Recent rains have turned waterfowl prospects from good to exceptional.
Little more than a week ago, prospects for the millions of waterfowl that spend all or part of autumn and winter in Texas and for the 100,000 or so waterfowl hunters looking forward to the state’s 2015-16 duck and goose hunting seasons looked quite good.
That changed this past weekend.
“Things went from good to exceptional — beyond exceptional in some places,” Kevin Kraai, waterfowl program leader for Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, said earlier this week, after a long weekend of rain left much of the state soaked — if not outright swamped — and helped set the stage for what could be one of the best autumns waterfowl and waterfowlers have seen in years. That season begins Saturday with the opening of duck season in Texas’ 54-county South Duck Zone and the 92 counties comprising the High Plains Mallard Management Unit. Duck season in the 139-county North Duck Zone opens the following Saturday, Nov. 7, the same date goose season opens in the state’s Eastern Goose Zone.
Ahead of this past weekend, wetland habitat conditions in some of the major waterfowl wintering areas of the state — coastal marshes and adjacent coastal prairies, the Panhandle’s playa lakes — were generally in very good shape, a result of heavy spring and early summer rains that filled Panhandle playas (natural wetland basins) and put freshwater in coastal marshes, stimulating growth of aquatic and moist-soil vegetation that provides forage for wintering ducks and geese.
However, waterfowl habitat in areas of eastern and central Texas were suffering effects of three months of hot, dry weather. Then the rains came. “It was a game changer,” Jeff Gunnels, TPWD wildlife biologist who works in the middle Trinity River basin, said of the weekend soaking. Almost 2 feet of rain fell in some areas of the middle Trinity River basin, with most areas seeing at least a half-dozen inches.
“We had 21.25 inches of rain on Richland Creek,” Gunnels said of the agency’s wetland-rich wildlife management area adjacent to RichlandChambers Reservoir in Navarro and Freestone counties. “There’s water everywhere now.” Abundant habitat
Flooding of bottomland forests will create new wetland habitat, with arriving ducks able to take advantage of what appears to be a heavy crop of acorns in the flooded forests. Also, rain runoff swelled reservoirs, flooding shorelines and flats where heavy growth of smartweed, pigweed, barnyard grass and other seed-producing, moistsoil plants have grown as lakes shrank during the summer.
“This is going to create a lot more habitat in places like old oxbows and sloughs and areas that have been dry,” Gunnels said. “It’s going to really benefit the birds. It may not be as much of a benefit for hunters because it’s going to spread ducks out over a wider area. But it’s going to give more hunters more places to hunt.”
That same effect from the heavy rains — more and better wintering habitat for waterfowl, spreading arriving waterfowl over the landscape and perhaps making it tougher for hunters to find large concentrations of birds — is likely on Texas’ coastal marshes and prairies.
“It’s opened up a lot of new places for them to feed and roost,” said Mike Rezsutek, Port Arthur-based upper coast wetland programs leader for TPWD.
And those areas look to be in excellent shape for arriving birds, he said. Aided by those spring/ early summer rains, freshwater wetlands along the upper coast have produced a good crop of pigweed, millet, najas and other preferred duck foods. Many brackish marsh ponds saw good growth of wigeongrass, a mainstay forage of ducks such as gadwall. Duck numbers up
Also, the upper-coast prairies saw another good year of rice production, creating excellent waterfowl habitat.
“Overall, I think we’re in pretty good shape,” Rezsutek said. “There’s already a good number of ducks down here. I’m very optimistic about this season.”
Todd Steele echoes that opinion about prospects for waterfowl and waterfowlers on the middle Texas coast.
“Our habitat is in about as good a shape as I’ve ever seen it,” said Steele, a principal in Thunderbird Hunting Club, a private waterfowl hunting club that leases about 15,000 acres holding about 1,000 acres of managed wetlands in Matagorda and Wharton counties. That habitat is holding a considerable number of ducks ahead of Saturday’s season opener.
“We’ve had a buildup of a substantial number of birds on our wetlands,” Steele said. “Lots of bluewings (teal), but a fair number of other ducks, too. It’s not like a year ago when we didn’t have any ducks until, literally, the day before the season opened.”
Along with the strong number of ducks, a trickle of white-fronted geese and sandhill cranes have arrived on the middle coast. Wednesday, while working on Thunderbird properties to prepare for Saturday’s opener, Steele reported seeing flocks of migrating whitefronts pouring onto mid-coast prairie. Those duck and goose numbers should be bolstered with this week’s bright moon and a slight cool front predicted for the weekend. Wider distribution
And a lot of ducks are headed to Texas. This year’s index of breeding populations of North America’s 10 most populous duck species, based on aerial surveys of northern nesting grounds this past spring, was 49.5 million birds, 43 percent higher than the 1955-2014 average and the highest in the 60-year history of the breeding population survey.
“Overall, I couldn’t ask for much better,” said Kraai, who said wetland conditions in the droughtplagued Panhandle are “beyond exceptional … you can’t find a dry playa.” He said conditions in the region and much of the rest of the state haven’t been this generally excellent “probably since 2005-06.”
If there is a downside for some hunters, it’s that the abundance of habitat will allow the birds to spread over a wide area instead of concentrating them in limited areas holding water and forage. Over the past decade, which saw much of the state in constant drought conditions, that has forced waterfowl to using the limited wetlands available. Waterfowlers with access to those areas enjoyed excellent hunting while those without access saw few birds and poor hunting.
This season promises to be different, especially if effects of the El Niño weather phenomenon result in the predicted much-wetter-thannormal autumn and early winter in Texas.
“We’re probably going to see birds distributed much more broadly, and that could affect hunting success for some people,” Kraai said. “But it’s really great for birds to have this much habitat. And it’ll be good for more hunters; there’ll be birds in more places and more places for hunters to go. You can’t complain about that.”