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rae61 said:
Handsome Choc! I love how a cackle immediately grabs their attention stopping them in their tracks.
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TY.
Right! About the only thing that can pull his mind off his stomach is a rooster cackle, a mallard highball, or a tennis ball!
I once thought I'd try a test to see which drove him more, a tennis ball or his food dish. I downed him in the center of the yard. Walked his tennis ball to one corner and his food dish to the other.
Joke was on me, when I released him, he ran and grabbed the ball on the turn to his food dish, dropped the ball in his dish and proceeded to eat. Yup, I'm a fool!! 😆😆
 
Bob Peters said:
It seems like those game production areas are money about 90% of the time. WPA's, they can be hit and miss.
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My personal experience has been that if they are in heavily hunted areas of the state, they get pounded too much. So even with food on them later in the season, they aren't as good. I found one last year in EC that had water down from the food and cover across the water. No birds in the cover on the same side of the water as the food. I had a hunch that maybe they were eating food and then flying across the water to safety. The water had just recently frozen. Went across the water and got 3 birds.

But areas without a lot of hunting pressure can hold a lot of birds due to that food source. This one today has standing corn (never got up to it to see how fresh it is), and across the road another older plot of sparse sorghum that still had some seeds on it. There is another plot of some type of food that is probably a year or two old that I found too, down the road and up another section road. And there were 2 dozen Sharp-tailed Grouse right down the road from there that flushed and landed 200 yards away.

Not sure if the SD boys were keeping this a secret, but I just now found out that SD extended the grouse/chicken season to end of January too! Honey and I are going to pay a visit to some grouse in a bit.

Getting back to GPAs....like many public spots, if the roads get snowed in and there is no pressure for a few weeks, the birds seem to come back in and hang around.

Anecdotal, so take the info for what it cost! :)

But when the GPAs are good, they can be REALLY good, like you said.
 
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My reply above might have come off as contrairian, which was not my intention. In thinking about what I have seen on GPAs, I also realized my experience in SD is mainly in January. I bet most of the GPAs, regardless of geographic location, can be awesome earlier in the season.

I found a wonderful, new to me, WMA, in western MN on opening weekend. It had corn on it that was separated from cattails by tall grasses. The way the land flowed, it created this winding alley of bird heaven. Birds galore. If only my shooting had been as glorious.

I stopped at it on the drive out to SD at the end of Oct, and found they had allowed the farmer to harvest all the corn! He left a little bit, but not much. Completely ruined the heavenly layout. I did get one late hatch youngster, but didn't see the dozens of birds I saw 2+ weeks prior.
 
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