A closer look at the past year in the Louisiana outdoors
Happy New Year!
Here’s hoping that whatever is in our 2026 is better than what we encountered in 2025.
That’s not to say what we had last year was bad. It wasn’t. There was good.
Speckled trout and redfish catches appeared to have rebounded from less-than-stellar takes the previous three years. Flounder made a grand appearance in many catches, and, with Mother Nature’s help, it appears the closed season on that species has worked. (Note here, cold winters help flounder numbers, too.)
The recreational red snapper season ran from May 1 all the way into November with a four-per-day limit.
Freshwater anglers, especially bass fishermen, have reason to celebrate now that Wildlife and Fisheries has a much-needed statewide bass management plan in place. This new program will include rank-and-file folks holding a “stakeholders” say in this plan. That, mon amis, is a big step.
Duck hunters got their wish for the first segment of their 60-day West and East zones seasons — cold weather in the northern and Midwest states. It was easy to know first-segment successes because there were almost no complaints from our state’s wild waterfowlers. Complaining happens when hunting is poor, and it was hard to complain when the first segment’s numbers more than doubled the estimate of the previous season’s opening days.
Several Arctic chills also helped deer hunters across Louisiana: only CWD hangs over this and future deer seasons, and the hope is to contain this virulent disease in those East-Central parishes.
The menhaden controversy
Now we’ve come to 2026.
Among a handful of wishes is that our elected officials would adopt a hands-off policy when it comes to what we know as our Sportsman’s Paradise.
Politics and our outdoor pursuits seldom mesh.
The menhaden issue reared its ugly head again.
Anyone who is paying attention knows this battle is political and only spurred on by Governor Jeff Landry’s meddling in this controversy between the recreational fishing and conservationists communities and the two foreign-owned commercial menhaden companies.
Yes, there is a biological component here. State regulations allow the menhaden industry a five-percent bycatch rate, a reg that’s been in place for years.
The menhaden folks stand proud their bycatch rate was 3.6 percent in the latest study, and Wildlife and Fisheries stands firm in the biological belief that that 3.6 percent is OK.
Somehow, Wildlife and Fisheries managers ignore that 3.6 percent translates into more than 37 million pounds of bycatch in that study for that one year, and doesn’t account for those millions of pounds of non-menhaden take multiplying year after year after year.
What’s often ignored here, too, is that the menhaden folks are working in waters at the same time speckled trout and redfish are spawning.
At nearly the same time, Wildlife and Fisheries marine fish managers engaged in a five-year debate over lessening the daily creel for recreational speckled trout and a much-less longer debate over decreasing the daily redfish limit.
It was as if the recreational sector was to blame for the decreased speckled trout and redfish populations, but ignored was the cumulative annual effect menhaden nets have had on these species.
Coastal projects
This continued friction between recreational and commercial sectors follows the contentious issue of Landry’s canceling the Mid-Barataria and Breton Diversion projects, plans years in the making and plans designed to add sediment to sediment-poor waters along our disappearing coast from the sediment-rich Mississippi River.
Why? You have to figure Landry’s moves there were political, too.
What some among us cannot understand is how Landry and his minions don’t understand that where they live and the ground on which they walk came from thousands of years of Mississippi River deposits.
What’s ignored is the restorative effect of opening the Mississippi River to water starved by more than 100 years of levee construction and maintenance and jetties designed to push sediment away from a coastline so desperately needing the clay and loam held in this mighty river’s flow.
Our governor’s influence has had widespread effects on what we do when it comes to fishing.
Governing our state is one thing. Ruling our state is another and takes on ominous warnings about what might come.
What other reason or reasons could there be for demanding our Wildlife and Fisheries Commission call for a quarter-mile buffer zone for the take of menhaden after a half-mile buffer was hammered just one year ago?
What other reason than political could it be to halt marsh and barrier island restoration projects?
These actions more than reinforce a personal belief about political power — power can be used as a tool or it can we used as a weapon.
And, we know how that power was used during the last months.
Again, Happy New Year.
