Outdoors with Robert Sloan

Thank goodness this duck season is over. It was absolutely the worst that I can remember after over five decades of chasing these wonderful waterfowl. I don’t know what happened, it’s anybody’s guess. Its’s not that we have an acute shortage of ducks. It’s more along the lines of not having enough cold weather, as in snow and ice up north, to move ducks down the Central Flyway. Whatever held them up did a good job of handing us some super-duper slow hunts. Put it this way, during this duck season I killed more pigs than ducks, six swine and five birds. That’s incredible.

 Kenny Vaughan, who lives in China just west of Beaumont, says this was his worst season ever for doves, ducks and geese.

 “In my humble opinion, from 50 years of observation, sportsmen don’t hurt game or fish populations,” said Vaughan. “Farming in China is minimal compared to what it once was. Birds come back to the same places once established as dependable feeding grounds. For us we need more farming for years to capture what we once had. Birds are programed for other areas now.”

 A typical hunt for this past season totaled two to three birds. And there were many, many mornings when hunters saw no birds and got zero shots. Hunting south of Winnie, usually among the best areas for taking both geese and ducks, was pitiful. Ditto that for a lot of hunts on the J.D. Murphree WMA. On the middle Texas coast the redheads didn’t even show up. That’s a first to happen in all my years of hunting. Even though the limit on redheads is two, that was going to be a big deal this season.

 “We normally have thousands of redheads from Port O’Connor and on down to the Laguna Madre,” said Jim Atkins, a long-time hunter out of POC. “They didn’t show up this season, and that made for some pretty slow hunts.”

 Hunts out of Wharton were slow for both geese and ducks. About the only thing that saved hunts in this region of Texas were blue-winged teal migrating back up north from South America.

 This past weekend I hunted on a 50-acre pond near Wharton and four of us had five teal and a pintail. All of the teal were blue wings. But we did see hundreds of pintails flying sky high. A group of hunters not far from us had six pintails, a limit for the six hunters, and one teal.

This is the first goose season when I didn’t hear or see any geese, after hunting from Southeast Texas to Rockport and on up to the Central Texas rivers.

So much for the waterfowl season. At least we can still hunt and shoot pigs 24-7, 365 days a year.

 Some good news is that the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department is focusing restoration of Eastern Wild Turkeys in East Texas, once again. Some of the priority areas are along the Neches River and White Rock Creek watersheds within Anderson, Angelina, Cherokee, Houston, Jasper, Polk, Trinity and Tyler Counties. That’s very good news. I love to hunt turkeys and managed to take a huge eastern wild turkey many years ago, in the 80’s, when TPWD released enough of these birds to have a spring season.

 The eastern wild turkey was once numerous in East Texas. However, due to rapid changes in habitat and unregulated harvest the eastern wild turkey was hunted till there were none left. That was from around the turn of the 20th century. Early attempts at restoration utilized pen reared turkeys and later the Rio Grande subspecies. Both methods failed to create a sustainable turkey population.

 TPWD began releasing wild trapped eastern turkeys from neighboring states in 1979. By 2003, over 7,000 wild turkeys had been stocked into East Texas utilizing a block stocking approach. Block stocking called for the release of 15 to 20 birds per site with 5 to 10 release sites per county. These restorations were successful in several areas, but many more failed to create sustainable populations.

 Want to manage for wild turkey habitat in East Texas, on your own land? Restoration sites must consist of a minimum of 10,000 acres of usable habitat. Proposed restoration sites may consist of multiple landowners. Restoration sites consisting of multiple landowners must demonstrate a level of cooperation among landowner members.

 Request for restoration must be submitted by the landowner or their agent and must have management authority of the property.

 Individuals must make a request for restoration in writing to TPWD’s Upland Game Bird Program. Request should be emailed to Jason Hardin or mailed to P.O. Box 279, Buffalo, Texas, 75831.