I had one of the rural mail carriers stop in a few weeks ago, during his survey period, he didn't see a brood of phez to mark down. The DNR is saying phez in this area are down 56%, and last year we were down 35% I think. But it is a pretty big region and there are area in this regions that didn't get as much snow last winter, and didn't get as much rain. But yeah would never tell anyone to stay home, but there are pockets of birds, especially ducks. I haven't found the pockets of phez yet though.
Andy point is valid and one of the factors I alluded too, there was good habitat from SD well into Canada. But we had a lot of ducks around here in June on certain sloughs nesting and trying to nest. On my property and onto our neighbors, we have a large wetland complex, it now totals about 75 acres, I glassed it 3-4 days a week because this was one of the sloughs that had good bird numbers. in the early part of june I had 4pr of bluebills, 4pr of redheads, 2 pr of pintails, 2 pr of widgeon, 1pr of woodducks, a few shoveler, no gadwalls and numerous mallards and least 10pr + of teal. At that time frame, saw mostly drake mallards(30+) so I assumed hens were on nests. Throughout the summer I saw in my estimate 5-6 different broods of mallards and 5-6 broods of teal and nothing else. Most of the teal broods were small, 2-4 babies, about half of the mallard broods that I saw were late, well into july. I watched one brood on a small satelitte pothole in late july go from 7 fuzzballs to 3 fuzzballs, then none. In mid August we had a big concentration of ducks feeding in a standing soybean field south of our place a mile. Most likely all the young we raised in a few mile radius. The field was sprayed I think for aphids, and they were gone and haven't found a concentaion like that since.
Another thing in all the reading I could find, most species should be on nests by the end of may, but I was still seeing ducks pair up in that mid june time frame. Even spend 10 min watching two drake pintails via for the affection of a hen, by chasing he all over the sky. It was really neat to watch, but again mid june? The divers may have had it the toughest in this area, where are sloughs came up and avg of 3ft. They like to nest on the waters edge in stands of old emergent growth and new growth. The old stuff was under water, and in mid june I started to see the new growth come up in early june, but it had shifted in many sloughs back towards the to the new shorline.
There are many other factors I think you need to figure in as well. But as I said before there are areas that have birds, this area doesn't right now outside small pockets. I even spent some time this last weekend north of the freeway and was not impressed.
