In Remembrance of a Friend

Those in our "hunting circle" lost a good friend back in July of 2010 after a year and a half battle with cancer.  "Mickey" and my dad have been hunting together for as long as I can remember, along with his two sons and my brother, amongst others as well .  We have had many memorable hunts on his land in the flooded timber of the Marais des Cygnes bottoms as well as at our place.  The man was wise beyond his years when it came to duck hunting and was the purest of shooters.  He managed to log his 100th lifetime triple (yes, he kept an exact count through the years) in the 2009 season after he was diagnosed with cancer.  You never heard him talk much about it, but you would sometimes hear a subtle "92" after a volley rang out of the blind with fluttering ducks in front.

We have dedicated our newest "honey hole" at Burbenska Farms in his name.  Many a hunt was spent talking about this project over the years before it was finally put into place.  Years of thinning out a pin oak stand of timber and the construction of levees on two sides now gives us a third timber hole to hunt out of.  We feel this one has the most potential as it is surrounded by pin oaks, has an open canopy with grassy understory due to the TSI, and most importantly, is closest to the ducks "natural flyway" over our property.  We will have to wait until next year (weather permitting) to see if this holds true, as we decided not to pump this section of the timber this year due to the amount of water it would take and the fact that the ducks weren't flying the area well as it was.  We had a sign made to dedicate the timber hole and plan on hanging it on the path into the flooded pin oaks during each season.  (Special thanks to Vince Crawford of VECtor Calls for the awesome word burning work!)

Dad (left) and Mickey (right) on the last day of the 2004 - 2005 season.

The season that never was...

The 2011-2012 duck season has come and gone, and it was arguably one of the most unsuccessful seasons we have ever had as far as actual duck numbers go.  Never would have imagined it would have turned out this way with the record numbers this spring in the breeding grounds.  Just goes to show that nothing is ever a guarantee, and seasons like this year make us appreciate the good and great years even more.

It's tough to say exactly why the hunting wasn't up to par this year.  Many other areas in Missouri had a record year and saw the full effects of the high duck numbers.  The ducks just flat out weren't using our area, even though there were 100,000+ ducks sitting not too far from us.  My theory is that it was due to several out-of-the-norm conditions that all came together....a "perfect storm" if you will.

A relatively wet spring abruptly changed to an extremely hot and dry summer.  The corn in our area suffered tremendously, with a lot of it producing little to no yield whatsoever.  Ducks are driven by their stomachs and their will to survive...they go to where the food us.  Other corn and bean fields fared okay, but with the dry conditions, farmers were able to harvest their crops and work the ground under earlier then normal.  From a duck hunting standpoint, we like to see a wet fall where farmers are able to get their corn out but leave the stubble.  This leaves a lot of waste grain in the dry fields for ducks to feed on.

On the other side of things, the nearby conservation area had above average food conditions this year, for both corn and their moist soil units.  With an abundance of food at the reserve, and very little food in our immediate area, the ducks had no reason to head our direction in search of food.

Also due to the dry weather, there wasn't much for water in the area.  Some ponds that are normally full were nearly dry, the rivers in the area had very little water, and other nearby marsh areas and duck clubs were bone dry.  We weren't able to pump enough water to hunt until a couple weeks into the season after a much needed 4-6 inches of rain soaked the entire river basin.  This would have normally resulted in a heavy flood, but the exceptionally dry ground absorbed so much of the rain that it hardly raised our river.  It did raise enough for us to pump enough water to give us some sort of season though.

To top it all off, it didn't help that our fields were literally nothing but bare dirt before we put water on it due to the dirt work we had done this summer.  We planted about 20 acres of japanese millet right as the work was completed, and had high hopes of having some "juicy" fields.  I think we ended up getting a whopping 0.2 inches of rain in the next three months after we put the seed down.  Needless to say, hardly anything came up.  Once flooded, our fields looked more like lakes than wetlands.  I don't think this ended up making much of a difference though, as the ducks just flat out weren't using the area like they normally do.  Sure, we may have drawn a few more ducks to the area, but not enough to make much of a difference.  Another duck club just down the river had flooded moist soil and corn and they too had never seen so few ducks.

Oh, and not to mention the unseasonably mild weather we had this year also.  I don't ever recall being able to hunt the entire last week of the 60-day season without having to break ice!  There were still plenty of ducks that had moved south far enough, but higher numbers than normal remain up north even as of right now.

All was not lost though...we managed to scratch our fair share of ducks and had a lot of good laughs this year.  We also got to experiment with our water levels after getting some heavy dirt work done this summer.  Having the fields barren of any vegetation gave us a good opportunity to really evaluate how the water depths varied throughout our fields.  We concluded that the dirt work we had done was a huge success and we took mental notes on a few things we need to tweak before next season...hopefully the weather cooperates better and we will be hunting over some much-anticipated flooded corn.

As usual, I slacked yet again with pictures this season but I did manage to take a handful.  I got some new glass towards the end of the season but never really got a good chance to use it.  Either had ducks flying but cloudy weather, or perfect weather but no ducks.  Oh well, hopefully from here on out they'll get better.  I may even go hunting with my camera if the ducks start using the area more or on their trip back north.  Still have goose season left but not sure how much I will make it out, if at all.