Hunting the roost.... Do's and Dont's

I have access to hunt about a 40 acre lake that never gets deeper than 5 feet, has tons of food, and great cover throughout the lake. It consistently holds about a thousand ducks throughout the day, and several thousand come in every evening. My fear is that if I hunt it, I'll mess it up and the ducks will get outta there till a new bunch come down. Anybody have experience with this? If y'all have any do's and dont's for hunting a roost I'd love to hear em. Thanks!

I primarily hunt 35 acre roost pond and about 1/3 of my hunts are in the evening. Observe legal shooting hours and you won't mess it up. Most of the birds come in after LST and are landing next to me while I'm picking up decoys. It's a sight to see!

Hunt with a metrogun, reduce the noise by 85%
Done

If you got food there and they are roosting there as well, I would not worry, they will probably find a new place to roost. The issue is when there is no food, and they are purely using said hole to roost, shoot it then they are gone, but food will bring them back.

Ya there's always a lot of food available here, so I guess it'll be ok. I'm gonna try to not hunt it often, maybe once every 10 days. Thanks!

As long as your arent disturbing the birds coming in after sunset you will be fine.

Just had a guy get real sore at me for hunting some birds on big public water yesterday evening. My spot isn't at the roost, but the roost is back in the creek about 1/2 mile so I was just intercepting them on the way back from wherever they go to eat. It was a magical hunt where the birds worked and responded to calls perfectly. I shot three birds out of a big group that I worked down to the water then stopped hunting and packed up at 4:30pm so that I didn't have to walk out in the dark AND so the rest of the birds would still; be there when I get a chance to hunt again... I highly doubt I pushed birds out of their roost, but the guy getting angry with me was convinced I had pushed every duck out of the entire interior of Texas by hunting in the evening.

and I suppose he was there just scouting? ha!

shoot me a pm....im world renown for not messing up roost holes.....ill show you the ropes for free!!

I wish they would pass a Texas law and say no duck hunting after 12:00PM. WMAs do this for a reason, ducks need a time to rest. Personally, I would rather scout in the afternoon, see where they are, then shoot them in the face in the morning.

One time I was scouting an area, it was loaded with ducks. It was a walk in area. I get back to my truck at the access point, I'm all excited I got a good place to hunt in the morning. Then this guy pulls up, in a hurry like he just got off work, it is about sunset, hops out of his truck with his shotgun, I'm looking at him like "please, don't do what I think you are going to do", and he says to me "Just going to go look". It was about a 10 minute walk so I took my time leaving.. Sure enough, about 10 minutes later, I hear the blasting, the SOB was jumping the ducks and shooting out the area. That is so sorry...

Honestly, it was between 3:45 and 4:15pm that I actually worked the birds down and got a couple. I was off the water and walking out by 4:40pm. That, to me, doesn't seem like it would traumatize the roosting ducks very much since there were still plenty of groups flying towards the creek mouth as I was walking out. I am a big supporter of the 12:00 rule, but since public hunting here in my area is so crowded on the weekends, and the amount of ridiculousness involved with people skybusting, building blinds in the wide open every 100 yards, etc- I figured that I wouldn't do any great deal of harm by myself smacking a couple decoying greenheads from a layout with 2 3/4" #4's for birds that have their landing gear down.