Bird Hunting Pictures

I’m jealous of you guys that have your seasons in full swing, here in South Alabama only a great dove season (5 hunts and 5 limits) and a poor teal season (no water). Waiting for the middle of November and a sandhill crane hunt in New Mexico. Never hunted NM and am really looking forward to it. Best of luck to all.
 
I know it. The moment I walked in the house, Savannah would take my hat from work and follow me all over the house. I want another one, but my wife is not ready. Savannah left such a huge impression in our hearts, and even though all dogs are different and have different personalities. My wife feels she would be comparing the new dog to Savannah, and she think it wouldn't be fair for the new dog. One day she'll be ready.
We only have so many "one days" allotted to us. She may be wasting hers. Every dog is different so there's never any concern about comparisons. She will get wrapped up in raising a new pup and adapting to its individual personality.

My late wife's father was a selfish guy who would never let his kids have a pet. He didn't want the competition for affection. Weird guy didn't know the first thing about love. Cathy always said she didn't marry me, she married my dog and my dad. Ethyl died within two years and shortly before we bought our first home a great deal popped up for a four month-old Lab pup. Sophie lasted to age 14 in spite of a couple epileptic seizures every year. Our two kids and Cathy were devastated when she died. Of course, I had some experience. Sophie was my third dog. After a week of the house in grieving, I called my wife at work and told her we were getting another dog. She threw out the same excuses. I think she was afraid Sophie would be forgotten. "The one thing that mattered most to that dog was seeing her family happy. Getting another dog would be fulfilling her dying wish I think." And so Black Pearl entered our lives. She lasted longer than my wife and son. By then I had a second black Lab, Opal. After those back to back tragedies I picked up a third dog, a French Brittany pup, "to keep me busy." Coral (aka Puppy) is now twelve. Pearl's successor Ellie is eight. Opal has been gone three years. Will I get another dog when these two are gone. Hard to say at this point. Perhaps not but only because the "one days" ahead of me are much more limited than your wife's. I hope she reads this. It's not moving on ... it's just moving. Living life.
 
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I live in SW Alaska. Birds are primarily waterfowl, spruce grouse, and ptarmigan. I don't own any bird dogs, and never have, and I don't bird hunt near as much as a lot of you.

One of my favorite firearms is my Savage 24V-A. It's got a .30-30 over top of a 20 gauge. I have had great success with it on birds. I have a dream of someday doing a hunt to a local peninsula and harvesting a caribou and duck and/or geese on the same trip with it. Ah, someday...

I also have a Colt Frontier .22 revolver. The sights do not adjust at all, and I'm not really sure it was meant as a hunter's handgun, but I practice with it at the range and I've shot a lot of gamebirds and snowshoe hares with it. I keep it in a chest holster when I'm on my snowmachine.

The middle photo... 3 cacklers, one shot. And yes they were in the air. ;)

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Tundra Tiger great birds, a true cackler is a goose I would love to have in my collection. I just gotta get back to the Pacific Northwest to get one.
 
Here's a beauty. Long gone from most of NY State are ringneck pheasants. But a few years ago, a hen came out of nowhere and took up residence in our yard to have her young. Her mate was this guy pictured, and I nicknamed him Trail Boss because he watched over her like white on rice. And just as strange that I would have them take up residence when we had not seen any pheasant in years, other cocks showed up and he would fight them off. He became so tame that he would walk up to us, peck at the door for corn, and stand under the water sprinkler for a shower. And best of all, he would stand on a mulch pile 2 or 3 times a day and beat his wings and crow like a real piece of work.
I took a mounted pheasant out and it was akin to waving a red flag at a Spanish bullfight.
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This property in west texas near the rio grande has self sustaining Chukkar populations along with native scaled “blue” quail. Land Owner also has been supplementing pheasants and they seem to be hanging around over the years.
Great mixed bag hunt of Native and non native birds
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Tundra Tiger great birds, a true cackler is a goose I would love to have in my collection. I just gotta get back to the Pacific Northwest to get one.
Tons of them in my flyaway. I shot a couple last week. They are fun to watch dropping to the decoys. Often they will do a complete barrel roll in midair. Looks like they are playing tag with each other.
 
Tons of them in my flyaway. I shot a couple last week. They are fun to watch dropping to the decoys. Often they will do a complete barrel roll in midair. Looks like they are playing tag with each other.
That’s fun to watch, I’ve seen the lesser Canada’s, snow geese and even sandhill cranes do that waffling in. When I was in north California back in the late 90’s while duck hunting we were covered up with cacklers and Aleutian Canada’s but at that time Humbolt county was closed to goose hunting because at the time the Aleutians were protected. Now they have a nuisance season for them but my buddy has left the area. The cacklers, Aleutian, dusky and western canadas are the only birds in the only ones in the Canada/cackler complex I don’t have.
 
That’s fun to watch, I’ve seen the lesser Canada’s, snow geese and even sandhill cranes do that waffling in. When I was in north California back in the late 90’s while duck hunting we were covered up with cacklers and Aleutian Canada’s but at that time Humbolt county was closed to goose hunting because at the time the Aleutians were protected. Now they have a nuisance season for them but my buddy has left the area. The cacklers, Aleutian, dusky and western canadas are the only birds in the only ones in the Canada/cackler complex I don’t have.
Cacklers are lessers. The name lesser Canada was dropped a long time ago. And then there are little Richardson's geese, also honker mimics but about the size of a mallard. Both cackling geese and Richardsons are not even in the same family tree as Canada geese (honkers). They are Brandt geese if I remember correctly. So how did some birds in the same family as snow geese wind up looking like big honkers? Not inbreeding. This is evolutionary mimicry in action. These geese evolved to resemble honkers as a defense mechanism. Honkers are simply too big for birds of prey to bring down (somewhere there's a YouTube video of a young falcon foolish enough to try taking a honker ... it had a wild ride for quite a while). So these little geese evolved to look like birds two or three times their actual size. In midair a hawk has no perspective to judge size, especially if cacklers are flying with their own kind or with snow geese of same size (which is very common). So it leaves them alone.
 
I’m proud someone else knows their Canada geese, when they separated the cacklers from the Canadas years ago the geese we hunted in the Texas panhandle were lumped in as lesser. They are actually B c parvipes and B c Hutchinson, the 2 small geese I don’t have are the B c minima and B c leucopareia cackling goose and the Aleutian goose. The big goose I haven’t shot is the western Canada B c moffitti. I assume the dusky is still protected. They changed some of the scientific names when they separated the Canadas from the cackling geese but I didn’t bother to learn them because I no longer needed to know.
 
I’m proud someone else knows their Canada geese, when they separated the cacklers from the Canadas years ago the geese we hunted in the Texas panhandle were lumped in as lesser. They are actually B c parvipes and B c Hutchinson, the 2 small geese I don’t have are the B c minima and B c leucopareia cackling goose and the Aleutian goose. The big goose I haven’t shot is the western Canada B c moffitti. I assume the dusky is still protected. They changed some of the scientific names when they separated the Canadas from the cackling geese but I didn’t bother to learn them because I no longer needed to know.
Have you shot a giant Canada? When I first started hunting it was thought they were extinct. Then a small nonmigratory flock was discovered on a bird refuge in the Midwest (Iowa I think?). From those birds a migratory population was developed. I don't know for certain but I suspect it was done by stealing their eggs and planting them in the nest of other still migratory subspecies Canada geese. I send in my wing surveys every year and the last two years they confirmed one giant Canada each year. I am sure I've shot two more this year. The three primary wing feather tips barely fit in the envelope!
 
Have you shot a giant Canada? When I first started hunting it was thought they were extinct. Then a small nonmigratory flock was discovered on a bird refuge in the Midwest (Iowa I think?). From those birds a migratory population was developed. I don't know for certain but I suspect it was done by stealing their eggs and planting them in the nest of other still migratory subspecies Canada geese. I send in my wing surveys every year and the last two years they confirmed one giant Canada each year. I am sure I've shot two more this year. The three primary wing feather tips barely fit in the envelope!
About 90% of the resident geese in the south are giant Canadas, they weigh on avg about 12 pounds and one exceptionally big gander I shot on Eufaula NWR weighed in at 17 pounds and was 11 years old according to the band return. They are so thick they are a nuisance with our season basically sept- October and then December and January.
 
About 90% of the resident geese in the south are giant Canadas, they weigh on avg about 12 pounds and one exceptionally big gander I shot on Eufaula NWR weighed in at 17 pounds and was 11 years old according to the band return. They are so thick they are a nuisance with our season basically sept- October and then December and January.
Typically you see a conservation season early (September time frame) with bag limits of 15 geese per day to reduce the number of resident geese. Later in the season (December to January) the limits are reduced to limit the number of migratory geese taken. Sometimes these limits are as few as one.
 
Our dark goose limit is 5 in all seasons, both Alabama has a pretty influx of migratory birds, the James Bay population of the Interior race. We rarely see any migratory Canadas on the coast. In 25 years of living and hunting here I’ve seen maybe 6 to 12 birds that were probably migratory, they were probably only 2/3 the size of the residents and twice as spooky.
 
That was supposed to say north Alabama, fat fingers
 
Our dark goose limit is 5 in all seasons, both Alabama has a pretty influx of migratory birds, the James Bay population of the Interior race. We rarely see any migratory Canadas on the coast. In 25 years of living and hunting here I’ve seen maybe 6 to 12 birds that were probably migratory, they were probably only 2/3 the size of the residents and twice as spooky.
About 6 hours west of you on the Arkansas/Mississippi border are all kinds of outfitters that are in the Mississippi fly-away zone for some prime goose & duck.
 
I had a waterfowl lease in western Mississippi, it was some good times. We were about an hour or so from the Mississippi River and Arkansas. We had it for about 6 or 8 years and I had a blast. Specks, mallards, gadwall, widgeon and pintail were all I shot almost turned me into a duck goose snob. I did shoot a few snow geese and Ross geese and blue winged teal.
 
I hunted feather long before I hunted fur. It is still a passion.

Argentina - ducks and perdiz
Duck Hunting Argentina

Perdiz Hunting Argentina

Canada - ducks and geese
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Georgia - "Burds"
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Austrian Capercaillie
Capercaillie Grouse Hunting Austria


And a host of blinds in Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, and Maryland for ducks and geese; driven hunts in Germany and Austria, and more "burds" in Oklahoma and coastal Texas.
 
I posted this the other other day in another thread but thought I would post it here as well. Good times with the kids
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Grz63 wrote on Werty's profile.
(cont'd)
Rockies museum,
CM Russel museum and lewis and Clark interpretative center
Horseback riding in Summer star ranch
Charlo bison range and Garnet ghost town
Flathead lake, road to the sun and hiking in Glacier NP
and back to SLC (via Ogden and Logan)
Grz63 wrote on Werty's profile.
Good Morning,
I plan to visit MT next Sept.
May I ask you to give me your comments; do I forget something ? are my choices worthy ? Thank you in advance
Philippe (France)

Start in Billings, Then visit little big horn battlefield,
MT grizzly encounter,
a hot springs (do you have good spots ?)
Looking to buy a 375 H&H or .416 Rem Mag if anyone has anything they want to let go of
 
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