I just don't understand what you are saying here.

---

With no tilled ground corn and other grains lay on the surface accessible to ducks dry feeding. When the field gets tilled much of it is not accessible or becomes non usable. Now instead of frozen water alone moving a lot of ducks (mainly mallards) southward, it takes 6-10" of snow cover and that just hasn't happened enough a lot of years.