After a hot start with many areas of the state holding some early ducks, Arkansas’s 2015-2016 duck season has been a grind with no push of new ducks and the scattering of the current population due to significant rain events. Scheduling a bulk of the first split during the full moon didn’t help matters either.
A majority of the eastern portion of the state has received over 12″ of rain since mid November which has key duck habitat in the White, Black and Cache Rivers and all their tributaries well out of their banks. The ducks that were on the Grand Prairie have been pulled into those freshly flooded hardwoods where an abundance of food exists. Given the extremely warm weather of the second split, the ducks aren’t having to move much in search of food.
Not that there are a lot of ducks in the state anyway. The big push hasn’t even made it to Iowa or Missouri yet so we are a few weeks behind migration wise.
Weather is supposed to drop down a little more normal this week (which will be about a 20 degree drop over this past weekend) so maybe things will improve. We as duck hunters can’t control the weather and have a hard time controlling the water so the best advice is to make the most of it. Surely at some point things get better. This might the huge productive January we’ve all been waiting on.
November and early December definitely qualified as lacking. And that’s probably putting it nicely.
