Agree with haymaker, we shot just under 2 birds per hunter mostly due to poor shooting. Only had one dog and it was dry so it was tough to find down birds. Cover was rather thick which was great! We saw plenty of birds. Hunting will get much better as harvest moves forward. SDviking
Yup, birds are back in small numbers in areas that they had disappeared from last year. In all of central east river last year we only found two pockets of birds in numbers around Huron and Gettysburg. They are still in small pockets but there are many more of those. Found some birds near Redfield/Tulare, Chelsea/Cresbard, Ashton/Frankfort. 3-4 guys with 1-2 dogs over 4 days got 25 birds. Not enough numbers to consistently see birds out of the cover so Mon/Tue where hard hunting after the rest were educated over the weekend. The rest just disappeared into crops and never came back out. Maybe after a cool down period they will be back out but for now it looks like a long wait for crops to get out and/or snow to see success.
Bird numbers were up and so was the crops, 4 hunters put down 25 birds but tues and wed were very poor weather conditions and shooting was poor, we did get 50 ducks over this time. We were unable to get on our private grounds which were still in crops so the 25 on public grounds was ok. We had great dog work and my pointer did fabulous and my labs and the other dogs did well. It was the poorest looking crops that I have ever seen and our farmer is worried about his herd and he may have to sell animals as they may not harvest crops until December and then he claims he will only get 80-90 bushels of corn per acre instead of the 200 normally. Water was great for the ducks and our ponds were almost full and had good cover around them. Was a better season than last year and will be better later this year. It does not look good for the farmers, one of the grain elevators has closed and it looks like others will follow suit. Seriously have to think about coming back later in the year, if it wasn't a 24 hr drive I would do it in a heart beat
Isn't that the way it is?Sometimes you walk miles, and don't shoot.Sometimes you walk for 5 minutes, and limit out, you just never know. Has a lot to do with weather, hunting preasure, wind, farming.I know of a huge cornfield out here that has to have a lot of birds, but getting permission will be difficult.