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Old 06-08-2018, 02:25 PM
Smalls Smalls is offline
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Join Date: Dec 2011
Location: South Central LA
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Natural Light Kid View Post
Agree. No offense, but they have to get a more well spoken messenger. let?s be clear, I?m not saying I could do better. I wasn?t an English major either. I think they MAY be on to something and I?ll probably support it, but can?t really see it going any further than getting a bunch of Louisiana duck hunters fired up. Think they need to show the potential of widespread disease by short stopping the birds and the potential long term effects to the bird population from short stopping them. Meanwhile it just sounds like a bunch of hunters whining about how they don?t shoot birds like they used to.
That's about what it amounts to. I've spoken with Josh about all of this, and he's definitely passionate about it, but I think it's a misguided attempt. This is simply going to come off as Louisiana duck hunters whining about a perceived decrease in bird numbers. All the USFWS and the northern states are going to look at is the yearly surveys, and see years with over 3 million birds in Louisiana, and they are going to laugh this off.

When you are trying to argue that flooding a corn crop is the same as baiting, when half of these guys probably hunt flooded rice fields, you aren't going to accomplish much. Yeah, it's a standing grain crop, but it's just as legal as hunting a harvested rice field. Flooding a rice field after harvest is no more a "normal agricultural practice" than flooding a corn field is, but that is what they are arguing.

The fact is simply this: no one is going to care about what some group of Louisiana duck hunters has to say. We no longer have the most hunters in the Mississippi Flyway. We no longer kill the most ducks in the Mississippi Flyway. And we are positioned in the worst part of the flyway to try to change anything.

I looked into this group thinking it was going to do something good for Louisiana waterfowl. Instead, they are a fool's errand to change federal regulations, and bashing the state waterfowl biologist along the way. That's not a recipe for success.

Quote:
Think they need to show the potential of widespread disease by short stopping the birds and the potential long term effects to the bird population from short stopping them.
As for this, I don't think it plays near as much of a role as breeding habitat does. That is the #1 factor by a wide margin.
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