Michigan.....

[MarketHunter]

The duck season opens here on Saturday as I've mentioned in another thread. I went scouting this morning and the report could certainly be better. The only private place we've got to hunt has very little water but I did see about 20 birds. Mostly wood ducks, a pair of mallards, and maybe some teal. The water is so low there's only one place you could get into anything like cover. I'm going back tomorrow afternoon to stick up a little blind. The mud is just over the knees so we're in for a workout setting decoys.

After I left there I thought I'd make a run by the infamous Mud Hole to see what it was looking like after the dry summer. This was our go to local duck marsh for a long time. As I lamented last year, it's been bought by the County as a wildlife sanctuary so our gunning days there are over.

As I walked down the trail I realized a huge pin oak had fallen over the path. I had to circle way around in the buck brush to get back on track. I didn't realize it till I got around the deadfall but in circling I'd actually crossed the canal and was behind the old permanent blind. I'd taken my waders off and had come this far in street shoes, to say I was stunned would put it mildly. The canal always held 2 or 3 feet of water, it was so grown up and dry I didn't even realize I'd crossed it. I walked on out to the end of the point and found that the whole slough was bone dry.

Where I stood in a cattail break with three feet of water (well two feet of silt mud and a foot of water) last season shooting wild geese there were weeds grown waist high and not a drip of water to be seen.

I circled on around and actually got up in the old blind around the other side of the point. That hide has stood there rock solid for all the seasons I've hunted the area. Now all of a sudden the roof is near caved in and the floor is rotting out, you'd never know it was the same blind.

The slough is bone dry, a tree has fallen across our well beaten path, and the blind is falling down. It's like the place knows it's hunting days are over and has given up the ghost. It was a bitter walk back to the truck......



DLH

[Opening Day]

Good news is a cold front is coming this weekend and might push down a few ducks. Rich and I are headed up to the UP for grouse and they are talking snow......

[MarketHunter]

We won't see them on this little slough I don't believe. This will be a local duck shoot only, I'd say every bird I saw this morning was born on that little puddle of water.

Good luck to you boys though, if I didn't have the big Flat Rock Flea Market on Sunday I might ask to come along.


DLH

[Duckman]

I hear ya on this drought business Destry. When we bought our place in 2001, you could jump 1000 mallards just off our drain ditches. Today those ditches are bone dry. We have a deep artesian well that used to free flow 800-1000 gpm and of course it kept open water all winter. Mighty attractive to birds when it is -20. Today it is not flowing at all. We are right adjacent to the "no hunt" zone on a National Wildlife Refuge and between grain fields and the river (Rio Grande), however these days there is little to hunt anywhere on the refuge. Birds normally would be piling in to our place as they were burned off the refuge areas open to hunting. Not any longer. A guy whose faily owned our property told me they used to take in day hunters for $20 a man when they were in a barley rotation and ducks/geese were thick. Between water issues surrounding farming, changes in the irrigation season, increases in regulatory measures effecting warm water wells and continuing drought, it will be a miracle if it ever gets back to what it was 10 years ago. Changes in farming practices are taking a toll as well. We went from being a destination pheasant hunting area to none. The barley residue that birds like in fall/winter is now being sprouted and disked to give a leg up on spring planting. Very little stubble is left.
I have been pumping for a week to a large wetland I could usually fill to duck level in 4-5 days and it still has a ways to go. There are zero ducks on it and I am about to give up. While we still have fair hunting, I used to kill a limit every blessed time I went out, usually 5 greenheads and something else like a gadwall or sprig to fill the limit. I sure hope I am wrong on what the future holds.
-plc-

[Bindlestiff]

Destry,

Sad news on the hunting spot but so well written that I felt I knew the place well. This would make a fine story to publish.

[charlie cleveland]

i agree this would be a great storey of what use to be...dont we all have rememberings of such places...this whole thread would make a fine articule for parker pages... charlie

[10 bore]

Originally Posted by Destry L. Hoffard

The duck season opens here on Saturday as I've mentioned in another thread. I went scouting this morning and the report could certainly be better. The only private place we've got to hunt has very little water but I did see about 20 birds. Mostly wood ducks, a pair of mallards, and maybe some teal. The water is so low there's only one place you could get into anything like cover. I'm going back tomorrow afternoon to stick up a little blind. The mud is just over the knees so we're in for a workout setting decoys.

After I left there I thought I'd make a run by the infamous Mud Hole to see what it was looking like after the dry summer. This was our go to local duck marsh for a long time. As I lamented last year, it's been bought by the County as a wildlife sanctuary so our gunning days there are over.

As I walked down the trail I realized a huge pin oak had fallen over the path. I had to circle way around in the buck brush to get back on track. I didn't realize it till I got around the deadfall but in circling I'd actually crossed the canal and was behind the old permanent blind. I'd taken my waders off and had come this far in street shoes, to say I was stunned would put it mildly. The canal always held 2 or 3 feet of water, it was so grown up and dry I didn't even realize I'd crossed it. I walked on out to the end of the point and found that the whole slough was bone dry.

Where I stood in a cattail break with three feet of water (well two feet of silt mud and a foot of water) last season shooting wild geese there were weeds grown waist high and not a drip of water to be seen.

I circled on around and actually got up in the old blind around the other side of the point. That hide has stood there rock solid for all the seasons I've hunted the area. Now all of a sudden the roof is near caved in and the floor is rotting out, you'd never know it was the same blind.

The slough is bone dry, a tree has fallen across our well beaten path, and the blind is falling down. It's like the place knows it's hunting days are over and has given up the ghost. It was a bitter walk back to the truck......



DLH

sad story , i remember the good days i had in some of my "new beaver ponds" now 40 years old and dry i(we) will never forget the good times. scott

[Richard Flanders]

Not all of the wetland drying up in Michigan is drought related. Michigan used to be covered with up to a mile of ice during the Pleistocene glaciation period. When the ice melted a lot of weight was removed and the entire lower peninsula has since then been rebounding at a rate of approximately 1/8" per year, which is quite a lot in geologic terms. The hinge line is along the Michigan-Ohio border; everything north of that is slowly rising, with the rate of rise increasing as you go north. I'm told there is a now a lot of land between the road and the water near Mackinaw bridge. At some point there may be no need for the bridge. There are numerous old sandy beach lines visible in the black organic potato fields in the thumb that used to be beach 'cliffs' but have now rotated enough to form ridges. Some of the wetlands are simply being elevated above the water tables that have kept them wet. There is nothing that can be done about this, of course; it's just the planet at work. Some of the drying is also a result of simple eutrophication caused by the decay of organic matter into soil or muck, as it were, that slowly fills in wetlands and kettle lakes left behind by the glaciers. This is an annual cycle as vegetation grows and dies with the seasons. Some of this could also be a result of the lowering of water table levels resulting from the removal of water for agriculture and domestic and industrial use, as in the Central Valley in California, where it has interestingly enough resulted in the lowering of the landscape by 20ft or more. Don't even get me started on the sad situation in New Orleans, where they will at some time in the future need dikes 200ft high to keep the city, which will be in a giant trench, dry; it's a lost cause caused by channelization of the river system to enhance shipping that has caused the sediments that would normally be deposited in the naturally sinking delta to continue on into the Gulf. They can't win that one. Get used to it as these processes will continue for some time to come.

[MarketHunter]

It was about what I expected, a lot of work fighting the mud for very little return. We had three wood ducks light a bit wide.We watched for awhile then decided to give them a try with little effect. Pair of mallards made half a swing and Jim managed to knock one down. That was my opening day here in Michigan.....

DLH

[Duckman]

Originally Posted by Destry L. Hoffard

It was about what I expected, a lot of work fighting the mud for very little return. We had three wood ducks light a bit wide.We watched for awhile then decided to give them a try with little effect. Pair of mallards made half a swing and Jim managed to knock one down. That was my opening day here in Michigan.....

DLH

I hope it improves for you soon. I'm going again Wed. but tomorrow I'm taking young Wyatt to try for his firs elk. Should have gone out tonight as 150+ were in our hay field well before shooting time ended. I told him they would probably come in too late so we should go in the morning. Live and learn! Hope I can post a picture of him with a nice cow.