Duck season has been a strange one for local hunters.

    Some are covered up with ducks while others cannot seem to find any but that is not the weird part.

    Hunters with access to flooded rice and other freshwater fields are shooting fewer birds than those in the marsh for the most part.

    Charles Wynn said his lease near Winnie is holding a few teal, mottled ducks and shovelers but even they are scattered.

    “My friends who are hunting down south of the Intracoastal in the marsh are covered up in shovelers and greenwings. They have very few big ducks but are getting plenty of action.”

    According to Mike Checkett biologist for Ducks Unlimited and host of DUTV the bulk of the birds are still far north of us.

    “The last reports we got South Dakota and Nebraska were loaded with birds. Most of the big ducks hunters in Texas pursue have not arrived yet,” he said.

    I spoke with Checkett just before our last cold front, which pushed more birds down but there is a good chance we will not see the fruits of an awesome year of duck production until the second split.

    Geese are a whole other issue with some fair numbers of specklebellies in the area and scattered groups of snows. I drove Interstate 10 between Beaumont and Houston on four separate days last week and did not see a single goose.

    Even typically goose-rich areas like El Camp and Wharton have few snows.

    Billy Stransky of Texas R.I.C.E. a Wharton-based nonprofit group dedicated to enhancing wetlands said there are around 30,000 white geese in the Garwood area but normally there are more than 100,000.

    “We haven’t head the weather to push a lot of the geese down yet and not as many geese are coming to Texas as they used to,” he said.

    Stransky points to a trip he took to Arkansas a few years ago to see if the rumors were true about the number of snows.

    “It was unbelievable. There is more water and habitat down one road than Texas R.I.C.E. will create and there were geese everywhere,” he said.

    Arkansas hunters shoot very few geese in comparison to Texans as they focus most of their efforts on mallards.

    Light pressure along with plenty of food and water might very well be changing migration patterns for geese.

    Cold winds should blow more snows our direction in the coming weeks along with more ducks. While the goose hatch was light meaning there will be few young birds, the amount of ducks produced this year is incredible. If a good portion of it makes it down to Texas it could be a memorable season.

    Hunters will just have to wait and see.