Pictures below are all from the last two weeks, enjoy!

Hunting has been hit and miss up here at the pit.  You are guaranteed to shoot birds, you just have to put your time in.  Over Thanksgiving break we had hunters hunt four days straight all day long, if you are patient and your schedule allows it, you will be rewarded. 

 

Turkey day was just for family, we had a good bird count for only getting into one bunch of ducks and one bunch of geese.  There were 6 of us hunting in the morning, we managed 10 mallards out of one flock.  It never fails once someone leaves the blind the other hunters will get some birds.  Right after my brother in- law and father in-law left we had a group of about 60 honkers come right in belly up, got to love the west wind days.  Four of us put 12 on the water belly up or so we thought, one ended up getting away but everyone was so excited they didn’t have time to reload and get the 12th for the limit.  We ended the day with 17 mallards, 11 honkers, and 1 snow goose.  Not too bad.

 

Friday was full of surprises, biggest surprise was that we only got a few birds.  The good news was what came in didn’t leave. 

 

Saturday we made a few arrangements to the decoys, moved the spinners to the field behind us and it seemed to work out.  Only managed a few still, but a few is better than none.

 

Sunday was the worst.  Lots of ducks around, as a matter of fact I am told they had four 100+ bunches of mallards give the guys four times to shoot their guns.  From what I hear that’s all the guys did was shoot their guns as they ended the day with one mallard and three geese. 

 

Lots of birds are in the area, it appears that the ducks are finally using Desoto Bend again and there is still a ton of ducks on the river.  Out of the four days we hunted ducks moved all day from all directions.  Hopefully it stays warm and the ducks stick around, this might be the first year we shoot ducks all the way to the end of the season.  

Friday was the start of a small migration that only lasted 1 day.  Guys in the blind Friday managed to take 19 birds, not bad for 5 hunters.  Ducks were moving good on Friday, but not many geese were seen.  We did have one bunch of snows work our spread for about 5 minutes and then they took off and headed south.  I highly doubt the birds that we saw migrating were out of SD or ND or even Canada.  Most of the time when we see migrators out of the norhern states the entire bunch commits right away, however we were only pulling 10-15 ducks out of a flock of 100 which leads me to believe that these ducks were not coming from very far away. 

Saturday was hot and heavy for the first hour and half of shooting time.  The blind ended up with 25 ducks, only 11 short of the 6 man limit needed.  Probably should of had the limit, but thats how it goes.   We did end up with three snow geese as well.  Saw only a handfull of ducks moving down the river, but it pretty much shut off after 1pm.  Out of all the ducks we shot only 1 or 2 bunches that were migrating most of the other ducks came in Friday night. 

Sunday was a total bust, what ducks were around were gone.  We saw maybe two or three flocks of ducks, no geese, and ended up with two singles in the bag. 

Every north wind day we should start seeing new birds since it is late enough in the year, however with little to no snow in the forecast for the Dakotas, I doubt we see any major migration.