Habitat, disturbance regulate duck behavior

Providing food and managing disturbance are the two most important things duck managers and duck hunters can do to improve duck hunting.

An expert panel accentuated those points recently during the annual Duck Season Social sponsored by the Arkansas Game and Fish Foundation.

Comprising the panel was Ryan Askren, a waterfowl ecologist and a post-doctoral research associate at the University of Arkansas-Monticello; Jody Pagan, a highly respected waterfowl biologist and habitat management consultant, and Jeff Watt, a manufacturer’s representative for Sitka Gear and RNT.

Duck hunters fret over things they cannot control or influence, like weather, the group agreed. They fret too much over what other people and other states are doing to attract and hold ducks instead of concentrating on what they can do to attract and hold ducks on properties they manage and hunt.

Arkansas hunters won’t accept that Arkansas is no longer the only player in the waterfowl market. Missouri, Oklahoma, Kansas, and other states have invested heavily in waterfowl hunting. Public and private landowners in those states have created state-of-the-art waterfowl habitat complexes with plenty of food and diverse habitat types that attract and hold ducks for as long as weather allows.

Arkansas, in contrast, has a lot less habitat and lower quality habitat than it had in the 1990s, Pagan said, recalling agricultural programs that encouraged landowners to provide habitat.

“This is a habitat dominated game,” Pagan said. “We can’t control the weather, but we can control what happens on our property. Back in the 90s, we had an Arkansas ‘partners’ program that all the federal and state agencies participated in. We would give folks water control structures. They didn’t have to pump, but they at least had to put boards in. The apex of that was in 199798, when we had over a quarter million acres of flooded ground on top of what was behind levees.

“Now, I drive from Searcy to Jonesboro and from Jonesboro to Louisiana, and I see [only] a handful of fields flooded. Even in the 80s and 90s we flooded the fields, and we had ducks. These programs are the only way we’re going to move the needle.”

Lack of habitat and food is why we don’t see the numbers of ducks in Arkansas that we remember so fondly, Pagan said. The ducks that are here concentrate where the food is, almost entirely on private ground.

“CRP (Conservation Reserve Program), water conservation programs, WRP (Wetland Reserve Program); that’s what moves the needle,” Pagan said. “You don’t see the clouds of ducks because the food’s not here. If the food’s not here, they’re going to ball up on this club and this club and this club.”

Pagan said he put GPS backpacks on some ducks in Louisiana to monitor their movements. He said he was astonished to see them fly up to the Grand Prairie and hop from one private club to another where food was available. The same thing happened with ducks in Texas that he monitored. They went to private wetland complexes in Kansas and Nebraska.

Pagan said that landowners have built habitat “super cells” containing a mixture of crop fields, moist soil areas and flooded timber.

“All I want to say is you’d better start thinking about doing something,” Pagan said.

Disturbance greatly influence duck behavior. Knowledgable landowners minimize disturbance in various ways. Some stop hunting ducks early in the morning. They stay away from ducks during non-hunting hours. Ducks are highly sensitive to pressure and they adapt to it by learning how and where to avoid it. That is why, Askren said, hunters often see ducks arrive in an area five minutes after the end of hunting time.

“Ducks figure it out pretty quick,” Askren said. “We’ve got to make sure we’re taking care of them while they’re here, not just taking them and overusing them.

“We need severe weather to kill ducks. That’s the biggest driver,” Askren continued. “We focus on how weather impacts movements. We’ve figured out when to put a lot of pressure on them. It’s advantageous for them to just hunker down and conserve energy than to get out and feed. These ducks are walking a really thin line. They’re just trying to make it to next year and survive and pass on their genes.”