Arkansas duck season winding down

Latest winter storms raise hopes for late-season hunters

By Jim Harris

Arkansas Wildlife Editor

LITTLE ROCK — As the Arkansas waterfowl season winds down, hunters are eyeing this latest midweek winter storm over the midwest and what it might bring in terms of late migration to The Natural State.

Reports earlier this week from Arkansas Game and Fish Commission biologists were that the overall duck numbers appeared to be up in many huntable areas, and that it appeared ducks were 'moving out,' according to one biologist observing east-central Arkansas. More pintails, shovelers and green-winged teal observed en masse in last week's AGFC late-January aerial survey indicated that ducks were beginning their move back north.

Hunters, though, were not detered and were still filling the public lands and wildlife management area parking lots on weekdays, such as Steve N. Wilson Raft Creek Bottoms WMAand George H.

Dunklin Bayou Meto WMA.

Then, early Wednesday, a major winter storm moved across the midwest and dipped into Arkansas. While the ice and snow in Arkansas was mostly confined to the northern reaches and mountainous hills of Arkansas, a blanket of snow apparently fell over all over Missouri and portions of Iowa and was moving eastward into Illinois. The hopeful waterfowl hunter here must be thinking, 'Here's the weather system we've been waiting for, one that

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covers up the food sources to the north of us.'

Well, we shall see. The regular 60-day season comes to a close at sunset Sunday, Jan. 31. The AGFC's second aerial survey of January, conducted Jan.

17-20 across the state by four waterfowl observers, noted a slight uptick in overall duck numbers and in mallards from the midwinter survey that was conducted Jan. 4-7.

The last of three surveys of the year showed an estimate of 1.2 million ducks and 527,920 mallards in Arkansas's Delta region, up from 1.078 million total ducks and 458,000 mallards in the survey from two weeks earlier. The mallard numbers were about 200,000 birds below the 20102022 long-term average, but were in line with late-January mallard counts in recent years. The total duck population was slightly below the long-term average.

The late January survey for the past decade typically shows a decline from the midwinter numbers, according to Luke Naylor, AGFC waterfowl program coordinator. Mallards typically account for 59 percent of all ducks during the late January county, but this year made up 44 percent of all ducks.

Dabbling ducks other than mallards (including northern pintail, northern shovelers and American green-winged teal) accounted for the overwhelming majority of other ducks in the Delta region survey.