Scouting Report

With only days to go before the start of the 2012 season I have been on a mission to scout out new places to hunt.  The new H7HT watercraft has opened up new possibilities for slaying action.  Who knows what areas are now accessible to the 12 foot camo sneak boat?  Only one way to find out.

I went to the Idaho Dept.of Fish and Game website and started looking for information about the places never before available to us.  http://fishandgame.idaho.gov/public/docs/wma/coeur.pdf   The map called Wildlife Management Areas looked good so I clicked on it and my mind was blown away.  Is this whole area in green WMA area?  A phone call was next in line.  I reached a guy at the F&G office who had nothing to do but tell me everything I wanted to know about wing-shooting in the CdA WMA.  Turns out that the closure on Thompson Lake (the other side of the road from my normal spot on Anderson, the one where all the ducks hang out and taunt me) only affects that lake.  The other areas in red, the ones we thought were closure areas, are perfectly fine to hunt.  In fact, they are THE places to hunt.  All public lands managed for the enjoyment of water-fowling and other hunting/fishing applications in fact.  He went on to tell me that some of the areas are private property and some of the landowners in the non-red areas allow hunting too, just have to ask for permission to go.  Moreover, any lake is good to go as long as you hunt from the boat and not from the shore.  Some of the marsh lands are private and, due to seasonal flooding/drying, are OK to hunt from a boat too.  Holy Heston!

After another half hour of him going on about other idiosyncrasies I also learned that I could go to the property records and find out exactly, down to the foot, where the property lines were.  Before I hung up I asked one more question.  What about Round Lake?  Yep, WMA too.  Also Heyburn State Park is one of the only State Parks to allow hunting right there in the park.  Holy Heston!

So on to the scouting report.  Dry.  Bone dry.  Lower Killarney, Cave lake and Swan lake were all dry in the areas that hunting is allowed.  So at work I started talking to Ron the Marshal and he told me a little story about duck hunting years ago with an old man he knew.  He and the old man, let's call him Mitch, well he and Mitch used to take a boat into the lower end of Round lake and take limits of mallards.  Mitch made him promise to never reveal the spot to others.  Mitch is now dead.  Ron showed me the spot.

With only days to go I now have to get to that spot and build a blind and look for where the water levels will let us retrieve birds if Peat is not yet 'birdy' enough.  So little time....
Unless of course we were reading the 2011 Fish and Game rules...
Then hunting season starts Oct 13th, just like everyone else...
Only 3 1/2 weeks to go.