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Duck Numbers


Arley
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7 minutes ago, Arley said:

 

Sorry Marshman forgot to thank you for your reply

No worries and I am sorry you have had a poor season , if I had to rely on Mallard for most of my fowling then I would say this had been a very poor season , I have had the odd pair of Mallard but due to some big commercial ponds near by and tons of grain going in I am afraid shooting several Mallard in a flight are now a thing of the past .

Widgeon tend to prefer the fresh splashes rather than the fed ponds and this year it started off dry and it wasn't till early December the first splashes appeared and for a couple of weeks the shooting was good  with eight being my best flight , then the heavy rains set in and most of the fields beside the estuary had more than enough water on them , duck still used the marshes but they didn't concentrate on any one marsh so you could still get one or two but the big flights have finished .

This is also the first year for a good many years that we didn't get any prolonged frosts where the splashes would freeze over and the duck would then use the tidal waters that were still open and the small amount of snow we had didn't last no more than a day .

So no two seasons are the same and with this season being so mild we haven't seen the big influx of fowl like we have other years when parts of the country have had a hard spell of weather , but by the sound of it , we haven't done to bad compared with some parts of the country.

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I had to say that we had a duck flight yesterday in kent, and we had many, many more ducks around than the same place last year. In fact we could easily have doubled the 100 bag; the last 1/3rd we were only shooting the challenging ones, waiting for geese...

And the surprise is there: ZERO geese around, we saw 3 fly over, and a 'wing' of them in the distance.. while last year we had dive bombing geese all over the place, while we had trouble filling the duck bag...

These wild birds, they really do as they want ;-)

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  • 2 weeks later...

Teal numbers have remained consistent throughout the season on the upper Forth.   We fed and shot a splash on one particular farm inland for the first time this year .  Every flight, once a fortnight we took Wigeon along with the normal Mallard and Teal. 

Our normal pond, which is really a splash that floods every year, about two miles away has produced only four Wigeon since 1989, always Mallard and Teal.  It shot very poorly this year, largely due to the effective drainage installed last year. 

 

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Shot at an inland pond towards the end of the season,high on the Pennines,saw a lot of duck mainly Mallard but good numbers of Teal too.

We shot 10 Mallard and 2 Teal for too many shots in a full on gale ,they were still coming in as we picked up afterwards.

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

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