Did Warm Weather Ruin Your Waterfowl Season?
You don’t need an “Al Gore For President” sticker on the bumper of your Honda Prius to notice that it...
You don’t need an “Al Gore For President” sticker on the bumper of your Honda Prius to notice that it has been unseasonably warm this winter. And this long stretch of warm weather has thrown a monkey wrench in waterfowl seasons across the country.
Most ducks and geese only migrate as far as they have to. Once they find open water, food and safety, they stop heading south. Warm weather typically means more open water and a shorter or delayed trip.
The Denver Post reported last week that this exact scenario was happening in Colorado. This from the post …
_”There are two main things that the weather has hurt us on,” said Jim Gammonly, waterfowl biologist for Colorado Parks and Wildlife. “One is that even as late as a couple of weeks ago, there were still tens of thousands of Canada geese and ducks — mainly mallards — well north of us. Places like Montana have not had much of a winter either.
“The other is the weather here. We haven’t had a lot of cold weather, so even if we had a lot of birds around, they’d be harder to get to because there are so many places for them to get away from the gun. So I expect the harvest data will be pretty spotty and probably pretty slow this last month or so.”_
How did the duck/goose season work out this year in your state?
