BHC Blog

Year to year, there are always things that pop up that need to be tended to in order to keep a lease running as smooth as possible. It may be rebuilding blinds or clearing brush. Those are the easy ones. Larger projects take time, planning and of course capital. But they are a necessary process where sometimes you have to spend money now to save it later on.

A great example is on duck ponds. Levees love to give way due to numerous factors, most beyond our control. Animals love to dig into levees during the off season. Then you don’t find a hole in it until you fill the pond with water. Of course, when it shoots out the wrong side you know you have a problem. Patching is a quick fix to keep a pond going through season, but the best course is to re-work the levee during down time after the season is over.

Some of the fun projects that come up from time to time are building new ponds or expanding existing ones. Fortunately, BHC is going to get to experience both this off season. There will be three new DU projects ready for this fall on a new lease in Louise, west of El Campo. We will also be expanding and improving our ponds out at the end of FM 1862.

Click on the picture to get the full size layout!

Finally made a trip out of state during hunting season. Most that know me are well aware of how hard it is to get me to leave the BHC to hunt elsewhere. Especially out of state. The main goal of the trip was not so much to hunt snow geese, but to also check out the possibility of expanding our club in some fashion into another state.

Much to my suprise there were several thousand geese on the properties we went to survey. Some days there were up to eight or nine thousand birds on the wheat fields in the back of the farm or scattered on the grown over cotton stubble at the front of the farm.

The future potential for duck hunting on these farms could be outstanding with hard work, good management and cooperation. For a person used to hunting the Texas coast, I had never seen so many mallards in my life! The pictures I took don’t do any justice. Several of the abandoned catfish ponds on the farms were filling with water from recent rains and the ducks loved it.

Hopefully, this is just the beginning of the adventures out of state. I will post more on this project as it develops.

The image above is a rough overview of what I spent most of the past summer working on. All areas color coded on the map (except for gray) are properties that ended up being leased to BHC by the new owners that bought all of the outlined property above in April 2011. BHC had been leasing a lot of the property from the previous owners for almost 30 years. When the land was sold, we had no idea if we would be able to lease it again or not. The future of the club was in doubt. We did still have around 5k acres from the original landowners that we still leased down near the coast to fall back on.

Dealing with owners from South America, who had never dealt with leasing for hunting, presented many challenges. There were language barriers, not to mention business and cultural barriers to bridge as well. With the amazing assistance of JD Wallace and my wife Tina, we were able to cram what normally takes me 5 or 6 months to prepare for into 6 weeks…and a deal was struck with the new owners.

Being that time was running short before the start of season, BHC couldn’t absorb the cost of over 16k acres for the entire farm in addition to the 5k we already leased. So we invited all of the other previous hunting leases that were affiliated with the previous ownership, to come back and have their leases through us. All in all it worked out well and we brought the majority of the waterfowling community in the area back together.

We’ve had the BHC Blog for well over a year…and I only made one post prior to this. A lot has transpired over the last year not only for me personally, but as well for the club. This past season (2011-2012) was one of our best ever and we are primed to move forward to bigger and better things.

My hope with this blog is to provide information not only to club members, but also fellow hunters and any and all interested folks. Some posts may seem boring as I pour over club information, but I hope to have just as many interesting stories. There is a 30 year history of hunts, members and who knows what else out there from the beginning of the club up to today.

There are plenty of good times and memories to be shared.

Chuck