KY Jon....I completely agree. Another reason for sky busting is just good old fashioned blood lust. Hunters that feel that anything flies, it dies. I went to a fairly popular “public” marsh here in northern Utah to check how the rest ponds looked....it was a Friday around 1 pm....the place was a zoo. It looked like an outdoor sporting event, cars, trucks, boats. You name it. I was checking out an area, glassing it when a small flock of swans flew over at about 150 yards up....the entire marsh lit up like they were shooting at bombers over Dresden in WW2. It was absolutely ridiculous. The worse part is one of the dingalings actually broke one of the swans wings and it started it’s decent down, it landed in grass about 6 ft tall & -about 300 yards out from where this group of hunters were hiding out. I had it marked pretty well and the guys looking for it weren’t anywhere even close to where it went down. It was a damn shame. I saw that same group shoot at about 4 or 5 more flocks of swans that were about the same altitude or even higher. Ugh.
In that same marsh on the drive out...there was a group of 5 or 6 guys sitting on buckets at the edge of the water shooting at anything that flew over. These guys were wearing blue jeans and camo shirts, not one of them had waders on...and not one of them could retrieve a duck if it got shot and went into the water behind them. It was disgusting. I called and talked to the game warden (a really good guy) and he seemed to be just overwhelmed. They just don’t have the manpower to be everywhere. I believe this season set a record for game violations in the this State. I can believe it.