Article: WHY DO YOU SEE SO MANY DUCKS AFTER THE SEASON?
https://www.themeateater.com/hunt/wa...ter-the-season
At the close of every duck season, it doesn’t take long for mallards and other puddle ducks to fill the skies and start landing in front of vacant hunting blinds. Greenheads, pintails, and other waterfowl dabble and preen in waters they would not have prior to the close of the season because hunters would have been there trying to coax them into shooting range. The chatter in taverns across the four flyways and on social media begins. It’s the same complaint every year. Hunters want later season dates because they think the ducks just arrived.
Well, not exactly. What some bird hunters are seeing in the weeks immediately following the season could be new migrants, but many have been there the whole time. They’re just now coming out of hiding.
Two recent telemetry studies in Arkansas and Tennessee (the latter is still ongoing) show that mallards become programmed to avoid hunting pressure and human disturbance once the season is underway. The birds stick to sanctuaries devoid of shotgun blasts and boats racing through the marsh. There have also been telemetry studies conducted on gadwall and pintails that reveal similar habits.
The reason hunters aren’t seeing as many ducks during the season—and harvest rates on mallards are dropping in many states—might have more to do with the evolution of the species than the migration. Extending your season another week isn’t likely to result in better hunting (unless there is a weather event that causes birds to move). Later season dates will only keep greenheads on the same cautious schedule that’s kept them alive since opening day.
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Mallards Only Move When They Have To
Both studies provide a detailed look at mallard movements in wintering areas. What they discovered is quite illuminating. Once the duck season begins, mallards quickly adapt to survive, spending their nights feeding on private, flooded agriculture and flying back to the refuge before shooting light in the morning. They spend the remainder of the day on these sanctuaries and do not fly out to feed until after sunset. The mallards remain on this strict regiment for the entirety of the season unless a substantial weather event forces them to move.
“Obviously, our research is focused in one area and can’t be generalized until more studies are done. But if you look at our data, these ducks get in a pretty predictable pattern,” said Cohen, whose students have placed transmitters on over 600 mallards for the last four years. “They know when the safe times to move are.”
But weather is consistently a wild card in determining bird movement.
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Dittmer’s mallards hardly spent any time at all on public hunting areas—day or night—until duck season ended. Once it did, the birds began to frequent public hunting acres and moved away from using spatial sanctuaries during daylight hours.
“When hunting season was on those mallards were either on the sanctuary or private agriculture, normally flooded rice,” Dittmer said. “But about two weeks after hunting season ended, during the daytime, they preferred public hunt areas over spatial sanctuaries (mostly flooded timber) and private lands. It was really clear that once hunting season ended, mallards started using these formerly risky areas. Presumably, they somehow knew it was safe.”
Dittmer’s research also revealed that the ducks aren’t likely to fly away or come in from somewhere else once the season ends.
“What intrigued me most about these mallards, other than how smart they were, is that most of them stayed within the vicinity of White River NWR,” he said. “Out of 105 birds, only two moved farther south than Arkansas.”
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Creatures of Habit
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“We’d go to these refuges once a week and spend an hour there and rally the birds at different intensity levels,” Cohen said. “One disturbance would be just a person walking around. Another disturbance would be ripping a boat through every inch of that refuge and never letting a single duck land. We expected the ducks to move around a lot more and that hunters would be more successful when we got those birds up.”
Shockingly, the opposite happened.
“The birds seemed to move less,” Cohen said. “It was like if you’re a little kid and scared, and instead of running out of your room, you hunker down in your bedroom and pull the covers over your head. That’s what we think is happening with the ducks. They know this place is safe, and they are reluctant to leave because so few places are safe. So they seem to hunker down and stay still.”
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Breaking Mallard Patterns Will Improve Hunting
How to increase hunter-harvest rates while doing what is best for the ducks is a debate waterfowlers, biologists, and wetlands managers have had for decades. All of us want to shoot daily limits of greenheads every time we hunt, but the reality is, the way many public and private hunting areas are managed for hunting pressure doesn’t lend to that experience.
For instance, Dittmer’s study revealed that his mallards stayed away from public hunting areas—no matter how they were managed for hunting pressure—the entirety of duck season. That means whether the area was open daily or just a few days a week (to allow birds rest), mallards didn’t use those wetlands, presumably because they knew such places were dangerous. The mallards in both studies used private lands almost exclusively after sunset when hunters were not present and disturbance was minimal.
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The thought is more sanctuaries will entice ducks to move freely instead of having one refuge where large concentrations of birds congregate. This may better distribute ducks and possibly get them to move more frequently.
“Partnerships with your neighbors might become really important,” Cohen said. “If you can all agree to hunt the edges of your properties and leave the middle as a safe space, that could build up ducks in your area. Look at the deer literature, look at the turkey literature…what we have learned is the less disturbance we put down, the more returns we are going to get in seeing animals.”
So, what can be done to see more ducks during the season?
“If you can make more sanctuaries for ducks, that will theoretically get them moving to different places, increase their space use, and make it easier to shoot them,” Cohen said. “Hunters have constrained ducks and so they know that either I need to move as little as possible or I die. The hunters who are successful realize this, and they understand that you have to sacrifice hunt days for hunt quality.”
