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All hunting, to borrow a wise politician's observation about his art, is local. Thus, while biologists and regulators must be attuned to large-scale and long-term trends in animal populations, most hunters gauge their seasons by the frequency with which game walks or flies past. Take the recently completed waterfowl season. Some might say: Take it, please. But waterfowl guide Kevin Corry isn't among the naysayers. The Dublin resident, who operates Wackum and Stackum Guide Service and plies his trade both at Lake Erie and in central Ohio cornfields, isn't complaining, though he noted some patterns during the past season that were out of the ordinary. For instance, during November on Sandusky Bay, Corry said, as a result of "extreme weather conditions -- 25 degrees for two or three days then 60 degrees for the next two or three days -- the migration seemed to stall out from time to time.'' Aerial surveys of the lake, meanwhile, indicated that duck numbers peaked a month later than normal, he said. Not surprisingly, December rains that fell on the fields Corry hunts east of Columbus provided him and his customers some of the best duck and goose hunting seen in a while. On the other hand, the January freeze sent waterfowl to available open water, where only hunters who had access did well. "One thing for sure,'' Corry said, "it required day-to-day scouting, preparation and a wide variety of decoy types (not species) to maintain consistent shooting.'' The "scouts'' from Ducks Unlimited, which keeps an eye on the big brood that encompasses all of North America, are using the word "spotty'' to describe what recently transpired on the four continental migratory bird flyways. "The 2003-04 waterfowl season could be summed up as one of extremes,'' said Chad Manlove, a Ducks Unlimited biologist.”Hunters either had one of their best or worst seasons, and there wasn't much middle ground among most of the hunters I spoke with.'' When "ducky'' conditions -- winds associated with cold fronts -- presented themselves, many regions of the country experienced outstanding hunting, Manlove said, confirming that Corry's observations in Ohio could be applied, at least this year, to a number of locales. Ohio, being a little off the wing-beaten path in terms of the two eastern waterfowl flyways, the Atlantic and the Mississippi, received a one-sentence mention in the lengthy Ducks Unlimited report. Here it is: "In Ohio, for example, dabbler migration was slightly above the long-term and five-year average but peaked one month later.'' |