Promises made in January’s column mean promises fulfilled this month.
From here, in 2025’s early days, things don’t look all that promising.
Let’s start with our state’s coastal restoration plans.
Gov. Landry blew up plans for the Mid-Barataria Diversion plan in the last months of 2024, and left billions of dollars hanging in limbo for Louisiana’s major coastal restoration program.
Seems Landry doesn’t want to hear about how much the state will be on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars in already signed Mid-Barataria contracts.
And when Landry told a Legislative hearing that he wanted to protect “his” people from this plan, one could only track his words to mean folks of his Acadian heritage.
That’s when some were left to wonder has Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser, a long-time Mid-Barataria opponent, somehow found French ancestry in his surname?
What about the oyster folks, those with Eastern European ancestry, those handful of men who have fought this land-building project from the start? Acadian, too, but that’s just a guess.
Restoring our coast
Grand Isle elected officials are fighting it, too, and you have to wonder why. Do they believe adding freshwater into the Barataria system will upset the balance of what they have on Louisiana’s only inhabited barrier island?
Don’t they know that the interplay of saltwater and freshwater is what make all manners of fishing what it is today?
Don’t they know that increasing saltwater levels far into the Barataria system will kill more vegetation, including trees, and further destabilizing the marshes?
Haven’t these men seen the degradation of our marshes, the islands and all that open water — and the lack of the edges the marshes and island provide for juveniles or most all species — is bad?
Don’t these men know without the Mississippi River and hundreds of years of its sediment-laden floodwaters that have built the very ground they stand on today?
Apparently not.
It’s something we only can call “intransigent ignorance” — an inability to understand this long-awaited process — that’s led us to the predicament of having to fight tooth and nail to see the Mid-Barataria plan built and begin to restore at least something our coast has been losing for near 100 years.
Yes, there are more ways to rebuild our marshes, but there doesn’t appear to be plans to offset the constant degradation of our coastal area, at least none offered by the Landry Administration to date.
This is a subject few sportsmen in our state have embraced, and it’s going to be tough to explain a couple of decades from now why places like Lafitte are going to be under constant threat of flooding when there are no trees, no marshes and increased subsidence.
Blue-winged teal
For this year, there are some things sportsmen can anticipate.
Let’s talk about duck hunting.
A drop in the May 2024 Breeding Survey — a U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service project — showed blue-winged teal numbers dropped to 4.599 million birds.
In the Adaptive Harvest Management plan, when blue-winged teal fall below 4.7 million in the survey, it calls for a 9-day season, not the 16-day special September season duck hunters have enjoyed for years.
Just so you know, blue-winged numbers have dropped in the last three survey years, from 6.485 million in 2022 to 5.25 million in 2023.
The last time something like this happened — the sudden decline in teal numbers — it was because waterfowl biologists didn’t find the places where teal chose to nest that season. If memory serves, teal decided to stop in the Dakotas and eastern Montana instead of pushing through to the Canadian provinces that year, and the survey biologists found the teal the next nesting year. They count the Dakotas and eastern Montana now, so the future of this special season rests in upcountry rains and the breeding ponds teal find this spring and next year.
The West Zone
The controversy over the West Zone duck season began last year when petitioners got the date pushed back to the last allowable duck-season date for Louisiana — Jan. 31.
That move, an amendment to the original offering in the proposal, stirred enough opponents to change the proposed season dates for 2025-2026’s West Zone.
In most years, the season dates are calendar adjustments from the previous (and ongoing) seasons.
Wildlife and Fisheries Commission member Kevin Segrera made sure to push last season’s opponents viewpoint and change the West Zone to a second split ending the season next Jan. 18.
Just know, all proposed 2025-2026 season dates are just that — proposed — and hunters have until 4 p.m. on March 6 to offer public comment. Wildlife and Fisheries plans a Zoom meeting in February to explain seasons and bag limits and to gather further public comment.
And, if you think the duck season talk will end this year, well, wait until next year. The 2025-2026 season is the last in a five-year waterfowl plan for Louisiana. Another season framework will be debated for the following season, and duck hunters should be prepared for an offering for three-zone waterfowl hunting.
