What a twisted morning.
We got on the road around 1 a.m., few of the guys on zero sleep. Got to our plan A spot and the birds stayed there overnight. We had a plan B spot with half as many birds...and decided to go after them instead of pushing the birds and hoping.
We set up about 500 windsocks or so next to a flooded lowspot in the field. Here's the middle of the spread:
The birds didn't come for around the first 45 minutes, and we started to get nervous. A few ducks and canadas flying, but no snows. Than the first flock was spotted...wow where they coming low. It turned out to be the pattern of the morning. Scattered small flocks came for about an hour and a half, and everyone of them approached about 10 yards off the deck. Many of them came so low they were almost dragging their bellies on the ground. The second they entered the north end of the pothole (top end of bottom pic), they'd either drop the landing gear and try to land in front of us or bank up and over us at 25 yards. Haven't seen birds do that since Sask. We ended up with 50 birds between 5 of us. About 12 or so were ross's, about 8 were matures and the rest juvies. Here's a pic showing 43 of the 50:
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A great morning to end the year. Wish I would've known and took advantage of these earlier. Here's a couple nice blues taken, both in the white phase (notice the "I'm running on 3 hours of sleep" look):
:beer:
