Ducks still scarce

[Kevin J Legg]

Hunted the lake today and saw very few ducks. Some bufflehead but few of anything else.saw one flock of broadbills, very few mallards and blacks, a couple long tails and whistlers and quite a few swans.

Harvest in my garden was more fruitful!

[guffins fisherman]

We need some fresh birds to come down. I hunted my honey hole Monday AM and saw a good number of mallards, but they were having none of my small decoy spread. What is here, is so leery and educated that hunting them is a waste of time at this point. Unfortunately, the weather does not look conducive to facilitating the migration at all for the northern zone at this point.

[Kevin J Legg]

Hopefully late western zone and later in Canada will be better

[Roybee]

This is crazy. No ice at all in the northern duck season. I plan in going hard all weekend still I guess. All this work and prep work for nothing. I should toss the riggers back on and troll for some musky at the acres. Perfect weather for trolling....

Sent from my SM-G900V using Lake Ontario United mobile app

[guffins fisherman]

I can't remember a Fall that was this consistently warm. I only saw ice enough to effect my hunt once this season. That was the day before Thanksgiving. The funny part is, I set up in water, and picked up in ice. My 10 year old thought it was pretty cool to watch the ice grow across the water. I didn't pull the trigger that day, but it served as a great scouting day. I saw where the birds were able to land, so I set up there on Thanksgiving morning and had my limit in less than an hour.

[Kevin J Legg]

Finished up my Northern waterfowl season and it was a little disappointing. Although we saw a fair number of birds our take wasn't stellar this fall. Today we took a pair of mallards and a goose. We were hunting a marsh that is usually frozen this time of year. I hope we get some weather so the western NY late season and the rest of the Canada season picks up. The birds today were very hawky and have likely seen it all. With muzzle loading ending this weekend I may be doing more perch fishing from my boat this week if weather cooperates.

[john1947]

Heres a real problem for ducks today.I caught this hawk on my deer cam.I started with over 100 mallards,down to three drakes in 3 years.

[KMC]

kaboom

[Gill-T]

Heres a real problem for ducks today.I caught this hawk on my deer cam.I started with over 100 mallards,down to three drakes in 3 years.

 

Hawks have always been around.  The problem in your situation is a learned pattern of easy prey.  At a rod and gun club in Lewiston there are a pair of hawks that have learned how to work together to kill pheasants in their nets/pens.  One bird swoops down and scares the pheasants into flight and as they flap against the overhead netting, the second hawk swoops down and cuts their heads off. Seems to me if you have a problem bear or wolf or whatever you can get a permit or warden action to kill the nuisance critter so why not hawks?