Shop Pit camera hunt yesterday...

Hey Guys,

I had a really fun hunt with Larry at the Shop Pit yesterday morning. We of course were hunting without guns, but it was a wonderful way to start the day regardless.

Even though the overcast pretty much wrecked our prospects photographically, I was hopeful nonetheless that maybe some rain would fall...

So I'm sure you're all thinking, "MOO, GET TO THE POINT!!! WERE THERE ANY BIRDS??!!!!"
Short answer -- YES!

I should mention that we weren't able to stay past 7:15 (I had to drive in to work by 9), but we saw quite a number of shootable ducks, specks and even snow geese despite doing barely any calling, having an absolutely tiny decoy spread and having wide-open unbrushed gates on the pit. The Shop Pit is a brand-new double-dog-box pit that's a real beauty to hunt out of.

This hole had been pumped 24 hours a day, for a solid week before I hunted it (thankfully with an electric pump). The day before we hunted it, the pump was finally given a rest. In that single day, the thirsty ground soaked up SO much water, the expanse of the pool had already receded by 15 to 20 yards in diameter. I'm attaching a few sad dusty dirt pics to the bird pics to try and communicate how dry it has been over there... Pic 14 attached to this post shows what is obviously normally very wet ground whose cattails are still clinging to life somehow. That ditch is adjacent to the West Rayburn Pit's field. The tractor shot, #15, was taken clear on the other side of Claypool's out of my truck window on Rayburn Road, about 3 minutes from Highway 1.

Meanwhile, the nearby timber preserve, Claypool's, was ABSOLUTELY FILTHY with birds of all kinds. There was a MIGHTY CLOUD of fowl in the sky over the timber. (Sadly, it looks kind of blurry in my pics due to the weak light and overcast.) This is to say, there are plenty of birds in the area who will no doubt happily pounce on any surrounding puddles as soon as those puddles appear!

I'm very interested to see how the Shop Pit will perform this year, since I've NEVER had snow geese land on me at Three Rivers before this hunt. In the closeup of the geese feeding, you can clearly make out the juvenile markings on two of the snows.

-moo out!