Restoring Duck Distribution
Delta is set to produce millions of ducks—and spearhead their return to traditional southern strongholds
By Bill Miller
The success of Delta’s Million Duck Campaign will deliver the greatest, most enduring impact on duck hunting since creation of the Federal Duck Stamp. As the dollars on MDC commitments of $284 million are realized, they’ll bulldoze the path to scale Delta Duck Production to add 1 million ducks to every fall flight, every year—forever.
Yet, exceeding the MDC fundraising goal is but one example in a history replete with successful marking of milestones. The Duck Hunters OrganizationTM never rests on the laurels of previous achievements. Well before any goal is reached, Delta’s leaders are already thinking, “What’s the next transformational accomplishment by which we will make more ducks and more duck hunters?”
With careful consideration by Delta’s board of directors, leadership team, and scientists, The Duck Hunters Organization’s next focus is “Duck Distribution.”
“Delta will produce a million ducks. In fact, we’ll produce many millions of ducks. As we do, the waterfowl management world will recognize the fact that Delta-style Duck Production is, far and away, the most important factor in delivering successful hunting seasons,” said Delta CEO Jason Tharpe. “However, we’ve realized that even as we’re adding millions of ducks to the fall flight, in the end it’s not only the number of ducks that matters to hunters. Equally important is where those ducks go and finding access and opportunity to hunt them. We’ve dubbed this the study of ‘Duck Distribution,’ and it’s the next frontier of waterfowl management that Delta will conquer.”
As described by Delta chief conservation officer Joel Brice in a recent “Voice of the Duck Hunter” podcast, (“Voice of the Duck Hunter,” episode No. 64.) Delta’s concept of Duck Distribution has five key variables:
• Duck Production
• Weather Variability
• Changes in Agriculture
• Public Land Issues
• Hunter Expectations
Brice said, “The first four of these directly impact duck distribution and, therefore, can positively or negatively impact hunters. The fifth is based on an individual’s lifetime of personal experiences, both past and present, and is more of a sociological component than a hard science component, as are the others.”
The magnitude of data that’s been gathered on each of these components is hard to fathom. Delta will devote the finest scientific resources to analyzing the data to deliver impactful information and actions for North America’s duck hunters.
Duck Production
Delta’s mantra has long been, “We shoot the fall flight.” That means that hunter success in all flyways is primarily based on what happens during the roughly 90 days the ducks are on the breeding grounds. Good production conditions result in more ducks overall—i.e., “see more ducks, shoot more ducks, hunters are happier.”
At least equally important is that good production produces more birds of the year. The more “juvies” that comprise the flocks migrating south, the more birds hunters will decoy and the higher the harvests will be. Delta chief policy officer John Devney said, “The fact that age ratios during good production years skew heavily to younger birds is critical in hunting success; there’s even a term for it—’juvenile vulnerability.’ It’s in Louisiana and other southern locales where this makes the biggest difference. The data of season after season makes it absolutely clear that annual production, especially the number of juveniles in the system, is directly correlated to southern hunter harvest numbers. Southern hunter success swings wildly based on duck production and age ratios.”
Three of the four pillars of Delta’s mission primarily support Duck Production. Obviously, there’s Predator Management and Hen Houses in the Duck Production pillar, but likewise Delta’s policy work in Habitat Conservation creates voluntary, incentive-based programs to protect remaining vital wetlands that are required for duck production. Delta’s Research pillar creates, refines, and improves the tools to produce ducks.
When it comes to Duck Production’s role in Duck Distribution, Delta president and chief scientist Frank Rohwer sums it up succinctly: “Duck Production is one of the key drivers in Duck Distribution. And there are only two things we need to do to improve annual duck production: protect small wetlands and deal with predators. Our policy team works to protect the most critical breeding wetlands and our Duck Production team works on the predator problem.
“Unfortunately, in recent years we’ve seen pretty poor duck production because the prairies are dry. When you look at the prairie pothole region where probably half the ducks we shoot come from, it’s been a tough stretch of years. The first ingredient for duck production is … water on the prairies at the right time of year. If we don’t have it, ducks are going to overfly to nest where they are far less productive.”
Weather Variability
It’s been an insider’s chuckle that over its 114-year history, one of the things that Delta has tried hardest to change is the average duck hunter’s answer to the question, “Where do your ducks come from?” which, for many, was, “Well … just over those trees.”
In all seriousness, we’ve been pretty successful in strengthening that awareness. Today’s duck hunters know that the ducks they see—whether bountiful or few—come from the northern breeding grounds of the prairies, the Canadian parklands and boreal forest, and the Alaskan and Arctic delta regions.
As Brice put it, “Pretty much no matter where you hunt ducks, everybody’s looking north wondering, ‘When are the ducks going to get here?’”
Regardless of your views on climate change, it’s impossible to discount the anecdotal experiences of hunters in the northern latitudes of the U.S. and in Canada that ducks stay there longer than they used to—including those of Delta’s own staff, who have been hunting there for decades. Devney recalls a time when hunting in North Dakota and points north was almost certainly done by Veteran’s Day each year. Brice remembers many years when everything was frozen up and lasting snow lay in the fields by Halloween.
Rohwer recounted, “I’ve only lived here year-round for 12 years, but my friends who are in their 70s tell me, ‘We never had a 60-day duck season. That was just a figment of the government’s imagination. We had 30-day duck seasons at best.’ And now they say, ‘We have 45-day seasons on the prairies, and if we hunt the river, we can shoot ducks all 60 days.’ That means if you’re hunting in Louisiana, you’re waiting and waiting and waiting.”
According to Rohwer, the meteorological records from the last 130 years show that the winter of 2024-2025 was the fourth warmest ever in North Dakota.
Some species of ducks, such as blue-winged teal, are driven by photoperiod. That’s why early teal seasons in the middle- and southern-latitudes are so reliably good. However, species like mallards and green-winged teal stick around until they have no access to open water and fields to feed. Therefore, it’s essential that the study of Duck Distribution include analysis of meteorologic and climatic data linked to data of when ducks show up in lower latitude wintering areas.
And conditions that “push” ducks is only one aspect of weather variability to account for. Precipitation, or lack thereof, and its impact on the availability of water and agricultural outcomes on the wintering ground is also integral to when ducks arrive, where they go, and whether they move. All need deeper scientific investigation to deliver practical knowledge to hunters.
Changes In Agriculture
Changes in agricultural practices and land on waterfowl breeding grounds in the north, in the wintering regions of the south, and everywhere in between have been continual since European settlement began in North America. And, as is true of change in any field, its rate continually accelerates.
New agricultural practices certainly impact duck production in the north. That’s why Delta seeks to create cooperative, voluntary, incentivized programs to bring landowners on board to protect wetlands—especially the most important small, shallow breeding wetlands embedded in agricultural landscapes.
But when it comes to Duck Distribution during hunting season, which is what hunters are most directly concerned about, it’s the ongoing changes in agricultural practices in the mid-latitudes and in the South that most impact where ducks go, where they stay, and when they arrive there.
Devney said, “We’ve certainly seen changes. You look at southern Louisiana, for example; we’ve seen a huge shift from rice agriculture to sugar cane. On the Texas Gulf Coast, the Lower Colorado Authority water gets scarce so rice falls completely out of the system. In the Mississippi Valley farmers are far less likely to do post-harvest flooding of rice stubble than they would have been in the late 1990s. All of those are seismic changes in terms of local wintering habitat—the thing that holds birds in the area during the hunting seasons.”
Rohwer added that in Louisiana, even farming for crawfish has impacted duck distribution. Farmers used to flood rice fields just a few inches deep in the winter to aid decomposition of rice stubble. Now, with a worldwide market for crawfish, the farmers who raise them in their rice fields flood 18 to 24 inches deep. Pintails and especially green-winged teal don’t like to reach that deep to pick up leftover rice grains. He said, “These subtle changes in human behavior and markets have massive impact on duck distribution.”
Public Land Issues
Delta regularly hears from hunters nationwide about the degraded conditions of and hunting opportunities on public lands. Refuges, wildlife management areas, and other federal and state public acreage, often paid for by duck hunters’ dollars, more and more frequently find themselves without resources for staffing, maintenance, land management, or anything else.
Devney said, “This may be the biggest issues we’ll be dealing with for the rest of our careers. Delta’s R3 team and the government and NGO R3 communities are working really hard to recruit new hunters, but what are we recruiting them into? There’s not a lot of places left to hunt. I’m real worried about that.”
In 2020, Devney and a colleague from one of Delta’s conservation partners undertook assessment of the status of National Wildlife Refuge System to understand the state of “deferred maintenance” (aka broken equipment and systems they have no money to fix) on NWRs. They found that on priority waterfowl refuges alone, the backlog on the assets to manage wetland habitat was $250 million. And that number is nested in the broader USFWS Refuge system deferred maintenance backlog currently pegged at $2.6 billion!
More recent analysis of the US Fish and Wildlife Service budgets going back to fiscal year 2010 shows that only correcting for inflation, the system is underwater another $230 million for the refuge system. There’s been a 29% reduction in workforce, meaning that there are 711 fewer people managing federal refuges.
In the same exercise, compiling the data for state-owned priority waterfowl management lands, they found $605 million in deferred maintenance!
These big numbers mean big impacts on Duck Distribution everywhere. Degradation of habitat resulting from lack of resources to maintain it is, without a doubt, one of the main reasons that ducks aren’t showing up at the same places they used to during their migrations and the reason hunters aren’t getting a crack at them.
Delta’s research on Duck Distribution promises to assess the magnitude of the impact and what other factors come into play.
The same holds true regarding public land hunting access and opportunity. Perhaps access remains similar or is even growing, but the quality of the hunting is definitely on the decline. This, too, needs scientific study.
A major part of the Duck Distribution initiative at Delta will be advocating for improved funding and management of public lands for ducks and duck hunters. Delta supporters—and all duck hunters—should stay alert for the opportunities that the Duck Hunters Organization creates in to make voices heard and push for improved outcomes.
Hunter Expectations
Rohwer summed up the problem of hunter expectations in three words: “Perception is reality.”
Social media messaging that is of questionable sourcing and validity enables many in the duck hunting community to watch others hunt ducks 365 days a year. They see limit after limit after limit splashed by others. It’s natural to think, “I should be able to do that, too.” That’s the perception.
But how do you know those limits in the reels and on TV weren’t collected over days of hunting rather than hours? That could be the reality.
Hunter expectations are not a direct driver of Duck Distribution. In fact, the inverse is probably true. While Delta can’t impact any individual’s perceptions or expectations, we do promise to always deliver the scientific facts of what we can research and our truthful analysis of others’ scientifically gathered data. We’ll deliver the most honest input on population and harvest models to accurately influence hunting regulations to do our best for ducks and duck hunters.
One model that Delta follows and will always defend is the fact that regulated hunting has virtually no impact on duck populations. Ninety percent of the equation determining of the number of ducks in the fall flight in any given year is the conditions of and occurrences in those 90 days on the breeding grounds. Hunting’s impact is insignificant, especially as hunter numbers decline.
And that takes us back to where we began—Duck Production.
The New Frontier
When it comes to the new frontier of Duck Distribution, Delta dreams big and will repeat its history by achieving big. Tharpe said, “Delta’s digging deep into these five factors to deliver solutions and act on them. We intend to get NWR and WMA spending prioritized and corrected. We’ll call on our chapters to increase the projects they participate in on key public lands. We will expand our working wetlands models beyond the Dakotas and Manitoba into all the US states and Canadian provinces of the PPR. We will stand behind ag programs to incentivize farmers to winter-flood their rice fields to the benefit of ducks and their land. And we’ve recently added Dr. Todd Arnold to Delta’s team to focus us even more intently on updating duck hunting regulatory models at the federal level. Delta’s future success in Duck Distribution, will be the next, next equal of the duck stamp program.”
Bill Miller is communications director for Delta Waterfowl.