Travel restrictions into Canada for non-Canadians due to the coronavirus pandemic have dropped to zero the number of nonresident waterfowl hunters who typically venture to Canada’s prairies and park lands.
One would surmise that, with no U.S. hunters, far fewer ducks would be harvested during Canada’s waterfowl hunting season. And those surviving ducks would eventually boost the potential harvest in Arkansas, right?
Duck hunting season opens Saturday in Arkansas.
Not so fast, said Luke Naylor, Arkansas Game and Fish Commission waterfowl program coordinator. Even if thousands of ducks are going unharvested with fewer hunters in Canada this fall, that number will be but a fraction of the ducks that are beginning their migration along the Central and Mississippi flyways, with many mallards converging at some point in Arkansas as they head south.
“The bottom line is, because nonresidents aren’t allowed into Canada now, any notion of a huge influx of ducks to the states and a noticeable impact on hunting success down here is wishful thinking,” he said. “On the scale that we’re dealing with, the amount of hunters and harvest in Canada, especially prairie Canada, is pretty small compared to what happens in the U.S., and even Arkansas alone.”
The Canadian Wildlife Service keeps tabs on many useful statistics, including non-Canadian resident hunter activity and harvest along with Canadian resident hunter activity and harvest. The numbers from past seasons, when Canada allowed nonresident hunters, are small in comparison to hunter activity and harvest in Arkansas alone, much less in the entire Mississippi and Central flyways.
With so many factors influencing where and when those birds move, the relatively small number of ducks harvested in Prairie Canada each year pale in comparison to other key drivers such as habitat abundance and distribution.
This and other biological factors certainly will impact Arkansas’s duck numbers as duck season arrives.