John K. Flores: Why no ducks?

For the past several weeks, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries issued their notice of intent and subsequently adopted the 2025-26 hunting season dates and regulations. Though the annual ritual receives public input, by and large, the vast majority of hunters pay little attention to the process. There is one exception, waterfowl hunters.
Waterfowl hunters from the last day of the season until the beginning of the next season gobble up every piece of information that pertains to duck breeding populations and potential fall flights. What’s more, they typically have a lot to say, both good and bad, when it comes to management of waterfowl.
For the past 28 seasons, Mississippi Flyway hunters have enjoyed liberal 60-day duck seasons with six duck limits. To the layperson, things may appear to be going well for duck populations. After all, for nearly three decades there has been little to no changes in the season framework set by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, who in 1995 officially adopted a method of managing waterfowl called Adaptive Harvest Management.
AHM utilizes scientific data that includes breeding population surveys across the U.S. and Canada, pond and habitat survey data on the breeding grounds, harvest rates, and other environmental inputs to create a model that helps managers make harvest decisions.
Each year in late July and early August, the USF&WS releases its annual “Waterfowl Breeding Population and Habitat Survey.” This past year’s survey estimated a breeding population of 33.99 million ducks across the U.S. and Canada. This number reflects a steady decline in the past decade, where the 2014 “BPOP” survey revealed a breeding population of 49.15 million ducks.
It’s important to note that the breeding population doesn’t reflect what the fall flight will be.
The LDWF conducts aerial surveys each month throughout the hunting season that provides biologists critical migration and winter population estimates. November 2024’s 510,000 aerial estimate for the coastal and Little River Basin ducks was the lowest “ever” on record, which was lower than November 2023’s lowest ever estimate.
December 2024’s aerial estimate of 1.56 million was 83% higher than 2023’s lowest on record, but still a whopping 29% lower than the survey’s 10-year average.
Finally, it took frigid weather that brought snow to Louisiana’s gulf coast to see duck numbers increase in January to the tune of 2.25 million. However, this number is still 24% below the long-term average for ducks in the state. Moreover, the 17,000 mallards counted during the aerial survey was a record low.
All of these statistics are only to point out that the significant decline in duck numbers, based upon a variety of solid data, is clearly impacting waterfowl hunter’s bag limits and therefore perceptions of how ducks are being managed across the landscape.
So, why no ducks? Retired USF&WS Biologist Paul Yakupzack, in his manifesto, “The Duck Demise,” says it could be the data AHM models are using.
Yakupzack, who prior to retirement managed Mandalay National Wildlife Refuge near Houma, said, “The Fish and Wildlife Service breeding population survey is the cornerstone for managing duck populations in North America and has been since 1955. The BPOP models assume a 50-50 male to female mallard sex ratio when estimating the mallard breeding population.”
“However,” Yakupzack continued, “recent research has concluded that the mallard sex ratio is closer to 80-20 males to females, thus significantly overestimating the mallard population.”
All biologists agree that the loss of wetland habitat is the number one reason for a decline in waterfowl populations. What’s more, the loss of habitat is inversely proportional to the increase in corn production for the purpose of producing ethanol.
It’s hard to tell a farmer in the prairie pothole region of the upper Midwest who is trying to make a living to change his agricultural practices of draining and tiling acreage for the sake of ducks.
The price for a bushel of corn far exceeds the Conservation Reserve Program monies he gets to enroll his property in the program. For years this has been discussed ad nauseam.
Yakupzack said, “The BPOP survey also estimates the number of May ponds each year as an index of the number of wetlands used by ducks for breeding. In the early days of the BPOP, a May pond was a pothole surrounded by vegetation where hen ducks nested and produced young ducks largely hidden from marauding predators. Fast forward to current May ponds and many are drained grassless wet spots in agricultural fields that are absolutely worthless to nesting ducks.”
Yakupzack went on to say that because of the protocols set in place since the initiation of the BPOP in the 1950s, the drained and useless wet spots he refers to are still counted as May ponds even though they have little to no value to nesting ducks. He concludes that the yearly overestimating of mallard populations and May pond data has led to false conclusions that North American duck populations are more robust than actually exist.
To a lesser degree, there are other things impacting duck populations, hunting pressure being one. Mechanical devices like Mojo spinning wing decoys are known to dupe immature ducks.
Cell phones not only have apps that can put you on the “X,” they also allow hunters to communicate who is doing what in the field and where.
Surface drive boats allow hunters to get to where the ducks are, sometimes pressuring them out of rest areas. The improvement in shotguns, barrel chokes, and shotshells over the past couple of decades have increased hunter lethality.
Yakupzack said, “The Fish and Wildlife Service, along with the flyway councils, have yet to acknowledge the facts and continue to set season length and bag limits based on faulty survey results through Adaptive Harvest Management models and matrices. The same 60-day season and 6 duck bag limits has been in place for 28 years despite faulty survey estimates.”
Yakupzack went on to say, “Although the primary historic driver of duck population decline is likely loss of habitat, continued liberal duck regulations based on faulty population data and wetlands data is likely adding to decimated duck populations across North America.”
Louisiana’s annual duck harvest from 1999 to 2022 went from 1.9 million ducks to 544,000. Louisiana’s mallard harvest over the same period went from 430,000 in 1999 to under 25,000 in 2022.
Most waterfowl hunters in Louisiana and Arkansas, with a few exceptions, agree the 2024-25 duck season was not good.
This past winter I went to Oklahoma to hunt ducks for a couple days, particularly with mallards in mind. In two days of hunting, four of us killed eight ducks total, four of which were pretty red-legged mallards.
The outfitter felt bad for us because we traveled so far to shoot a handful of ducks. So much so, he gave us half of our money back.
It will take a lot of voices to get the USF&WS to change the way they manage ducks. The issue is complex and trying to get the Federal Government to change is often next to impossible.
The good news is, the duck demise isn’t a Blue State-Red State, issue. Contact your Congressman and Senators and let them know your concern.
John Flores is the Morgan City Review’s outdoor writer. He can be contacted at gowiththeflo@cox.net.