Jacob Sartain worked all summer long to create habitat to generate teal hunting opportunities, manicuring the abandoned catfish ponds on his Delta property to provide what the blue-winged birds would want.
So many hours, so much sweat and for what?
“On opening day, we hunted less than 30 minutes,” Sartain said. “On Sunday, we hunted about 30 minutes.”
Seems like a lot of time to produce just an hour of action so far in the 16-day teal season, which opened Saturday and ends on Sept. 30.
Ha! Oh what an hour it was.
“We shot five limits (of four each) on Saturday and five more on Sunday,” Sartain said. “It was as good as teal hunting as teal hunting gets. I don’t know if it could get any better.”
That kind of report was the norm from around Mississippi, both from Delta habitat and from riverbeds and upland reservoirs. Even at Ross Barnett, where Tony Jackson got two limits over the weekend, although it did take longer than Sartain’s groups.
“Now, we had the opportunity on Saturday to be done in 30 minutes but we were so surprised when the teal first flew in that we got caught — and I’m saying this figuratively — with our pants down,” said Jackson, of Madison. “In the first half hour, we got buzzed by three groups, repeatedly and it was the third pass before we fired a shot.
“Had we been ready, and could shoot worth a darn, we’d have had our limit of 12 in about 45 minutes. As it was, we were done on Saturday in about an hour and 15 minutes and on Sunday in the same place, we were done in 1 ½ hours. I have never seen that many blue-wings on Barnett before.”
Jackson wouldn’t give up his location, but said he and two friends were on the lower main lake “in a place that we found while we were out fishing one day about a week before. We were fishing for bass and we kept seeing groups of five, 10 or 12 teal buzzing over this spot. We investigated and found a shallow hole surrounded by grass. We had to pole our flat bottom over the vegetation to get to the pocket.”
Jeremy Thomas of Greenville said he and three partners got their limits Saturday on the still low Mississippi River.
“The toughest part was finding water with enough cover around it to hide,” he said. “We had to leave the boat in the river parked on a sand bar and walk across it to an old slough that had a few inches to a few feet of water. We found it while running catfish jugs on the river and scouting for teal the weekend before.
“We don’t hunt on Sundays so we’re going back on Wednesday and again on Saturday and I bet we get limits again. When we were packing out across the sand bar on opening day, there were still groups of teal checking it out.”
Further south, in the Port Gibson area, William Bailey of Clinton said hunting was a bit slower. Hunting at a club along Bayou Pierre and another on the Mississippi River, Bailey said only two or three limits were produced out of 12 hunters.
“They are good shooters,” he said laughing. “Naw, I just think they were in the best spot. The rest of us averaged two to three birds each or were shut out. We hunted a lot of spots, and some of them were loaded and some pretty bare. My spot was one of the latter.”
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