omicron1792
5 year old buck +
I love woodies and ringnecks! Going Thursday.
Waterfowl
- Thread starter ksgobbler
- Start date
Telemark
5 year old buck +
Heck yeah that was fun! Always a pleasure to spend time in a blind with fantastic people like you and your son.
We once figured we killed a duck with a band per approximately 1000 ducks - it was several years between bands for several of us combined. Now days, around here, it would be a lifetime between bands
H20fwler
5 year old buck +
Five bands out of this blind this year, most locally banded.
Today, spitting-snow temp drop. Birds were like flies, four guys could have limited before noon.
Turkey Creek
5 year old buck +
Nice!
I have a question...... not trying to start anything, the bag limit is the bag limit to each their own. Do you regularly shoot hens? Has that always been the case? Or has something changed in mindset? We just personally only shoot drakes, yes occasionally a hen takes a collateral damage hit. Seems if I have seen more photos the last year or two on various forums with more hens in the bag.
We never used to kill hens, wood ducks, ring necks, or shovelers. Now we shoot any of them. We used to kill 120/130 ducks a year apiece hunting 30 days. Some days now, we dont see a limit. Yes, it seems counter productive to shoot hens when the population is decreasing - but in our area, we believe more of the decline is shortstopping than the decline of the overall population. Overall population is down by 25% - our ducks are down by 75%
H20fwler
5 year old buck +
Drakes make pics look better but we aren’t hung up on drakes only here at home, if they are flying great sure. We like to shoot and eat ducks.
Hunting here on the lake normally I will shoot about any duck that comes in that is not a merg because it may be the only birds in that day.
Hunting out in corn stubble locally it's drakes only with the mallards, because it is late season migrators and a sure thing, but I’ll shoot whatever for the other two birds. Normally field hunting we look flocks over hard for the "other" before taking mallards...blacks/pins/gaddies.
When we travel, we definitely target drakes and mostly anything that is not mallards like big divers/pintails/gaddies/wigeon/spoonies...with Cans and spoonies being favorite top targets.
Mallards and greater canada geese are a given and most common here, so when hunting Canada or ND/SD/MI/AR/LA we look for anything not a mallard or big canada goose.
A day like today the birds just kept getting better as the weather got worse and the birds started acting "right".. so it was a two man limit of mallards two hens six drakes with one black duck.
Telemark
5 year old buck +
Nice haul!
H20fwler
5 year old buck +
Wish you would have been in the blind today!
Foggy47
5 year old buck +
Me too.
Catscratch
5 year old buck +
I still can't shoot a hen mallard on purpose. Grew up when it was considered a sin. Has stuck with me.
We don't have many birds where I am able to hunt (my little swamp/public land) and pretty much all I see are woodies with the occasional ring neck so I shoot pretty much what I see. Used to try not to shoot hens, but I hunt to eat them since I can't control the population. There is one swamp that I get an invite to once every 4-5 years that sees all kinds of birds. Had a last minute invite last year and was not able to make it due to work travel. They killed all kinds of birds that morning.