Anybody read this book?

I just flipped through a few pages and read a small bit. Very neat book indeed. Things sure were different back in the old days. I remember guiding for Clifton Tyler back in high school. He would always talk about his dad Marvin Tyler using the white goose spread with diapers, rags, and cloth. Had a write up about Marvin in this book about all of that. I can only imagine what it was like back then.

http://www.amazon.com/Hundred-Years-Texas-Waterfowl-Hunting/dp/1603447636

I finished it last week. It is a good book with a lot of interesting information. I live in Katy and would loved to have hunted this area before it all turned to subdivisions. The book says that the Katy prairie was the densest wetland in Texas at one time. More and more of the prairie and rice fields are being developed and the amount of pressure around the Houston area is high. That is a bad combination for waterfowl.

I hear ya bradshaw.

When I first got into waterfowl I was on a lease in the Katy prairie, some of those places, including the place I shot my first mallard no longer exist.

We shot a lot of birds and that wasn't even that long ago.

It's really sad.

Not that one but I read the market hunting book by the same author and thought it was a good book!

It went downhill rapidely since 2002

I guided for Blue Goose for a while that Marvin originally owned. John Fields owned it while I was there.

If you want an idea of what Katy used to look like, download google earth and scroll back to the 1940's aerials. Then look south of Cypress at all the depressions and potholes. In Sawyers book, he claims the old timers attributed the depressions to wallows made by buffalo.

That's a great book! I really enjoy flipping though it every so often and reading different sections. It really is sad to see what it use to be.

I enjoyed the book.
Actually contacted mr sawyer about the decoys in the book, he gave me some referrals of guys to call!
I've since learned a ton from guys whose parents/grandparents carved some of the decoys in the book.
That inspired me to Start a rig of Texas "carvers" decoys... I'll carve 1-2 a year until I cover the major ones!

Great book for texas waterfowlers!

Just bought it, and am looking forward to giving it a read.

I'm not all that old (nearly 40 now), but I can remember when Katy was a couple of rice silos and a crossroads. Seems like starting around the late 1990's it exploded, and with it the last of the old Katy Prairie started dying off.

They say that of the original gulf coast prairie lands in Texas (Katy Prairie, Bay Prairie and the prairies of southeast Texas), that less than 2% remain. That is really something.

I flipped through it. Got a good laugh at the cloth diapers for snow decoys. Can you imagine asking the wife to pick up some extra diapers all year long?

I also got a kick out of reading how folks would take a train to the coast and staying at lodges focused on waterfowl and fishing.

My great grandfather told my dad stories about driving down to Houston from Dallas to hunt ducks on the prairie in the 20s and 30s. It took 2 days and involved opening lots of gates.