More Outdoors Pictures, February 12, 2012

Catching up on my e-mails, I ran across a couple of very interesting pictures.  The first was from Randy Pfaff, a pastor and hunting guide from southern Colorado.  This was taken in late September 2011 and shows sandhill cranes heading south to their winter homes in northern New Mexico and the Texas panhandle.

The next one was from a fishing trip James Crumley, a neighbor, participated in with his 2 sons.  This picture shows a big redfish, or channel bass, that they caught, this one’s probably 40 inches long, not that unusual around the jetties on our Gulf coast, but what is unusual is that the fish had been “caught” before!  Notice the artificial plug, probably a variety of a Gulp plug, already in its mouth, the broken line attached to the plug, the scaring and the treble hook imbedded in the upper lip! Very, very unusual, but the fish was successfully released, of course, minus all hooks!

More mundane sightings around my ranch were the large number of mourning dove on the telephone line behind my house, I counted 32 one afternoon last week, but the camera lens wouldn’t cover them all, here’s 26 of the darting devils. 

Then, last Saturday afternoon, sitting in MaMaw’s blind a good number of dove came into the feeder.  The second “shot” shows 2 of them picking up the corn and I guess the protein pellets too.  Of course with all of this dove activity, the season ended in mid January!

The last picture is of a gadwall hen that was sitting, all by her lonesome, on my neighbor’s stock tank.  These ducks are short range, migrants, breeding mostly in our northern plains and wintering in Texas, Louisiana and Mexico, California also has a ‘huntible’ population of these birds.

Read more at Outdoor Odyssey