Sporting Clays are..Well...Sporting!

Dylan is home for thanksgiving (thank you lord!) so we decided to go out to the St. Louis Skeet and Trap Club and shoot some sporting clays today. Lots of fun. Dylan had never done it before and wanted to shoot some. I let him take my old High Standard 12 gauge pump back to Mizzou to use. I got that gun for christmas when I was 13 and took good care of it so it looks almost new.

 

Friday Walk About.

I took Friday off this week and decided to take Bama out to see if we could find some quail. Birds or not it was a really nice day to outside walking in the woods. I thought about duck hunting but my heart just wasn't into getting up really early and hauling all the stuff out to a marsh in the dark and setting up. So I slept for another couple hours and headed out about 8:00. I didn't take many pics as you can see.

Pretty spot but no quail.

Bama doing his impression of a duck decoy.

I had an idea for a T-shirt design so I knocked it out on my iPhone.
Yeah I wasn't exactly hunting hard today.

Cold Front Moving In; Will The Ducks Come With It?

Cool rainy weather is moving in this evening and ducks are predicted to be moving out ahead of it. I have plenty of PTO time left maybe I'll take an impromptu day off tomorrow. Now where should I go?

I scouted a few places about a month ago and saw geese at one of the places last weekend while Bama and I were quail hunting. That place is about an hour and a half away. The other place is closer and looks really good but I didn't see ducks there when I was scouting. The pictures below are of the second and closer place. It's an old sand dredging operation off the Meramec River about a half hour from home. Hmmmm.

This is an arial view of the strip pits. As you can see it's a series of long ponds surrounded by trees and nearby are a number of farm fields that were planted in corn this year. The Meramec River runs from the North to the Southeast on the eastern side of the property.

Good vegetation in this place for the ducks. Should be a good spot.

LIke I said this is an old sand dredging area and that's a barge with trees growing out of it!

Another strip lake just over the hill from the barge. Again it looks like it would hold ducks.

Oh and it also holds a number of beavers. That must be a big beaver because thats a pretty big tree and the cut starts about two feet off the ground.

Another pond in the area.

Yes It's Been A While.

Sorry for the lack of posting. I could spend time giving you all my excuses but frankly I've probably just been lazy. Yep that's it lazy. Sometimes that's an enjoyable thing. Well on to my adventures....

It's been a little over a week since I got back from North Dakota where my friend Mark and I hunted with our friends from Delta Waterfowl. Really great group of people and organization dedicated to waterfowl habitat conservation and stewardship as well as supporting the tradition of waterfowl hunting for generations to come.

Mark and I donate our time and what skills we posses doing Delta's print and online advertising. We also design posters, logos, and whatever else they need for their fund raising and membership events.
It's our way of giving back and frankly it's a lot of fun doing the work. Delta wanted to repay us by inviting us up to Bismark, North Dakota to their headquarters for three days of waterfowl and pheasant hunting. Twist my arm fellas!

John Deveny acted as our guide for three days and wanted to give us three different styles of hunting.
Deep water for diving ducks like canvasbacks, redheads, buffleheads and blue bills. Shallow marsh for mallards, teal, gadwalls etc... and the occassional specks (goose) which are a goose variety rarely seen in Missouri. Our third day was a field hunt in layout blinds for ducks and geese. The first two days we also hunted pheasants in the afternoon. Lots and lots of fun and I enjoyed every minute of it! I guess my favorite was the marsh hunt. We saw an incredible amount of waterfowl and I got my limit on ducks and shot a speckled goose and a ross as well. Over the three days I shot mallards, teal, pintails, gadwall and bluebills as well as specks, lesser snow, canadian and ross geese.

Our pheasant hunts were fun as well but we didn't bag as many of those as I might have expected. The expiring CRP programs are really starting to take there effect on upland habitat. Places that John said he usually saw incredible amounts of roosters were plowed and planted. Join Pheasants Forever and other organizations that push for these programs if you want to see this type of hunting continue for future generations and frankly for those of us hunting now.  Ok enough soap box talk on to the pictures!