Wasn’t that a breath of fresh, cool air Saturday morning? Emphasis is on the word cool after the first significant cold front passed through the Teche Area late last week.
Those cooling winds from the north were sure to heat up bloodlines of small game hunters, big game hunters and fisherman. It’s the proverbial switch that turns on in an outdoorsman’s veins every year in the first days of fall, which arrived Sept. 22.
The gusting winds in the post-cold front, however, weren’t what the doctor ordered for many outdoorsmen, particularly squirrel hunters who were hopeful of bagging some bushy-tailed critters on the opening day of squirrel hunting season Saturday.
One of the hunters who was planning to get into the woods was Brian Carline, a 53-year-old New Iberian. Carline was supposed to go with some other avid hunters and hunt squirrels in the Lake Fausse Pointe area.
Carline was hoping against hope that it wasn’t too windy for squirrel hunting. While wind is the friend of a duck hunter, as waterfowl hunting guide Elliott Sale said recently while talking about the prospects for the recently completed special teal season, it sure doesn’t favor squirrel hunters in the woods.
Carline, by the way, took his grandson Caiden Carline deer hunting last weekend and the 7-year-old boy killed his first-ever buck during the state’s youth deer hunting weekend. (See related story on this page.)
And gusty winds forecast Saturday more than likely frustrated speckled trout anglers who wanted to tap the speckled trout population in and around Vermilion Bay. The speckled trout started biting a few weeks ago and many of them are being caught now on small soft plastics in The Cove. I’ve gotten some encouraging reports and can’t way to go fish for speckled trout.
Action under the birds has been fair to good, too, an encouraging development compared to last year when fewer fish than usual were caught under the birds that “pick” over shrimp and baitfish.
The cool weather is welcome. It has arrived just in time for area outdoorsmen and the Gumbo Cookoff.
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Here are some interesting facts provided by Ducks Unlimited and emailed to me by Jason Foster, chairman of the New Iberia DU Chapter.
• Since 2001, the number of ducks harvested in Louisiana has increased steadily, reaching 2.8 million in 2011, 1 million more than neighboring Arkansas.
• Louisiana has the highest overall duck harvest in the United States and second-highest kill per hunter at 26.7 birds per hunter per season in 2012.
• Louisiana is expected to winter 9 million ducks and a half-million geese (20 percent of the nation’s waterfowl and about half the population in the Mississippi Flyway.
• DU works to keep rice agriculture on the landscape, which provides 42 percent of the available food for winter dabbling ducks on the Gulf Coast.
DON SHOOPMANis outdoors editor of The Daily Iberian.