My ideal duck season dates, what's your?

[Lreynolds]

Originally Posted by Quackhead62

What if we'd go back to east and west zones and keep the sixty day season starting on the second weekend in November.

That's what we had from 1975 to 2012, which include the "good ole days" for most here. So why did we change in 2012?

1) Because hunters in NW LA wanted to set seasons separate from those along the coast, 2) it would allow more flexibility in targeting hunting regulations to particular habitat types, and 3) it would provide additional hunting opportunity, especially if the season length was reduced.

Unfortunately, we found out that although hunters in NW LA did indeed want DIFFERENT season dates from coastal hunters, some of them wanted LATER dates and some of them wanted EARLIER dates. The devil is always in the details, and maybe we should just go back to the pre-2012 structure.

So why are we changing again in 2016?

Because the rice industry wants additional time to get their second-crop out and the fields prepared for hunting before the season opens; and many rice-field hunters want later seasons. So we moved the zone boundaries so that much of the rice-growing portions of Jefferson Davis, Acadia, Evangeline, and Vermilion Parishes are now in the East Zone. I'm not convinced this was a good move. That rice acreage is clearly of coastal origin, it is part of the Coastal Prairies and Marshes ecotype, and the birds of SW LA use both marsh and rice-fields as components of the same wetland complex. Yes, the further north you go, the less that interaction with the marsh occurs, but those rice fields are definitely more closely tied to coastal habitat than the Mississippi Alluvial Valley.

But we will see .........