The way I look at it, Louisiana’s seasons go in the order of Mardi Gras season, crawfish season, fishing season and duck season, with a hurricane season that likes to linger somewhere between fishing and duck.
And last weekend marked the opening of teal season, a taste to hunters of what’s to come this November.
Even though the weather hasn’t cooled much and the mosquitoes are even thirstier as winter approaches, many sportsmen will take to the early morning marshes and rice fields to bag their first limits of the season.
However, Hurricane Isaac, though only a contribution to the problem, was a bitter reminder of what hunters old and new face besides mosquitoes: erosion.
Coastal erosion has been a long withstanding problem that a great deal of premier hunting clubs encounter. Looking out from Highway 82 over some of the most renowned hunting marshes, skeletons of once fruitful blinds now sit abandoned in open water.
As salt intrudes into the marsh grass, the grass recedes, opening up water and killing off habitat. When the habitat shrinks, so does hunting land, and hunters must recede deeper into a disappearing land where birds become pressured and eventually move out.
David Pfister, a longtime duck hunter of the marshes surrounding Delacroix, La., sheds light on another factor. Although Hurricane Isaac hit them hard, his particular piece of marsh did not see erosion, but it was the saltwater intrusion that presented his problem. The saltwater has destroyed all freshwater food and seaweed.
Pfister said this causes a problem in keeping the ducks in these marshes.
“Once they figure the lack of food, they’ll move — likely further south or west.”
This can be good news to hunters in southwest Louisiana for the time being, but a longterm struggle for the entirety of waterfowlers down here.
It is certainly no secret we suffer constant coastal erosion, but this is a dog that will never die — so we can’t beat it enough. It’s a “holy war,” as former Gov. Mike Foster called it.
Some hunters have deliberated that Ducks Unlimited’s encouragement of hunting in areas north of Louisiana has hurt our hunts. But DU has and will continue to be one of the largest backers for the restoration of Louisiana’s wetlands. The organization has conserved 358,443 acres in Louisiana and raised $1,766,175 in 2011 for the cause.
However, with the amount of licensed hunters constantly growing, our coastal erosion presents a simple supply and demand dilemma, with a not-so-simple solution.
A byproduct of this supply and demand dilemma is a problem that hunters call “pressure,” when wild game is being hunted too often or too hard. Nowadays, blinds will compete for the same flight of birds in the area, trying to call louder than the other guy and eventually losing the birds.
Thirty minutes before the sunrise each morning, shots ring out like a civil war. And each year it becomes more and more a sign that more and more hunters are filling the only available areas.
This fact of the growing waterfowling population leaves me torn. I advocate for hunting. A passion for it is great to develop the young mind and keep the old sane — it could do some good for anybody.
But now the hunt has become such an industry that it tends to become less and less a gentleman’s sport, where it used to be more about the adventure, nature and the company that comes along, rather than just bagging the limit. Within the younger generations, much of it has become a tool for a social reputation.
Sure, miraculous hip-shots or my buddy Three-Shot McGee missing that spoonbill are memories I won’t soon forget, but the best parts of the hunt come in the still moments. When the birds slow for a spell, and you get to watch that flight teasing the horizon line that can’t decide whether it’s night or day.
Maybe it’s true south Louisiana hasn’t yielded in the marsh as it has in the past, and maybe there’s more than just coastal erosion that hurts the hunt.
Whatever the source, there are no easy solutions, only prescriptions that require our awareness and effort.
Chris Ortte is a 21-year-old political science senior from Lafayette.
