Texas’ 16-day blue-winged teal season is expected to be a good one.
Something very close to the once-believed phenomenon of spontaneous generation occurs during late August and early September on Texas’ coastal prairie. Take a fairly recently harvested rice field. Flood it with a few inches of water to stimulate secondcrop growth. Add a full moon or have a slight, cool breath of north wind whisper across the grasslands of the northcentral United States a thousand or so miles north of the Texas coast. Wait a day or so.
Boom! Blue-winged teal! Swarms of the little ducks seem to spring from what, an evening or two before, was a pastoral but seemingly lifeless patch of coastal Texas wetland.
That’s the way it seems to go each year. One day, nothing. The next, swarms of blue-winged teal are boiling and buzzing over rice fields and shallow wetlands on the prairie and ponds on coastal marshes.
Bluewings don’t, of course, spontaneously generate from simmering late-summer rice fields. But they do just “show up,” en masse, along Texas’ coastal prairies and marshes in September.
That’s the nature of these smallish ducks, the first waterfowl to begin their annual southern migration and the first “northern” duck to arrive in Texas each autumn.
The timing of the bluewing migration is inexact, though, and not at all wholly predictable, as any Texas waterfowl hunter will tell you. And waterfowlers would know. Bluewings are the focus of a brief but very popular hunting season held each September since the mid1960s — a season designed to take advantage of the flood of bluewings pouring into and through Texas on their way to wintering grounds in Mexico and beyond. Season opens Saturday
That season opens Sept. 10. And, thanks to what appears to be an earlierthan-usual build-up of teal on the birds’ preferred resting/recharging area on Texas’ coastal plains and the unusually lush and abundant wetland habitat waiting for them, this year’s teal season looks to hold outstanding potential for the 40,000 or so Texas waterfowlers who will head afield over the 16-day season that closes Sept. 25.
“Unless some strange weather changes things, I’d say this looks like it’ll be a good teal season in this corner of Texas,” said Mike Rezsutek, who oversees Texas Parks and Wildlife Department wildlife management areas and wetland programs in the teal magnet that is wetland-rich Jefferson, Chambers and Orange counties in the southeast corner of the state. And by “strange weather,” Rezsutek means a tropical weather system (OK, hurricane or tropical storm) hitting the Texas coast sometime this month.
Texas already has seen it share of a different kind of strange weather this year — weather that promises to benefit teal, teal hunters and just about anything else that depends on healthy, rich, vibrant and abundant wetlands.
“We certainly have had enough rain to put water on the landscape,” Rezsutek said.”There’s no lack of places for a teal to land.”
He’s right. This past month was the wettest August in almost a century and ties 1914 as the wettest on record. The 24-month period ending with August has been the wettest such stretch on record in Texas, according to the state’s climatologist.
The long stretch of wet conditions have invigorated marsh and prairie wetlands, generating outstanding growth of native aquatic vegetation that fuels teal and other wetland-dependent birds and wildlife. Prime conditions
Also, there’s more rice out there than there has been. A lot more. After years of drought and the associated cutoff of irrigation water to many rice farmers, exacerbating already declining rice production on Texas coastal prairies, two extremely wet years have cracked open the spigots in the rice country along the lower Colorado River. Rice production jumped at least 35,000 acres this year. And rice plays a huge role in providing waterfowl habitat. Rice fields are especially crucial to earlymigrating blue-winged teal.
“Teal are going to find shallow water — mud flats where they can roost and rest — and they’ll find where they can get food. They are uncanny about that. But they are just naturally drawn to rice. They really key on that second-crop rice. If it’s out there, they are going to find it,” said Todd Steele, who runs operations for the private Thunderbird Hunting Club which leases land in Matagorda and Wharton counties southwest of Houston. The high-carbohydrate forage provided by waste rice is a magnet to teal rebuilding reserves after having made the thousand-mile jump from nesting grounds on the prairies of the northcentral U.S. and southcentral Canada.
Gene Campbell, who runs Oyster Bayou Hunting Club in Chambers County, echoes Steele.
“They’re going to be drawn to where they can find something to eat. And they love rice fields,” Campbell said. They’ve found them. “There are a zillion teal already down,” Campbell said earlier this week. “I’m really kind of surprised to see so many so early. Some years, we worry if they’ll get here before the season starts. Last year, the birds didn’t show up until the day before the season opened. Not this year.” Steele agrees. “A year ago, there were only a handful of teal down a couple of days before the season opened. Then they showed up, overnight,” he said. “This year, there were good numbers of birds on some spots on Sept. 1. They’re way ahead of schedule.”
There are more coming. A lot more. North America’s blue-winged teal population has been riding a high not seen in the 60 years standardized population surveys have been conducted on breeding/nesting grounds.
The bluewing teal population index has been above its long-term average of 5 million birds each year since 2006, peaking in 2012 at a record 9.2 million birds. Over those years, federal waterfowl managers, at the urging of waterfowl managers from Texas and other Central and Mississippi Flyway states (but mainly Texas), have liberalized teal season regulations, increasing season length from nine days to 16 days and bumping the daily bag limit from four teal per day to six.
This year’s bluewing breeding population index fell from 8.5 million in 2015 to 6.7 million. But that’s still well above the long-term average and, when you add this year’s production of young bluewings, it’s certainly possible that more than 8 million bluewings will head south — are heading south — this autumn.
About 70 percent or more of those teal will pass through the species’ main migration corridor that covers the stretch of Gulf Coast from about Corpus Christi to the east side of Louisiana. Just the first wave
And the teal already here are just the first wave. Almost all of them are adult males, easily identified by the wide white “shoulder patch” on the leading edge of their wings. Those adult males are the first to molt, regrow flight feathers and feel the urge to head down the flyway. They are joined by a few adult females.
The next waves will be a mix of other adult males and adult females with their broods. That stream of bluewings into and out of Texas will continue for the coming three months or so, with bluewing numbers in Texas peaking and ebbing as autumn cool fronts send some resting/ recharging bluewings on their way south while others arrive from the north.
This year, chances look good that bluewings will linger a little longer than normal before heading south. Habitat conditions are so good in Texas, the birds will have little reason to hurry.
In dry or drought years, migrating teal are forced to concentrate on limited suitable habitat. That can make for some world-class teal hunting for the relatively few waterfowlers who have access to that limited habitat. But heavy hunting pressure on those areas can also send the birds packing for less dangerous climes, invariably across the Gulf of Mexico.
This year, the abundance of wetland habitat stands to give teal plenty of places to find a bit of peace, quiet and a good meal.
“You’re going to see birds more evenly distributed this year; they’re not all going to be in a handful of spots,” Steele predicted.
“There’s so much water out there and there’s so many places they can go. It’s probably going to scatter the birds, but it’ll hold the birds, too,” Campbell said.
That wider distribution of teal means more hunters will see and get a chance to decoy birds.
“Really, things look excellent for this teal season,” Campbell said.