Recent waterfowl aerial surveys conducted in Arkansas and Mississippi illustrate how little duck habitat exists in those two states.
Bracketed between the Mississippi Flyway and the eastern edge of the Central Flyway, Arkansas has more diverse habitat than Mississippi and more potential for restoring or creating new habitat. The Arkansas River Valley has significant potential. Unfortunately, wing dams and revetments have turned backwaters and marshes into scrub land. It is detrimental to waterfowl and especially to fisheries.
The Mississippi Flyway is our bread and butter. Its role as the winter repository for ducks, particularly mallards, made Arkansas the duck hunting capital of the world. We still are the hunting capital of the world for what few ducks remain, with increasingly high numbers of hunters concentrated into the same amount of habitat.
The Mississippi Alluvial Plain (Delta) once contained about 25 million acres of prime waterfowl habitat, mostly in the form of forested wetlands that extended from southeastern Missouri to southern Louisiana. That acreage has been reduced to about 300,000.
The Delta comprises roughly one-third of Arkansas' land mass, but only a small percentage contains prime waterfowl habitat. The map that the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission included with its most recent aerial survey shows about 153,000 mallards concentrated in about 30 areas from Missouri to Louisiana. Only eight areas have high concentrations. A mere 153,000 mallards were distributed across about 10 million acres, but only in the fraction of those 10 million acres that had water.
At the start of 2025, rainfall has put a lot more water on the landscape, but the weather north of Arkansas has not been cold enough to push many new ducks into the state.
From this we posit three scenarios.
One, a relatively small number of ducks is now sparsely distributed across a greater amount of acreage.
Two, a relatively small number of ducks remain concentrated in different areas as they bounce around to exploit fresh food sources.
Three -- the theory supported by my observers in southeast Arkansas -- is that rain and thunderstorms pushed the ducks "out of the country" to more hospitable climates. I don't know where that would be. It rained all over the country last weekend.
The key datum, however, is that a limited amount of prime waterfowl habitat is available in America's most important waterfowl wintering area.
Mississippi's portion of the Delta is less than half of Arkansas's portion, about 4.5 million acres. The Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks conducted its last aerial waterfowl survey Dec. 10-13. It estimated 302,000 ducks in its entire portion of the Delta. Only 49,533 were mallards. That's 57% less than the long-term average for the survey period. Only four areas had high distributions of ducks, "high" being described as more than 115 ducks per square mile.
Most of Mississippi's Delta contained what was generously described as "medium" concentrations of ducks, with a range of 12-115 per square mile. About 20 areas had fewer than 12 ducks per square mile.
Unlike Arkansas, the duck hunting culture in western Mississippi appears to have waned to irrelevance. Lamar Boyd of Beaver Dam Lake Hunting Services recently told us very few residents of Tunica County hunt ducks. Boyd makes this assessment from a credible perch. He guides at Beaver Dam Lake, one of the America's most famous duck hunting locations. Most of his clients are non-residents. People his age and younger in Tunica County don't hunt ducks. They hunt deer. The small amount of duck habitat is leased and not accessible to local people. Deer are everywhere, and they are accessible.
Boyd said he believes the lack of local interest bodes poorly for duck hunting and duck conservation. If there's no demand for duck habitat, then there is no compelling reason to supply duck habitat.
On the other hand, low supply of a commodity increases the value of the supply. This, in turn, increases the value of the remaining amount of duck habitat. That creates a potential growth market in which there is value in creating new duck habitat.
Eventually winter precipitation will return to the prairies and refresh breeding habitat. Ducks will prosper. If we want them to keep coming, it would behoove us to beckon them with more habitat and food.