Arkansas’s waterfowl hunting season will resume 30 minutes before sunrise Saturday, Dec. 10, and ducks and geese will have had nearly two weeks of mostly quiet on the Arkansas landscape. With this week’s nasty wet weather and ducks perhaps finding more habitat, this 14-day portion of the waterfowl season will open with more promise than the first part did last month.
Public hunting lands are slowly filling up around the state, thanks to some recent weather fronts that have raised water levels, which is typical of the late fall. The big 4- to 6-inch rainfall that waterfowl biologists seek still hasn’t passed our way yet. Weather patterns this week have brought low cloud cover, and at least by Tuesday the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission’s annual December aerial survey had not gotten off the ground. The AGFC’s waterfowl team was scheduled to take to the skies this week to get an estimated statewide count of the waterfowl migration.
The observations from biologist that we spoke with this week have come from the ground. “I’m still hoping to fly one day this week if the weather will just break,” Jason Carbaugh, a waterfowl biologist based in Jonesboro and part of the aerial survey team, said Tuesday. “So far, the clouds are too low.
”I’m not seeing any noteworthy duck concentrations in my daily travels yet. I drove to Earl Buss Bayou DeView WMA (Tuesday) morning. Very little water across the landscape down there and no ducks to speak of yet. I have heard Lake Ashbaugh at Dave Donaldson Black River WMA has a large concentration of ducks, which is usually does this time of year. It usually has more than 20,000 ducks on it this time of year.”
Zach Yancey, an AGFC biologist out of the northeast office with Carbaugh and who checks in on Dave Donaldson WMA, confirmed that “20,000 is probably about right. Lots of pintails, small ducks and a decent amount of mallards.”
Biologist Jessica Homan of the AGFC’s Brinkley Office reported Tuesday seeing about 500 mallards on the Conway George A tract of Sheffield Nelson Dagmar WMA, but that is all she had seen. In the Arkansas River Valley, biologist Alex Zachary said Ed Gordon Point Remove WMA had low to moderate duck use the past week. Water had been low, but now there is at least some water, in George H. Dunklin Bayou Meto WMA, according to Mark Hooks, an AGFC biologist based in Monticello.
Water continues to inches its way up and over moist-soil units in the Steve N. Wilson Raft Creek Bottoms WMA, though it’s still far from easy to navigate the trails to many of the hunting locations. With the White River only at 3.3feet at the Georgetown gauge, there just isn’t a lot of water naturally flowing into the area. The AGFC uses relift pumps to put water into the WMA, and a few areas still have no water. Other favored spots, however, have 100 percent or close water coverage.
For users of Harris Brake WMA in central Arkansas, the upper greentree reservoir has full water coverage, and nearby Harris Brake Lake helps provide the WMA with needed water during waterfowl season. However, the lower GTR’s water control structure recently was damaged, allowing water to drain from the lower greentree reservoir and the structure can’t be fixed at this time. Kevin Lynch, biologist from the Fort Smith office, says that the lower GTR will mostly likely drain completely unless Fourche La Fave overtops the levee and floods the GTR.
So that brings us around to rainfall, and more of it is needed to provide waterfowl with more opportunity to get to the food sources in the moist-soil units and greentree reservoirs, as well as any leftover rice in the fields around the Arkansas Delta.
This portion of the Arkansas waterfowl season will run until sunset Dec. 23. After a two-day closure for the Christmas holiday, the season reopens 30 minutes before sunrise Dec. 26 and continues to its closure of the 60-day full season at sunset Jan. 31.