Waterfowl Management

This week’s show is about family, old friends, and meeting new ones. We recently traveled to Oklahoma for some duck hunting with IT Director, Blake Hagemeier’s Fowled Reality, to meet up with TMA viewer Josh Dickerson of First Light Gear.

Josh has been a loyal TMA viewer and has taken much of what he has learned from, Jody Pagan’s waterfowl management and put it to practice. He recently acquired a piece of property that borders two rivers. Josh has thinned out a few acres of trees and built a levy system to hold water for duck hunting. This year he planted millet in the pools in hopes of attracting waterfowl, but the deer got to the millet before the season. After a late Spring drawdown, moist soil plants should germinate in the mud flats created left behind by the water and begin to provide ample forage for migrating ducks.

To further the management program on his property, Josh has begun trapping predators and is working on controlling the hog population. What he is doing is a perfect example of small property management. You don’t have to own large tracts of land to benefit wildlife. Anything land enhancements you can make will benefit the wildlife that frequent your property. Improving your land is not an overnight process. It takes time, but you and your family can reap the benefits down the road.

Since Josh’s property is still a work in progress, we took to the public land river systems and utilized some private land that Josh had permission to hunt. As with waterfowl hunting anywhere, scouting is the key to success. With a little road time, we were able to locate a large number of ducks utilizing dry fields along the rivers. The ducks just so happened to using a bean field that had a ditch running through it. The ditch offered a perfect hide that is vital to late season duck hunting. In three days of hunting “The Ditch”, the guys from The Management Advantage, First Light Gear, and Fowled Reality were able to put 80+ ducks down.