Area’s duck season coming to close

Published 6:03 am Sunday, January 29, 2017

The state’s duck hunting season comes to a close today with the east zone bowing out. Both the West and Coastal zones, of which Southwest Louisiana is the biggest part, stopped shooting last Sunday.

Left is the goose hunt which will go on in all zones until Tuesday for Canada geese and until Feb. 12 for specklebellies, snows, blues and Ross’.

Also, there is the conservation season (no limit and mechanical decoys can be used) for snow geese that begins Feb. 13 and runs through March 12 in all zones. By then, however, a large part of the goose population could be gone.

With hunters in the Coastal and West zones having to concentrate on geese the past week, two of the best in the business — Greg Byrley and Capt. Sammie Faulk — had some observations about local goose hunting.

Byrley hunts the rice fields while Faulk spends his time in the marsh and the two of them agree that goose hunting has been just about like duck hunting: the bigger flocks have been out in the fields — rice and rye grass.

“It just seems that every year the birds (geese) are getting here later and leaving earlier,” Byrley said. “There just have not been as many as we normally have. Overall it has been a good season, but there is not the number of birds down that we had 12 to 14 years ago.

“We’ve had 9-10 days of south wind with temperatures in the 70s. I love the game, but it’s just not like it used to be. To me it really depends on the weather.”

Byrley said one recent hunt with a party did have the group netting six specklebellies.

In the marsh, Faulk characterized the year as being “fair thus far. One thing about it was that we did not have high water, but we had a lot of it and the geese have been able to scatter.

“In the marsh that I hunt we will see and hear them, but don’t get many shots at them. Lot of our hunters also chase the specklebellies and there haven’t been that many in our area.”

He added that it had been a pretty good season for hunters who hunt a little north of the marsh, on the edges of hay or rice fields.

Faulk too noted the decline in both ducks and geese from previous years.

Neither hunter, though, said he can wait to get back to the hunt next year when it is hoped that the bodies of both duck and geese making the trip down might have grown a little larger.