Sounds like a title to a book. As I lay here waiting for light, my mind tends to wander. I look out over the water and you can make out the faint outline of my decoys and my tracks leading to and from my layout, to the decoys. A question pops into my head. Do the foot prints to and from the layout flair ducks? Is it just a big arrow pointing to my blind? What do y'all think?

No

No

yep can be on hard hunted birds, imo

I always brush out my tracks with a cut willow limb.

No

I've even thought about it on a dove field were the ground is raked. If you walk across that raked earth your tracks jump out big time. If I was a dove I'd notice it.

I don't think so, I'll have to ask a duck after season is closed.

I have thought the same thing before. Especially with an all mud shore and little cover. When times are tough and ducks are wary, you are looking for anything you can do to minimize ducks flaring, I'm guessing it could result in some ducks flaring, probably a very small percent, a very high percent will not flare, for that reason I have never worried about it, but you never know.

Walk in backwards.

I only hunt flooded timber in the dallas/ft worth metroplex. Never been a problem!

No, but I have used bear track soled shoes to scare away other hunters from my public hunting spots.

there it is, some one always figures it out

I said the same thing this morning. But not footprints the fact that all the new tracked up area is a lot darker than the untouched dirt. All I hunt is shoreline with very little cover.

I have noticed but try not to over think it

No but have you discovered that when you set your shotgun down to eat something or go to the bathroom the sky fills with birds. Just wondering.......

That's the duck gods mess'n with ya.

Actually- it probably depends on the terrain. If the area has clumps of dirt/tufts of grass, etc- doubt it would make a difference.

Don't know about the shore line, but I think it helps to go out and stir up the water around the decoys. I think it makes it look more realistic. The dog retrieving the ducks helps with this too.

No

Think about driving a 4 wheeler through thick vegetation. Leaves a trail right to the blind. Doesn't matter.

I don't think so. To get any useful information from a track in the mud would require high-level abstract association. I think humans are the only animals that can look at a track in the mud and more-or-less intuitively understand that a particular species left it.

If a dog on his platform doesn't flare birds, I doubt a footprint would.

I think animals can think better than we give them credit- so...one of my animal stories....
I had this dog that was pretty smart. He minded me pretty good except for this thing about grabbing huge sticks, 8-10' long and running around with them. If we were on a road he would race back and forth, as he passed me he would be far enough away that I never got wacked by the big stick but it always sort of irked me.
One day he couldn't find a big enough stick so he looked around. There were some saplings growing nearby so I guess he figured he would just pull up a sapling and run around with that. He grabbed the sapling and started pulling it, the roots were so strong that he couldn't yank it out and I sort of laughed at the futility of the thing.
When I laughed at him he stopped. He looked at me and looked at the sapling and then just kept staring at the sapling. Suddenly he started looking around at some of the other saplings. I thought he was going to try pulling up another tree but instead he got the one he had been yanking on and started dragging the top over to the other trees.
"What in the world is that dog trying to do?" I thought.
He got the top of the saping tight around another tree and then used that other tree as a fulcum and snapped off the top of the sapling. Voila! He had his big stick.
It sort of amazed me, I thought to myself this dog was made aware of the futility of his action at yanking on the roots. He stopped and had to think about what he could do. The idea occurred that maybe he could snap off the top. He looked arond for a suitable tree and did just that.
I think the scientists watch animals in labratory cages- animals that would die pronto on their own in the wilds. IMHO animals can think.