By all accounts, the opening week of duck season was exciting anywhere there was water.
Alan Thomas of Russellville enjoyed a week’s worth of excellent hunting at Lake Dardanelle, despite plenty of company.
Opening morning was a rodeo, Thomas said. The parking lots at the boat ramps were full last Saturday well before dawn. Many hunters camped on the islands or in their boats to stake out their spots. Thomas said there was plenty of shooting early, but a thunderstorm forced them to quit early.
“Lightning was striking, and it just wasn’t worth it to try to stick it out,” Thomas said.
His group didn’t get as many ducks as it might have because the adults held off on some early flocks to give some young hunters first crack. The kids sometimes got so excited that they didn’t shoot, and birds got away unscathed. Ducks continued to fly during the storm, Thomas said, but several of his party were eager to get to Fayetteville for the Razorbacks’ football game with Ole Miss.
On the Grand Prairie, Sheffield Nelson said he saw more birds near DeWitt during the first two days than he’s seen in 25 years of hunting the same excellent spot. That’s saying a lot because it’s better on a slow day than most places.
Lack of rainfall shut out places that depend on flooding, like the White River and Cache River national wildlife refuges. Greg Rawn, proprietor of Kocourek’s Antiques in Hazen, said public land hunters in that part of the world are relegated to “puddle” hunting until water floods the bottoms.
Naturally, the best hunting right now is in flooded rice fields and private timber that has been flooded artificially.
According to the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission’s aerial survey report for November, there are nearly twice as many mallards in the Mississippi River Delta as there were in November 2013. The overall duck population is similar to what it was this time last year.
Nearly 50 percent of mallards in the Delta were in the Bayou Meto-Lower Arkansas and Little River Ditches watersheds, wrote Luke Naylor, the AGFC’s waterfowl biologist. The Little River Ditches watershed contains Big Lake National Wildlife Refuge, where biologists encountered high numbers of mallards. Duck concentrations not reflected in this survey include Lake Ashbaugh at Dave Donaldson Black River Wildlife Management Area.
The Arkansas River Valley estimates for all ducks and mallards were the highest since formal surveys began in January 2013. Several areas contained good mallard numbers, but the eastern end of Lake Dardanelle and the Petit Jean River led all others with 12,114 and 10,428 mallards, respectively.
About 30 percent of mallards in the Delta were observed in rice fields, and another 24 percent in aquaculture reservoirs, with 14 percent in buttonbush, 8 percent in moist-soil habitat and 7 percent in bottomland-hardwood wetlands.
In the Arkansas River Valley, 25 percent of mallards were in rivers, bayous and sloughs, and 23 percent were in moist-soil habitat.
Dry conditions are typical in November, Naylor wrote, and the landscape was noticeably dry during this survey period with the exception of sheet water in agricultural fields following rainfall in the Delta south of Pine Bluff. Most other habitat was a result of active management by private landowners and public agencies. Duck distribution was patchy, which is typical in dry conditions, but these survey results suggest the unusually cold conditions preceding the survey period brought good numbers of ducks — particularly mallards — to the state.
This is the time of year when duck hunting articles in magazines recommend best loads for various situations. Field & Stream recently touted Blue Box Federal steel shot as being suitable for decoying ducks out to 20 yards. That one made me laugh. Thomas and I use those shells because they are cheap, but also because they are very good. We both use Winchester SX3 12-gauge autoloaders, and this load through a full choke enables to cleanly and decisively kill ducks at ranges a lot farther than 20 yards.
I prefer 3-inch No. 2 because it patterns very well in my gun. If you lead ducks properly, you’ll hit them in the head and drop them like stones.
I recently put George Dunklin on the spot and asked him what the president of Ducks Unlimited uses. He didn’t hesitate. He said he uses No. 6 Hevi-Shot through a Patternmaster tube for all situations. It takes a little practice to figure out how far to lead, Dunklin said, but once you do, he said the Hevi-Shot is very effective.