Delta gets a drenching
Duck hunters hope recent rains bring birds to region
By Randy Zellers
AGFC Communications
The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission's aerial survey team is in the air this week for its annual January Midwinter Survey of waterfowl, and what they'll see this time over the landscape is an inundation of water that wasn't there in December.
The state received an
See DUCKS, page A9 DUCKS
From page A8
long-awaited major rainfail last week. However, instead of 4-6 inches throughout all of the Arkansas Delta and other parts of The Natural State, what happened instead were pockets of torrential rainfall leaving certain spots with up to 12 inches of rain, where others saw 2 inches or less. The town of DeWitt in Arkansas County was flooded with a foot of rain. George H.
Dunklin Jr. Bayou Meto WMA, which is in Arkansas and Jefferson counties, was hit with 8 inches of rain. Ducks cleared out of Missouri in a mass exodus around Christmastime, as reported by the Missouri Department of Conservation. Snow and ice cover, heavy northwest winds and a drastic drop in temperature in The Show-Me State pushed mallards and other ducks into the bottomland hardwoods and flooded Delta fields.
Reports forwarded to the AGFC Waterfowl Report indicated a big jump in mallards seen in east-central Arkansas, especially in the Big Creek area between the Dale Bumpers White River NWR and the St.
Francis National Forest, where consistent birds were observed by waterfowlers on hunting leases or private lands. It will be interesting to see how that lines up this week with the AGFC's aerial survey of waterfowl.
The 60-day waterfowl season continues through Jan.
31. That includes hunting for all geese, ducks, mergansers and geese.
