Arkansas Sports 360 - ArkansasSports360.com

10/12/2009 at 12:00am

Nature will rarely please Arkansas duck hunters, just as nature doesn’t usually delight Arkansans in general when it comes to the weather.

The duck hunter’s lament — explaining away a long, frigid morning in the blind (or sometimes a warm one swatting away mosquitoes) with few ducks to call at, much less bring into the hole — is that either there wasn’t enough water or there was too much and the ducks were too dispersed. Or it isn’t cold enough. Or it’s turned too cold to get out.

“Everybody who is a duck hunter craves water,” says Luke Naylor, the Arkansas Game & Fish Commission’s waterfowl program coordinator. “Ducks need flooded habitat. But there is a threshold, and now you hear maybe there’s too much water. The worry is, there will be so much habitat this year that they’ll be so spread out and therefore harder to hunt.”

Rarely, it seems, are the conditions just right. And still, the hunters labor on, some 40,000 plus who will at some point before late January take to the woods, or the rice fields, or the public hunting grounds, in search of one more bag limit, hoping most of their kill has a green head. It’s a season, a ritual, that is estimated to bring in $60 million to the economy of Arkansas County and Stuttgart alone.

This year, more than any other except for maybe five in the past 130 years, hunters will find more water than they can imagine. And so will the ducks, when they get here.

And it’s anybody’s guess right now how that will affect the “harvest.”

“This has been an abnormal year,” Rich Johnson, wetlands program coordinator for the Game & Fish Commission, said of the rainfall, which came in record numbers in several months, including October. “This year we’re definitely wetter than in most years. There’s definitely going to be more opportunity on public lands because of the water availability.

“In dry years they say there’s not enough water, and in wet years there’s too much. We hear a lot about ‘it’s too dry or it’s too wet.’ It’s hard to figure out what’s just right.”

Even a dry stretch of almost two weeks to start November didn’t dampen the prospects for a very wet duck season. Several state wildlife management areas were closed for deer hunting because of the October flooding, but all that water will work nicely for duck hunters.

The rivers are running high, meaning their tributaries have water with nowhere to go. An overly wet May and even more rain in late summer hampered the G&FC’s efforts to improve its public lands.

The farming fields also have food aplenty, unusual for this time of year, Johnson said. Typically, rice would be cut by now, but some farmers still have work to do now, and the recently cut rice hasn’t germinated. Johnson added, “It’s also amazing how many beans are out there.” With late harvests, soybean residual will not have deteriorated before the birds arrive.

Johnson says that ducks typically look for moist-soil seeds (e.g., grasses and smart weed) early in the season after migrating, seek out acorns and other high-carbohydrate food when it turns colder in December, then will forage primarily on invertebrates (snails, worms and the like) in January for the right nutrients in preparation for the migration north.

So, for what it’s worth, there is plenty of food available, and plenty of water.

Now, the hunters will ask: Will there be plenty of ducks?

The early reports in the state are spotty, but Johnson says he doesn’t start getting excited about Arkansas hunting anyway until around Christmastime. That’s when he expects the bigger migration of young birds.

As for the duck-numbers outlook as opening day approached Nov. 21, Luke Naylor said, “We’ve been hearing mixed reports from people out in the field driving around. With all the habitat that is out there, it sure doesn’t seem like every patch of water has ducks. But I have heard reports of large concentrations here and there.”

The spring count of ducks in the northern reaches — the Dakotas and Canada, which supply the Mississippi and Central flyways with ducks, and especially mallards — was “extremely good,” Naylor said.

“The count was 42 million ducks, and that’s in the top five for spring counts since 1955,” he said. “We saw good numbers from the duck-breeding grounds. There was fair to good breeding effort in Canada and very good breeding effort in the U.S. prairie pothole region.

“We’re expecting good things. Good water and good nesting efforts for ducks bode well for us.”

However, mild temperatures in the Dakotas had not stirred the ducks enough in late October to move them south, Naylor noted.

“If we have one of those mild early seasons like we’re leading into, it could be pretty slow for the first few weeks,” Naylor said a few days before a brief cold front dropped temperatures in Arkansas into the 40s for lows. “The weather pattern we’re in hasn’t been conducive to duck migration; south winds, highs in the 70s, lows in the 50s won’t attract the ducks. And when it’s 50 degrees forecast in the Dakotas, that also isn’t doing a lot to move ducks this way.”

So the reports are that most of the ducks that Arkansans may eventually see are sitting specifically in northeast South Dakota, where, as Arkansas farmers have experienced, crops were flooded and unharvested.

The 2008-09 season began wetter than most, the GF&C folks said, but nothing like this year, which on the Delta seven-year flood cycle would rate extremely wet. Usually, October and November are among the state’s drier months, with rain coming in December and January.

It’s safe to assume some of those early winged passers-by have noticed the expanse of water and made Arkansas home, at least until the shooting starts. So some of that large amount of water “surely won’t hurt us,” Naylor said.

“There will be plenty of options out there for both private landholders and public hunters.”

Naylor, who like Johnson looks forward to hunting the latter part of December and into January, added, “By the time the 60-day season goes by, we’re going to have some good duck hunting at some point. That’s the advantage of being in a state where ducks are just hard-wired to go. ... Sometimes around here, when these El Nino effects start happening, it gets warm and can be a little rough at first. But I suggest that hunters hang in there. It could change tomorrow.”

Sounds just like the weather in Arkansas.