Stan, it is a mixed bag of local and migrants. Well I guess they are migrants but we are not allowed to profile them anymore. Last year I had two great fields with 300 plus using both two weeks before the season. We had a slight cool snap, 50 at night and 70 for highs, two thirds of the birds were gone in two days. About a week later I started to see birds building up again. Not to the pre cool spell levels but enough to make for good shooting.
Teal, Wood Docks and Doves do tend to be very temperature sensitive in the early Fall around here. I've seen weeks or months of work vanish in a couple of days. Sometimes we get northern birds down to replace them, sometimes not. When I lived back on the East coast we had a lot of late season migrant birds which came down right around years end. Some days there would be hundreds of Dove working back and forth across my farm. We had tons of birds but struggled to get enough shooter to keep them moving in a field. My solution was to find a way to pass shoot them and would gladly shoot them all day long. Life was very good on those days.
