Another Fall, come and gone

Wow, well, here it is, the end of January. I got back from our trip to Arkansas 2 weeks ago already. So, the season has officially ended. Now it's on to some Upland tests for the dog, some decoy carving, getting ready for Spring Snows, and trying to catch up on everything else. Or club's test is this weekend, so hopefully we're ready. I'm going to the game farm on Fri to make sure. At least the weather should be nice this weekend. We've had some where it was -30 actual temps! No thanks!

Overall, it was a good season. Bird numbers were down everywhere it seemed, but we still got our share. I think I averaged about 4.5 birds/day in MN. I was able to get my work schedule arranged so I could work four 10s and have Fridays off. I didn't really take any vacation time during the MN season though so I think I hunted 28 days. The mallards never really stacked up good for us, though we had plenty of good shoots. But it was mostly just 2 or 3 of us out there, as opposed to some of the 4-6 man hunts we often have. A buddy and I started learning the craft of chasing the wiley Goldeneye. We had a few GE decoys, but I'm making a dozen more and we have some secret weapons planned for next year. We did alright as it was, we only had a couple days and our best day was 6, but we lost 4 more if I remember right. That, and again, they really didn't build up like they normally do where we planned to hunt them. That's all for now, I need to get ready for the test and paint some Goldeneye decoys.