Midwinter Survey Coming; Anecdotal Reports Not Promising
Arkansas Game and Fish Commission biologists were able to survey the waterfowl landscape last week with no significant delays (unlike December’s aerial survey attempts), and the results from those flights and counts for the annual midwinter survey will be out in the coming days.
But from anecdotal reports and speaking this week with Brett Leach, the AGFC’s waterfowl coordinator, the biologists may not have come across as many promising numbers of ducks as they saw before Christmas. Leach indicated that he had seen ducks from the air in the Plumerville area of the Arkansas River Valley when he took to the air, but the randomly selected transects that send him over an area to be counted — and that number imported into the algorithm for the waterfowl estimate — did not put him over nearly as many ducks as he’d hoped to see.
Keep a lookout later this week and click THIS LINK for the midwinter survey when it is released. We’ll also cover it in this newsletter next week.
Migration maps that indicate waterfowl observations based on biologist reports and other data showed a strong amount of ducks counted and/or estimated in eastern Arkansas near the Mississippi River a week ago, which fell in line with the aerial survey results that were released from late December.
That December estimate of mallards in the Delta by the aerial count was nearly 500,000 birds, a big jump over the December 2024 estimate. Birds were observed in a few clumps around limited water sources, which introduced greater uncertainty into the overall estimate, which reported 1.4 million total ducks in the Delta. Arctic geese were estimated at more than 2 million.
Clear skies, a good wind, and cooler temperatures seemed to help some waterfowlers over the weekend, according to reports heard through the duck hunting grapevine. There are ducks being harvested in southeast Arkansas, according to anecdotal reports.
Arkansas hunters will be looking at highs in the 40s and lows at night in the 20s this weekend, which might lock up some areas of water and move ducks around to more open water areas overnight. By midweek of next week, daytime temperatures are expected to return to the 50s and 60s. The extended forecast does not show a drastic cold push into Arkansas before the end of the season on Jan. 31.
There is snow in parts of Illinois, which might move the large amounts of birds — both ducks and geese — seen in the southern part of that state in the past week, according to reports from Ducks Unlimited, which spoke with bird observers, biologists, and hunters in that region.
Numbers from Missouri’s conservation areas in the Bootheel are very low. Eagle Bluffs Conservation Area had 2,500 ducks counted on Jan. 4. Ted Shanks Conservation Area reported 3,000 total ducks on Dec. 29. The best news came from Ten Mile Pond Conservation Area, which is closest to the Mississippi River, with an estimated 13,500 ducks on Jan. 11.
The best duck harvest per hunter reported was 1.72 ducks per hunter at Ted Shanks (160 ducks for 93 hunters) at the end of December. Total estimates were higher at Ten Mile Pond, where the average duck harvest per hunter was 1.22 in its Jan. 11 report. Missouri’s conservation area hunting is by permit only, and hunters report their harvest at the end of their hunt. Most of Missouri’s ducks by the end of December appeared to be in the upper middle and northern portions of the state, according to the Missouri Department of Conservation.
Meanwhile, Mississippi’s aerial survey in December estimated 92,947 mallards and 390,183 total ducks. Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks biologists were scheduled to survey the week of Jan. 5, like Arkansas’s biologists, but results were not available at press time.
The Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries in mid-December estimated 1.665 million total ducks in the state, including 13,000 mallards, 244,000 gadwalls, 434,000 pintails, 209,000 green-winged teal, and 198,000 blue-winged teal. Diving ducks — including scaup, ring-necked ducks, and canvasbacks — accounted for 361,000 of the estimate.