just sayin....

I saw a couple today myself. Amazing, the robins are here, and everyone is seeing mallards too!!

It's supposed to be in the 50's to near 60 this week here in Iowa with south winds. I expect to see a large push of feathered fauna.

10* here in VA this morning. 65* forecast for Saturday.

I have been baiting the slough behind my house with corn I gleaned this past fall. The woodies started off with a couple of pair coming to the bait and now I get a couple hundred coming and going. A lot of them are roosting in the back of the slough and at night my wife and I listen to the woodies in the woods. You'all know the sounds they make. Pretty cool. I'm gonna get them coming in for another month or so and try to get some good close up snap shots of them. They are checking out the woodduck boxes really good too. They are very skittish. When I walk out on my back deck they stop feeding and watch me. I go back in the house and they go back to feeding. If I walk out back they flush crazy.
No big ducks or teal yet.
Randy

Mud we have been 20's in the day and single digits at night. My slough was half way freezing up at night and the woodies were landing in the open water and walking around on the ice. Yesterday it was really nice here. Got into the fifty's and today its gonna hit sixty. Its amazing how much I can get done when its warm outside. The critters are really moving now that its warming up.
Randy

Very cool netman. We put up a bunch of duck boxes a few weeks ago. I want to try the mallard tubes next year.
As for the wood ducks, I was at a sewage treatment plant a few weeks back. Bunch of mallards and some wood duck drakes sitting on one of the ponds. I lost a lot of respect for ole wood duck that day.

My buddy who lives near East St Louis said he could tell spring was here because all the bothers were taking their space heaters to the pawn shops.

One of the worst whoopings I ever got was when I was about 8yrs old and my Gramma told me to go and keep the Robins scared out of her Fig trees. She had two giant fig trees out behind the house over by an old smokehouse.

Now in my infinite 8yr old wisdom, I figured that running around flappin my arms and making noise was just stupid and there had to be a better way. What way was that you ask? Shoot the sum bucks with my BB gun.

I got about 3/4 of a 5 gallon bucket full of Robins before my Grandad figured out what I was doing.


Didn't sit down to good for a spell.

When I was in my early twenties, me and a couple of buddies had a cabin on some prime hunting land. We decided one night after a half gallon and watching Jeremiah Johnson to only eat what we killed and burn our own firewood. We split enough oak to stoke a warship across the Pacific.
We had deer and ducks and squirrels and fish in the freezer.
By January our provisions were wearing thin and we noticed that our lady friends came by less frequently as the house was always cold as a well diggers ass. Fireplaces will NOT keep a house warm.
The last straw was me and steve shooting birds over birdseed in the snow. We'd cap a few and set em up like stuffers. We got some squirrels as a bonus. Benjamin Silver Streak out the sliding glass door. Blood in the snow.
The roomated broke and ordered a tank of heating oil that night. We hit the grocery store and the ladies showed up again.
Then we all got married, had kids, mortgages...................

Oh well. mixed songbirds breasted in a pie crust with gravy is some good eats.