Still no new birds in Oklahoma.

[Offshore 1]

I have first had observation of the Goose migration stopping. The three refuges near where I grew up went from having a million Geese in Jan in the early 70s to may be a few thousand by 2000. The lack of migration corresponds with supplemental feed andwide spread no till farming.

It's amazing at how many people have taken note of these issues. With this group, there is now a lot of push back from DU and DW... hunters from up north who are in the thick of this refute what is happening. Unfortunately I wasn't able to duck hunt this year but was able to go out for geese while deer hunting in Iowa in the middle of december. All ponds that I seen on most farmers fields were pretty much frozen... the place we hunted was right across from a refuge and the ducks/geese were so thick it was sickening. Knowing they should have been traveling south by that time... let alone the fields in Missouri that were flooded with standing corn on the drive there and back.... SMH

[Bsktball55]

Personally I think there are multiple reasons for this. Number 1, the weather hasn't cooperated this year. Up until the last week or two of the season, it was still fairly warm up north. There was no snow coverage and it wasn't cold enough to force the birds south. Then it got cold real fast. Seems like the same thing happened last year too. We kept waiting for a good cold front to push birds down and then it was 0 degrees overnight and everything froze up. I don't think the flooded corn fields are killing the migration, they have been doing that for decades, I do think that putting food on the refuges is hurting things. There are places they are now planting a lot of corn on the refuges where you are not allowed to hunt, there is no pressure so the birds never had to leave the refuge to go find food. Looking at the numbers of places like Otter Slough, they still had pretty good numbers of ducks most of the time, but they never flew to the surrounding flooded corn fields because they had all the food they needed right there on the refuge. Those farmers are busting ice to hunt or may have an ice eater, but that opens up an area large enough to hunt, not hold 10's of thousands of birds. But when you allow 50,000 birds to sit on a refuge all day, they can keep the water open much longer. You also have to realize that there used to be millions of acres of wetlands in this area that had more than enough natural food, yet the birds still migrated.
I have also heard that the migrate routes seem to be shifting further west then they used to be. Could be due to the north pole shifting very quickly right now.

[Bearetta]

Western Kansas and eastern Colorado shelter a lot of birds that no one knows about because there are very few hunters out there. Farmers/Ranchers usually don’t take the time off to do such things. Not many waterfowl hunters in the area and birds go where they please pretty much unmolested.
Patterns have changed due to food crops/weather/pressure/refuge buildup.
This year weather and food availability have to be the big factors as well as seasons close up north by end of november. Why go south?