Any of you guys out hunting birds last weekend for the MN opener? How’d you do?
I’m sure everyone has heard that bird counts are way down. I had very limited expectations going it, but the one thing that gave me some hope is that the harvest is WAY ahead of normal so there is much less standing corn for the birds to hide in. In fact, I’d say this is the most corn I’ve ever seen out on the opening day.
I was down by Marshall. As usual, there were big groups camped out on the WMAs and other public areas starting at 6 in the morning.
My observations were that the bird counts were accurate. Way, way, way down. After the initial rush of shots between 9 and 11, it was rare to hear shooting. By 4:00 there were no hunters out on the back roads and the WMAs were deserted.
Confirming the fact that SW MN had a terrible nesting season, we were seeing pheasants that were about 10 inches high and could barely fly, so there were some very late nestings, probably the result of the first nests getting flooded out.
I have access to 1000 acres of private land including quite a bit of CRP. We did find birds resting in thinner, shorter CRP out of the wind on both days, but again numbers were far below even an average year, never mind the peak years of 2006-2009.
Total for 2 days of hard hunting with good dogs 3 of us flushed about 14 hens and we went 4 for 5 on the roosters we flushed. Partridge are non-existant in the area we hunted and we sadly haven’t seen any for 5 years.
It’s always great to be out there and I had limited expectations, so I wasn’t that disappointed. In fact, if anything we flushed more than I expected.
How did everyone else do?
Grouse
