# Now that it's over.....



## swedeole (May 21, 2007)

How would you rate the 2009 spring season?

Juvies? Rossies? Speed of migration? Conditions? Competition? Weather?

We hit it pretty good this spring. We had some great days with solid all-day wind.

Saw very few other hunters - only 3 other spreads sighted in 1,000+ miles in Nodak. Out of 8 days, we could only hear one other spread shooting off in the distance. Talked with a few crews when we passed through Oakes, but nothing the farther north we got except for one guy from Nebraska north of Devil's Lake.

I was amazed at how fast the migration passed through. On our first day of hunting, we hunted just north of the South Dakota border April 8th, and there were tornados everywhere. 11 days later we were 3 miles from the Manitoba border and we were hunting the tail-end, with few migrating flocks moving.

We shot a TON of Rossies this year, and roughly equal numbers of juvies and adults. Honestly, I was expecting more juvies. Even the later flocks were probably half and half.

I don't think the conditions lived up to the hype. Obviously the fields were sloppy, but we never buried the ATV in many miles in the fields. It was definitely wet, but it seems like it always is.

All in all I'd give the season an A- for a letter grade, or a 9 on a 1-10 scale. The only thing that could have made it better would have been if we could have gotten into the migrators more. There's just nothing like hammering away at those big migrating flocks when they're moving hard in the evening and they bomb right down from the heavens. We did have one flock of 1,000+ high migrators do it right and we hit them right at 20 yards, but the majority of our shooting was on staging birds.


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## Bustem36 (Feb 5, 2008)

Season in ND I give a "C"

True not a lot of hunters but quick main migration and the juvies caught the adults and for me it didn't work out to well.

SD on the other hand I give an "A"

We hit the tail end of the main migration and the start of the juvies. Didn't have huge shoots but solid shoots with only a couple days of slow shooting. Ground was better and birds actually moved from the water they were roosting on.


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## goosehunternd (Mar 10, 2006)

Its not over, we hunted today and will go tomorow. Impressed with the amount of juvies when ya find them


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## jwdinius1 (Dec 14, 2006)

> Its not over, we hunted today and will go tomorow. Impressed with the amount of juvies when ya find them


True that, found a pocket near bismarck but wasnt able to hunt them!


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## jwdinius1 (Dec 14, 2006)

over all hunted 3 days with 3 hunters two days and by myself the last day and went 61, 10 and 24 solo! birds decoyed well!


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## Old Hunter (Mar 8, 2002)

I would give the spring hunt in ND a C- It was way too short.The migration was slow to come out of SD and when it started it was pushed back into SD by snowstorms twice. The juvies were few and far between. Always next year.


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## justund223 (Aug 28, 2006)

I would say A for decoyable birds, D for how long they stayed, if i lived there it would have been an A for time, but its not feasable to drive 7 hours to find small juvy pockets


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## headshot (Oct 26, 2006)

A+++++ for this area of Sask. No other hunters in the area I hunted and we clobbered them a few times. Some days were crap but overall there were good numbers of birds and the weather helped a lot. Still thousands of birds in the area but the season ended on April 30. Come on Sept. :sniper:


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## blhunter3 (May 5, 2007)

I would give the season a B. Saw lots of birds and had many chance's to shoot at them, but being I was a rookie decoyer, my spread only had 23 birds fall in two hunts. So that was in itself a good confidence booster.


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## ImpalaSSpeed96 (Aug 25, 2008)

I wasn't looking terribly hard, but I didn't see one bird over Minot in any of time outside...


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