SCOTT: Making today your good old days

Men and women with at least 50 years of outdoor experience have fond — if not necessarily accurate — memories of the good old days.

We hail from an era when boats were made of wood, and fishing rods were made either of steel or one of fiberglass’ forerunners. If we’re not entitled to view the past through occasionally rose-colored glasses, who is?

Sometimes what we call the good old days really were the good old days. For example, the 1950s and 1960s and, perhaps the early 1970s were a gilded age for quail hunters that I fear will never be repeated.

The Midwestern landscape was dominated by a patchwork of small, multi-crop farms. Avian predators, which were represented by viable populations of a number of species, were fair game for any youngster with a .22 rifle.

And the war years of the 1940s and early 1950s drastically reduced hunting pressure.

Fate put me in a perfect position to enjoy a full two-thirds of this avenue of opportunity. I was fortunate to hunt over some exceptional bird dogs, but the plain truth was a dogless hunter could easily kill a daily limit of bobwhites.

While I’d never turn down a chance to hunt quail with a couple of good friends, I prefer yesterday’s memories to today’s reality.

Defining the glory days of duck hunting is impossible without defining the term “duck hunting.” If your idea of a duck hunt is shooting birds that dare to venture beyond the boundaries of an artificially created refuge, today is duck hunting’s good old days because there are unquestionably more ducks now than there were 50 years ago.

If your idea of a duck hunt puts the emphasis on the hunt, the 1950s and 1960s were duck hunting’s halcyon days. There might have been fewer ducks, but they were widely dispersed among hundreds of lakes, ponds and streams where everyone had a fair chance to enjoy a good hunt.

For many hunters, the good old days are right now. For example, 50 years ago, the regulations governing deer and turkey hunting bore no resemblance to those in force today.

Only 20 years ago, not even the most optimistic deer or turkey biologist would have predicted how widely dispersed near-saturation populations of both species would be at the dawn of the 21st century.

Much the same could be said of geese. Light snow, blue and Ross goose populations are so far out of control that annual conservation orders permit no-limit hunting until mid-April.

Resident Giant Canada geese, once presumed to be extinct in the state, now pose problems in urban areas that only a vastly liberalized hunting season has any hope of containing.

Those of us who enjoy fishing warm water streams wax nostalgic for the good old days and rightly so. I grew up on the banks of the Solomon River in north central Kansas.

Even during the drought years of the 1950s, the river ran deep enough to float a wooden boat propelled by an outboard motor, and it yielded impressive numbers of both channel cats and flatheads. Then new impoundments on both of the river’s headwater forks destroyed its natural ebb and flow. Nowadays, it would be hard to float it in a canoe, but there’s really no reason a fisherman would want to bother doing so.

An overwhelming majority of modern anglers prefer reservoirs. To them, fishing’s good old days came during the 1980s and 1990s. These folks are only now beginning to realize that their good old days have slipped away.

Is there anything a fisherman or hunter of any age or level of experience can do to make 2010 his or her good old days?

Yes, there is. For example, I’ve switched from quail and pheasants to rabbits even though it meant giving up my beloved Brittany Spaniels and Labrador retrievers in favor of now equally-beloved beagles.

I quit hunting waterfowl and am using the time to do more squirrel, deer and turkey hunting.

As for fishing, I launch my boat on flat water when the crappie, bass or walleye action is hot. I spend the rest of my fishing time exploring Missouri’s many excellent catfish streams.