Well, I have been having a rough season so far. What started off pretty well has gotten really tough to get birds within gun range.
A combination of several factors have really dampened my team's season lately.
We have had a couple of snow events one of them a major storm dropping about 2 feet of the white stuff. These storms have made me miss a lot of hunting opportunities due to work conflicts. Out of all the farms that we have access to on a regular basis, none of them appear currently to be in any direct flight paths. On top of all of this, I personally have not seen the numbers in our area like I have in previous years. The beans have been cut very low this year with hardly anything on the ground providing very poor natural concealment opportunities. The corn has been cut, but the stubble is around 20" tall. This is normally no problem, but with the flight path really far away and trying to run traffic, it has been extremely hard to get the attention of the birds to this field due to the fact that the stubble hides most of the decoys. Most of the ponds in the areas are frozen solid, with no birds roosting in the immediate areas. I found one pond yesterday that is still completely open and one could probably walk from one side to the other with out getting a foot wet, by walking on birds there were so many waterfowl in there. Unfortunately the closest farms to this pond that we have access on is about 2 miles away, and yesterday evening we set up on one of them which is beans. A few birds were heading to that pond but they all had their auto pilot on and we were unable to convince them otherwise. We did have one flock that flew over that we were able to peel off a single. He circled us 8 times, but we were unable to close the door. While he was cicrling a loan duck from out of nowhere buzzed us twice. (Wish I had thrown out the duck dekes when we were setting up ...
, could have pulled the trigger on this, but I was still workin on getting the goose in) Yesterday morning, we went to another bean field in layout blinds. We had some action early on with a single and then two other flocks, but again, we couldn't close the door. With about 2 inches of snow \still on the ground, and no snow covers for the layout blinds we stuck out and this effected the outcome. And boy, it was muddy yesterday as we reached near 40 degrees and the big thaw began, almost had one truck stuck in the field last night, and my wonderful wife didn't get upset when her loving husband showed up with her joyfull son covered with mud, head to toe. Our boots had about an inch layer of mud on them.
This morning, I have to work, but some of the guys are hunting a wheat field across the road from where we hunted last night, so I am awaiting word from them, and hopefully they will be able to connect. Temps fell back below freezing last night and today we are not to get above freezing with wind gusts of around 20-30 mph.
Have a hefty week coming up with work and then things should slack off enough to allow more time afield. Hope to post up some good pics in the next couple of weeks for you all.
