Cool fronts might enhance what is expected to be a robust teal season.
Numbers in Texas might take off once cool fronts push ducks south
A couple million bluewinged teal, perhaps more, will pass through Texas this month and next, stopping to rest and refuel on wetlands from Panhandle playas to Gulf Coast marsh ponds, flooded rice fields and managed moist-soil impoundments as they make their way to wintering grounds in Mexico and Central and South America.
How many of the small, early-migrating little ducks will be around Saturday for the opening of Texas’ 16-day, teal-only hunting season looks to depend greatly on what happens over the coming couple of days.
“Right now, we’ve got little pockets of teal here and there,” Todd Steele, who oversees the private Thunderbird Hunting Club spread over 20,000 or so acres in Jackson and Matagorda counties, said Wednesday morning. “But we’ve got back-to-back (cool) fronts coming, and I fully expect them to push some birds down here. We could load up with birds overnight. That’s the way it is during teal season; things can change overnight.” Matt Nelson agrees. “It’s almost always hard to predict how the teal season opener will go,” said Nelson, who heads wetland and wetland wildlife programs on Texas Parks and Wildlife Department wildlife management areas along the state’s mid-coast coastal prairies and marshes. “I’ve been out scouting on the Friday before the season and seen very few teal, and the next morning there are birds everywhere.
“The good thing is, this year, teal should like what they see when they show up.” Nelson said. “For the most part, the habitat situation looks really encouraging.”
“Wetland conditions look pretty good,” said Mike Rezsutek, who oversees TPWD wetland and waterfowl-related projects on the upper Texas coast from his base on the J.D. Murphree Wildlife Management Area near Port Arthur. “It sure has helped that we’ve had a wet year — fifty-something inches of rain so far this year around here. That’s something we haven’t seen in a lot of recent years. We’ve got water in the marshes, and there’s some flooded second-crop rice up this way.”
Good conditions
Some of that secondcrop rice in Jefferson and Chambers counties holds good numbers of bluewings; one report from southern Chambers County described the number of bluewings piled into flooded second-crop rice field as “biblical.” But most reports ahead of Saturday’s opener are of smaller numbers of birds — a couple of hundred here, a few score there — scattered on the marshes and other wetlands super-charged by recent rains.
Wetlands along the middle coast, especially coastal marshes, also greatly benefited from rains earlier this year and, especially, from recent downpours.
“Habitat conditions on our WMAs are good to great,” Nelson said. “In August, we got some really heavy rain — 6-9 inches in some spots — that really helped the marsh and topped off some of the shallow-water impoundments.”
While this wetter-than-normal year has been an overall benefit for waterfowl habitat on Texas coastal prairies and marshes, it has had a bit of a downside for teal hunters along the middle coast. The extremely wet conditions in spring and early summer put many rice farmers on the midcoast behind schedule for planting their crops. That pushed harvest later, not leaving enough time for rice farmers to flood fields for a second crop. Those second-crop fields are some of the most attractive spots for migrating bluewings, with the little ducks feeding heavily on high-energy rice seeds in the shallow-flooded fields. ‘The teal are coming’
This rarity of secondcrop rice combined with the steep reduction in overall rice acreage on the coastal prairie over the past decade (a result of water policies in the wake of 2011’s recordsetting drought) means other wetlands — typically, man-made managed wetlands created by waterfowl hunters, private conservation groups such as Ducks Unlimited, and state and federal wildlife agencies — are even more crucial to teal and other wetland-dependant birds and wildlife.
“If it wasn’t for managed wetlands, there would be almost no wetlands on the prairie when teal get here,” Steele said.
While pulses of bluewings have been arriving on the Texas coast since mid-August, the big push is still to come.
“One thing we know is that the teal are coming down. They’ll get here; they always do,” said Rezsutek.
Typically, bluewing numbers in Texas begin to swell from a trickle in late August to a flood by mid-September, with the population building as the month wears on. Bluewings, which migrate earlier than any other North American duck species, leave nesting grounds on northern prairies in pulses. Adult males are the first to head south and are most commonly taken during teal season. Adult female bluewings and their broods make the move south later, with their biggest southern push often
coming in October. Booming population
And a lot of bluewings are headed south. Earlier this year, the bluewing breeding population index was estimated to be 8.5 million birds. That’s 73 percent above the long-term average for the survey that has been conducted each spring since 1955. The bluewing population is on a roll, having been between 5.8 million and 9.2 million for the past decade.
Adding even modest nesting success this year, those 8.5 million bluewings should produce a fall flight of 12 million or more birds. And a large portion of those bluewings passes through Texas each autumn. Texas and Louisiana see the highest concentrations of migrating bluewings and the best success for teal hunters during the September season.
Texas trails only Louisiana in the number of teal taken during the September teal-only season, which this year runs Sept. 12-27 statewide. In recent years, Texas waterfowlers have taken 120,000165,000 bluewings during the 16-day season during which only teal are legal game. While greenwing teal are also legal during teal season, only a relative handful — 10-15 percent of the teal season harvest — of the later-migrating greenwings are taken as part of the six-teal aggregate daily bag limit. Saving best for last?
While prospects for the opening weekend of Texas’ 2015 teal season appear mixed, prospects for the entire 16-day season look outstanding.
“Teal numbers should just get better through the month, especially if we can get fronts to push them south ” Nelson said. “Sometimes the last weekend of the season can be better than the opening weekend.”
But if the approaching cool front, which has dropped temperatures into the low 40s in North Dakota, where a large percentage of bluewings nest, brings with it the expected waves of teal, this weekend could be outstanding, and not just because of the good hunting.
“It’s supposed to be beautiful weather — cooler and drier with a little north wind,” Steele said of the approaching opening weekend. “It should be great.”
When it comes to Texas teal season, it almost always is.