Saturday, April 7th San Jacinto Wildlife Area held their Annual Hunter’s Education Class. Tom Trakes, of San Jacinto Wildlife Area, reported that there were 52 new hunters in attendance to study for and take their Hunter’s Education test. Their well-earned Hunter’s Education Certificate makes the students eligible to be fully licensed hunters in the State of California. The class was a mix of youth and adults and they will all be joining us as part of our hunting community.
Valley Wide provided the tables and chairs for the event and the students were provided with a nice lunch of chicken, sandwiches, and chips at the noon break.
The class working hard
Lunch Time!
The Volunteer Clean-Up Day was also held at San Jacinto today and the turnout was pretty light for this event. Less than 10 volunteers showed up to assist the San Jacinto staff in getting the refuge’s blinds cleaned up from the recently ended waterfowl season. Volunteers met at the check station at 7 am then scattered throughout the wildlife area, plastic bags in hand, to clean up all the spent shell, wads and other miscellaneous trash they could manage to find in and around the blinds. Besides the usual spent shells and wads there were other things found like flashlights, batteries, a decoy keel with line and weight attached, half a wading pole, and even an old car wheel just to name a few.
SoCalHunt was in attendance for the Clean-up day and pitched in with my trusty shell stick to clean up around at least 8 of the area’s blinds today. It was nice to see that most blinds I hit were in pretty clean condition so the clean-up wasn’t as labor intensive as it has been some other years. This was a good thing as it allowed the small group of Volunteers to pretty much get the job done despite the light turnout.
As always at SJ there were other rewards. There were a lot of ducks using the wildlife area. I saw more waterfowl in the first 5 minutes I was there then I saw all last season.
And, of course, it isn’t all about ducks at San Jacinto, especially in the offseason, as there were a great variety of other birds utilizing the refuge too. And, as always, the scenery was outstanding!
There was even a small bonus today as March Air Force Base was having an air show, so we got to see a few of the aircraft flying around the area for that, including a B-2 Stealth Bomber (Sorry didn’t have the camera ready when that one flew by). I was able to snap a shot of a pair of FA-18 flying over though.
The next volunteer work day will likely be scheduled for some time in June and will be a Blind Brush-up day, to start preparing the blinds for the next waterfowl season in October. When the date is set SoCalHunt will have it posted here so you can mark the date on your calendar.
SoCalHunt 
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