Nothing beats a speck calling.
I’m surprised the salt plains survey had such low numbers. I saw enough ducks and geese last weekend of muzz that I bought a duck stamp and dusted off some 28ga bismuth I bought years ago. My brothers and our sons will all be together over Thanksgiving. Can’t believe I’m saying this, but I hope the deer cooperate early on so we can get in a duck hunt or two.
They don't winter there like they used to imo. I'm only 25 min from there and used to hunt lots of places between home and there, and we slayed them all season. Like the flip of a switch in 2018 it was a slow year, and has been almost nonexistent since. We rarely hunted water even, all cut milo and corn fields. Glass the horizons before sunset, find a black cloud of birds going to feed and go find them, ask permission for the following days and slay them. Now there's outfitter trucks at every other intersection doing the same thing lol
I’m not as plugged into waterfowling like I once was, but there are definitely less birds up there overall. And the guide thing up there is ridiculous. Theyre everywhere and from everywhere. If I hunted waterfowl more it’d bother me a lot more, but the days of knocking on a door for permission are coming to end. And I must have just been in the flyway they were using those days, but I saw a lot of ducks in smaller (<20) groups and a fair amount of small geese. Flooded milo terraces near me were full of birds. We won’t need 12,000 ducks for a good hunt. We just need 30 that want to come in right.
