Georgia 2019 Duck Season Forecast

If you’ve seen the articles from Ducks Unlimited or Delta Waterfowl, you know overall duck numbers are down this season. The estimated duck population is the lowest it’s been in 12 years and about 5 1/2 percent below the 20-year average.

Does that matter for Georgia duck hunters? Not so much. Most Georgia hunters are killing wood ducks, and Atlantic Flyway wood duck numbers look good and have been improving each year.

A lack of water is a bigger concern than overall duck populations right now. Migrating ducks this year will see less shine from flooded wetlands, certainly less than last winter, when swamps and lowlands were full of water after Hurricane Michael.

Much of south and middle Georgia got much-needed rain opening day of firearms deer season, but we’re still in a drought, and many swamps are bone dry.

We spoke with Greg Balkcom, WRD’s state waterfowl biologist, the week before the big rains from Tropical Storm Nestor swept through Georgia.

Greg said our duck hunting isn’t impacted as much by population variances as the Mississippi Flyway states are. Water conditions, however, could impact the hunting.

“I have been out in the field looking at our impoundments, and what I’m seeing is that it’s pretty dry. Just the other day, a place that normally has 2 or 3 feet of water had about 6 inches of water on it. Typically, September, October and early November is the driest time of the year anyway, but this year it’s been a little drier than normal.

“Some of our areas that we can pump water into—Rum Creek for example, the Oconee impoundments—those I’m not concerned about. It’s some of the other ones where we rely on rainfall and runoff to flood, they may turn into late season opportunity more so than early opportunity.”

Work Continues At Altamaha WMA, Expect Impacts

Altamaha Waterfowl Management Area and its waterfowl impoundments were damaged by Hurricane Irma on Sept. 11, 2017, and work to repair that damage is still ongoing.

“Waterfowl hunters planning to hunt this area should take note of repairs and conditions to help prevent unwanted surprises and frustrations,” said a WRD press release.

Altamaha WMA is divided into three management units—Butler Island, Champney Island and Rhett’s Island. Here’s the status of each heading into the 2019-2020 waterfowl season:

Butler Island: The Butler Island impoundments have been stabilized and waterfowl habitats are in good condition. Technicians on the area have been extremely busy preparing the area for this season and the ducks are beginning to settle in.

Champney Island: Repair work on the West Champney, Old Snipe and New Snipe units will begin in the immediate future. Hunters are strongly encouraged to scout these units ahead of their desired hunting dates and be aware that water level conditions may change from week to week, so continuous scouting will be important.

Rhett’s Island: Repairs to the hunting areas of Rhett’s Island are ongoing. Due to the repair schedule, complete flooding of the impoundments may be delayed past the opening of Waterfowl season. Access into the impoundments is a challenge due to the crossover areas being destroyed during the storm. Dike restoration is ongoing, so replacement crossovers cannot be installed at the current time.  While some waterfowl hunting opportunity does exist on Rhett’s Island, the issues with access will be extremely challenging to hunters not familiar with the area.

Meanwhile, more rains should help fill some of the swamps that have been dry for months. If they don’t get enough water, hunters might think that during winters when the swamps are dry that reservoir hunting and areas where water can be pumped might be hotspots, but that’s not always the case.

“What I’ve heard from hunters in the past is that in years when we are really dry, it seems like a lot of the ducks just keep on trucking,” Greg said. “If they’re flying over the landscape, and they’re seeing all those Carolina bays dry and they’re seeing all those potholes dry, they just keep going, whether they go to the Gulf Coast or interior Florida. They don’t pile into the reservoirs like you would hope they would and hang around here, they just keep on going.

“And conversely, when it’s really wet, they tend to spread out, and that makes for bad hunting—it’s really hard for hunters to get on them.”

While overall duck numbers don’t look great this year, Greg said that’s not something Georgia hunters need to worry too much about.

“When I’m looking at impacts to Georgia, I’m not looking so much at the prairie potholes… the duck factory of North America. Most of our ducks are coming from the Great Lakes and eastward, eastern Canada and the northeast U.S. and those areas.”

Greg said the good news for Georgia hunters is that wood ducks are doing well.

“For the long term, wood duck numbers have been climbing as long as we’ve been keeping up with wood ducks through the breeding birds survey back to 1966. The Atlantic Flyway wood duck numbers are up a little over 1 percent for that long term. In the short term, just since ’09, we’re climbing almost 2 percent a year.

“This year for ringnecks we are just about dead on the long-term average, the 20-year average. Ringnecks did actually jump up a little this year, up about 10 percent from last year. We were down some last year, this year we’re up, and we’re spot on for long-term average. For the guys who are hunting Seminole or Clarks Hill or for a lesser extent Eufaula, I expect it to be a perfectly average year for ringnecks.

“For mallards we’re still looking at a long-term decline (on the Atlantic Flyway), and that’s been going on for some years. We’re down another 2 percent this year, and we’re about 16 percent below the long-term average for Eastern mallards. That is something that the Flyway has been watching for several years. There’s a really good survey called the Atlantic Flyway Breeding Waterfowl Survey, and they’ve been seeing a steady long-term decline since the late ’90s in those eastern mallards.

“Eastern Canada mallards are doing a little bit better, but most of our birds come from northeastern U.S. We have an honest to goodness long-term decline. We don’t know why. We seriously doubt it’s harvest related. It does appear that maybe it’s habitat related. We’re going to be looking into that over the next several years. But with fewer mallards, that was the reason for the decease in the (mallard) bag limit from four to two.

“There’s a lot of good science going on looking at eastern mallards right now. But—long-term decline, fewer mallards on the landscape—we’ve got to drop that bag limit and see what we can do.”

The overall duck harvest in Georgia has remained mostly steady for the past 10 to 15 years. Since 2006, the average Georgia duck harvest is 143,000 birds per season. Most of that Georgia duck harvest is wood ducks.

“Wood ducks are far and away the majority, about 60% of the total bag,” Greg said.

“If you look back in the ’90s, mallards used to be the No. 2 bird in the bag. Mallard harvest has declined, so now ringnecks are actually our No. 2 bird in the bag, about 11% of our harvest is ringnecks every year. Mallards are down to about 7 1/2%, greenwing teal follow them up, and then you’ve got bluewing teal and mergansers about 3%, gadwall, scaup and redheads at about 2% of the harvest.”

Without a doubt, Georgia’s quota waterfowl hunts are the toughest draw for public-land hunters vying for a quota-hunt spot. This year there’s a new waterfowl quota hunt in Georgia.

“New this year is B.F. Grant Wildlife Management Area’s waterfowl impoundments,” Greg said. “We built those in the late 1980s in partnership with Ducks Unlimited. It’s a combination of three dikes and three water control structures, permanent water reservoir upstream and two floodable impoundments down below. We made a nice investment there that improved our management capability. We decided we can probably offer a little public hunting opportunity.

“We’re really happy to make those improvements at B.F. Grant. And given now that we can manage it better, to ease into a few quota hunts. We’re starting conservative. Just a couple of hunts this year, but we’ll see how it works out and see how things looks in the future, but we’re happy to have that new opportunity for Georgia waterfowl hunters.”     

More Duck Talk With Greg Balkcom On GON Podcast
To hear the full interview with WRD Waterfowl Biologist Greg Balkcom as he shares more information about duck hunting in Georgia, head to www.gon.com/gon-outdoors-podcasts. Also, make sure to subscribe to GON Outdoors podcasts on your favorite podcast provider. You can download GON podcasts to your phone and listen while you’re driving to the hunting property.

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