fowlmind wrote:I am not apposed to taking two days off the regular season for a early season. Like I said on a other post though. The season should allow the regular daily bag plus a daily of teal.
If we are going to give up regular season days we need to make it worth our while. The other states get extra days which also means extra birds. To ask for this is not out of line. They honestly should ask for double the daily on teal since they will be negotiating and will be shot down on several things.
MN has to step up to the plate with this one. The are slowly taking steps and starting to get away from being so restrictive compared to the other states. Getting rid of the 4 bird daily (when the rest of the flyway was 6), the 1/2 before sunrise start, the daily on wood ducks form 2 to 3. All these were things we were allowed by the feds and MN held us back. Then we finally got the split season as well.
These changes gave us additional opportunities and are probably favored by most. To let another opportunity slip away with out trying it doesn't make sense. If they wanted to they could make it work. Look at the dove season, it had more hurdles than this one and they still have a season going for them.
The states that get extra days are states that have teal only (two states have wood ducks as well), but Iowa with their "early duck" where everything is legal, they take those 5 days off the end of their regular season so they are not gaining any extra days but are gaining harvest numbers because the early season is always better than the late season.
The regular season days that MN would be giving up are a Monday and Tuesday of incredibly mediocre hunting (except for maybe one or two groups that have decent mallard feeds). So we would lose those two crappy days and be gaining an entire weekend of what would most likely be outstanding hunting across the entire state.
And I totally agree it is good to see the state moving forward on not being so ultra conservative on regulations, all that thought process has gotten us is a 50,000 hunter decline, and according to a response e-mail by a certain state wildlife manager, despite what they say at MWA, an unofficial count based off e-mails and calls is around 60/40 in favor of a teal season.
