beaver pond reports

[fishuhalik]

anyone find any honey holes this year? man i miss beaver ponds. they come in so dumb you could wear blaze orange & they'd still land on your hat!

[dan z]

checked out a couple the other day and they were empty

[TylerS]

No beaver ponds, but I did find one of the finest little honey holes that I've managed to stumble across in quite some time. It is adjacent to a bigger body of water, which gets most of the hunting pressure. Good for me, because the mallards absolutely dive-bomb the slough I'm in. Best that I can figure is it was dry last fall. Then over the winter, the cattails broke off at snow height. With the rain we got this spring, it filled back up, and the cattails around the edge grew but not in the middle. This left a "stubble" effect. You can hardly even tell it's water from the road, and the ducks in it are pretty concealed. I've been out there four times and have shot plenty of birds each outing without having to scout beforehand. The last time out was a spur-of-the-moment evening hunt on a bluebird day with no wind. Called in a flock of about 20 green heads and doubled right before sunset. One of the highlights of my fall so far!

I've been looking for a spot like this for years...I hope I can keep it to myself, and that it keeps producing

[123fish]

We don't have actual beaver ponds down here in the sw corner but places where the beaver dam up the five foot wide streams usually using corn stalks or red willows. These spots are wood duck magnets. They have been especially good this year but it's starting to look like we have lost a lot of the wood ducks we had. They always hold a few until late in the season though.