What I have to add is I heard all the same things back when I was a kid as well. And they were true then and they are true now. Waterfowl Hunters poured millions and millions maybe billions into habitat work I don't know how you would get that actual figure but it's a TON of money. And the ducks came back in a big time way. By the early 1990's they would come into even places in North Alabama thick. I have a blind in West Tennessee but I hunted the TN River a lot I grew up within 45 minutes of it from front door to boat in the water. In the 1990's you could pull up out at Swine Creek at Beulah Bay where you could look out on the river... Take some binoculars and look out at the river channel and see the birds out there rolling along the channel like blackbirds in a grain field. We would shoot flocks of pintails over at the Mallard Fox Creek that had 100 in them. I am not lying.

I can remember hunting in the Stumps out in front of the West Dike road in a T-shirt and sun glasses. Like a September dove shoot but in December.

Tell me what you see out there today....

It isn't the weather, guys. You do realize they have zones up North and hunt ducks in some parts of those States for months and months. It isn't just open everywhere all the time. It's open over here for a while and then it closes and over there in the next county for a while and.... next thing you know you've been shooting ducks about like we shoot deer here in Alabama. For months on end.

It is all the habitat we have built up North a duck doesn't have to migrate anymore. Second it is the fact that ducks imprint on areas (that's real) and we have killed the chit out of them in the MS Flyway that actually fly South and don't stay on the edge of the ice..

For what it is worth I have never believed the Wheeler Refuge counts reflect the actual situation in that area. I think the refuge itself is capable of holding about the average number of ducks they report each year but what they fail to take into account is all the ducks on the river and surrounding areas. It has always seemed to me that the duck hunting in N. Alabama was always at it's best when the refuge was essentially "full". They gonna count about the same number every year because that's about what they can hold. And thank God we have that. Because all the other river systems in the State owned by AL Power don't have WMAs on them all they care about is selling a lake lot. And that puts more duck dynasty hunters in less area.