doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com It's almost Christmas, whats on your wish list?

A bunch of things all at once.
1. Bird flu coming out of the chicken houses around Philly in the winters of '81-'83 hit the wild birds hard.
2. Older farmers (the guys who took their GI Bill benefits to buy a farm) aging out and younger ones coming in. The younger ones needed to farm more acres more intensively to make their nut, so
(a) they needed bigger, faster equipment to do it, so out came the fencerows, and where they didn't yank the fencerows they cleaned out a lot of the understory and thinned them so as to not "waste" acreage, and
(b) in the alfalfa fields around where I grew up, they went to an earlier first cutting. June alfalfa was prime bug-hunting country for pheasant chicks and the edges prime nesting territory. Instead of mama pheasant and her chicks fluttering out of the way of the cutter, moving the first cutting up a week or two meant mama pheasant and her nest got chopped up. And
(c) Farmers went from the old-model corn harvesters, which left busted stalks and such in the fields all winter, then plowed them under in spring. The old equipment left a lot of cover/concealment in the stalks and good amount of corn behind. They switched to the kind that chopped the stalks and roots, mixed that into the dirt and left the fields basically bare earth all winter. No cover/concealment and no food.
3. Developers buying out the other farmers and busting up the landscape of 60-120 acre farms, fragmenting the habitat.
4. Edge habitat growing up, manifesting in deer and turkeys showing up where none had been before.
5. Resurgence of hawks.
6. Arrival of coyotes in the mid- to late 70s.

I wouldn't be surprised if there was some sort of pesticide tie-in, too.

There were a lot of birds in '81 when I went overseas. When I got back in '84, there were very few. By '85-'86 it wasn't even worth buying a license.

With Christmas next week I have been thinking a lot about when I was young and the toys and things I wanted.
So this year I am asking Santa for,
1 - a pair of Boss 20 bores with 29" barrels
2 - an all expense paid driven grouse hunt in Scotland
3 - a new president

I hope I can get at least one.

pretty much the same story in Wisconsin..... we still have a few wild birds, but now our governor is starting to sell off state owned tracts of marginal use land that still holds some birds...means less hunting opportunities...and even less wild bird prodution....our governor seems hell bent to ruin all aspects of state owned public access hunting grounds....while at the same time trying to deregulate the private deer/game farms that brought chronic wasting disease to our state instead of banning them....so much for Wisconsin being a sportsmans destination.....unless you want to shoot tame deer in a fenced yard.. ... go figure

but then wanting something bad to happen to our governor is not in keeping with the Christmas spirit...now is it