good morning
 

parker people its a cool but nice sunny day here in ole miss....hope all you have aa nice a day as i have at the moment....leaves are begging there fall colors here we have only had 1 frost so far theres gona be a lot of leaves still on for opening day of deer season which starts this coming saturday i look forward to it....charlie

Thank you Charlie! It is a beautiful day here. Spent some time looking at my guns, now breakfast with Mills and puppy intervention with our trainer in a little while

It was an assume day here also. Couldn't ask for anything better.

This was a great weekend in Auburn, it warmed up from the cold spell and the Tigers pulled one out for once. There was talk that they were going to change the Auburn greeting from War Eagle to three and out. Hope everyone else had a nice beginning to November.

Spin

Today (actually yesterday) was a great day here in WNY to mow the lawn possibly for the last time and get leaves picked up. That is what I was doing after my morning pheasabt hunt. My wife and I also had the chance to get a batch of spaghetti sauce made.

Every day I wake up and get up is a great day! Rain here this morning, Charlie, but it will help the food plots.

I hope your food plots have done well. We got ours in late due to a sever drought all summer long, but it's been rainy ever since. The clover is up, but still young and small, but the nurse crop of wheat looks decent.

No big ones on the trail cameras, but a couple of "keepers 'til next year" will be entertaining to watch. It will be 15 degrees Saturday morning, our firearms opener. I'll hunt a couple of days and then cross the line into Iowa to have a "real hunt" -- wild quail over a brace of Gordon setters...carrying a Parker!

Good day to you, Charlie!

I shot clays Sunday afternoon

I spent most of Sunday swearing that I'll never drink again.. :nono:

But I did get the yard mostly cleaned up today.

I've had several good mornings chasing grouse and woodcock with Grace this season. Actually, the bird season is far from over but with rifle season for deer opening this Saturday, I'm afraid I'll be done with them for this year anyway.
Grace has turned into a very good woodcock dog, pointing them with intensity, sometimes with the bird a mere two feet or less off her nose. But she still hasn't learned she can't get that close to grouse.

Saturday morning Grace received a visit with two of her beautiful daughters who will be 1 year old on November 17. All three of these girls were ecstatic and played and licked and played and ran all over the place. They were so much fun to watch!

It has been a great season and I thought with the fall of woodcock we got two weeks ago (17 flushes in 1.3 hours) that they would have passed through, especially with the high winds, snow and cold of the last week or so... But NO! we had six points and flushes and we scared the livin' daylights outta them!! (...we decided to leave them as seed birds for next year. :whistle:)

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looks fantastic Dean !

It really is Chris... and it has been for the 62 years I’ve been enjoying that place and the wonderful friends there.





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Wonderful photos! Looks like a great place...with a great bird dog. Glad you left some seed birds. I do my part also, and if they gave awards for birds left, I may actually win something!

Beautiful pictures, Dean. What a wonderful time of year.

Woodcock that are being tracked via gps indicate that the migration is slow to get started but there has been some movement in the last week.

It has been my experience that dogs run heavily on woodcock and preserve birds have a tendency to crowd grouse. Once trained though to stay off their birds and stop at first scent a dog can be good to adequate on all of them but it takes training to do so. It becomes especially critical when grouse numbers are low with a high percentage of old birds in the population.

Great photos, Dean!

Gary where do you find the gps tracking information ? I used to have it through a site which no longer updates.

Keeps falling. Should be a good pheasant hunt tomorrow if country roads passable

I got the gps info from the PA grouse biologist. According to her the Ruffed Grouse Society is supposed to make the data available through their web site. I have not checked to see if it is available.

Thank you, that is the site i was following but it has nothing for 2018. Just looked it up again and it is dated 2018 but will not load the map. It was fascinating to follow one from New Brunswick in 2017 the south and north paths over lapped and it returned to the same area by the same route. Some of them flew some very long distances in a 24 hour period. You can still access the 2017 fall and spring migrations, it is very interesting.

Could you share the link?

ruffedgrousesociety.org


There have been two different woodcock tracking schemes on the RGS website in recent years. One, that depicts the flight paths of gps equipped birds. The second, is a mapping venue where hunters can report woodcock migration conditions. The latter is still there but has been changed and doesn't work well for me.

http://www.ruffedgrousesociety.org/m...p#.W-bgaBRUOlJ Hope this works, still in computer 101. It did work.

Gary you have found the same as i did. The GPS tracking i found had a 2018 date but did not show anything. The past years tracking are still very interesting in that on a given date you can see the distance flown and the time it stayed in a given area. Also the path taken and how far south, some make a leisurely flight others do it in long flights.

Ah ha! Wonderfull to find that the spot we flushed 14 mudbats last week wasn't on the map! The secret is safe!!!!