Figuring out hunting properties

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627PCFan

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Oct 18, 2007
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Seacoast NH
After a few years off with little ones, I hit the road for the opening day of duck season and I'm glad I scouted before. Water levels on this WMA were very low, consolidating an already over hunting parcel. I scouted Thursday and found a hole holding water and 10 or so wood ducks, made sure not to blow them out. Upon a 5 am arrival I find I had 8 folks competing for a pond roughly 2 acres in size. Normally there are hundreds of acres of flooded timber, swamp and impoundments but with the draught, it was no good. Despite a lot of hunting competition in years past I have always done well in other parts when it was flooded.

On another WMA circa 2008, I found a gem, an abandoned 8-acre irrigation pond (going back 40 years so far as I was able to research). It too held woodies, mallards and the occasional canvasback and migratory geese just about every day. Somewhere around 2011 we had a hurricane blow through in October and burst the dam and drained the whole pond and dried everything up. Today it's just a lowland field with small trees coming in.

I work hard at figuring out how to hunt a place and when I do I enjoy the rewards but man do I hate having to change tactics and having to re-learn.
 
I am a big fan of maps. I'll pull up topos and satellite photos and print them out to study. Actually plotted a buck's route by marking gps coordinates on a topo and tracked him to a saddle on the map. The big 8 point is on the wall.
 
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