duck hunting success
November 4th, 2005 by Administrator
Warm weather cools duck hunting success - There’s probably no better way to sum up the state of the duck season than the words of wildlife biologist Tim Reis: “It’s not happening anywhere at the moment.”
Reis is the state Department of Natural Resources’ wildlife supervisor for nine counties around Saginaw Bay, the heart of Michigan’s waterfowl activity. His area saw a pretty fair start to the southern Michigan duck season Oct. 15, he said, but “things have slowed down substantially. That warm weather that came in from the southwest did it.
“The teal and some of the local ducks moved south with the first cold front, but once it warmed up again, there was no reason for ducks north of us to head south.”
Another problem has been that after a couple of weeks of hunting, the locally produced ducks that comprise the bulk of the birds killed by Michigan hunters have concentrated in refuges where hunters can’t get at them.
More than 15,000 ducks and 3,500 Canada geese were at the Fish Point Refuge on the south shore of Saginaw Bay, but hunters reported that those ducks have been shot at so much they are difficult to lure into a decoy spread outside the refuge.
“We haven’t seen any great movement of migratory ducks yet,” said Faye McNew, the DNR’s waterfowl specialist. “The divers are still up north. What we don’t know is if they will come through over a period of weeks, the way they usually do, or if we’ll get a cold snap and they’ll pass through in a rush.”
Buddy Hahn of Trenton hunts ducks on Lake Erie. Last weekend, “we saw quite a few mallards, but we only shot one,” he said. “The birds out there now are mostly smart ducks that have been shot at before.
“You can blow on a duck call until you croak, but they know the game, and they won’t get within 100 yards of a decoy.”
BY ERIC SHARP
FREE PRESS OUTDOORS WRITER