They recently built a Cabela's in Huntsville and I went there for the first time last week. I asked a salesman for help finding a plastic shell box and told him I wanted one that just held 25 shells as that was the limit on a local WMA. When I mentioned duck hunting he perked up and told me he was a die-hard duck hunter and had been hunting for a "long long time". The kid was maybe 25. He then informed me we were going to get an extra 20 days added to our duck season because "We didn't kill enough last season.", and he'd read about that online. At this point I came to the conclusion his waterfowl education must have been self taught or perhaps his instructors were his same-aged peers and briefly mentioned May pond counts, breeding surveys, and a lot of field collected data crunched by advanced statistical methods would determine our season and bags. Don't get me wrong, I'm not bashing the kid as he was polite, helpful, and enthusiastic about duck hunting. It was a throwback to the kind of naïve comments I'd heard from other upstart hunters 30 years ago, myself included. I hope the kid sticks with it and grows into an informed waterfowler. As I left the store and thought about the guy and his comments it made me think about all the conversations from here about things like federal frameworks and population management with informed people that I'm glad to have learned from and share with my son.
