Cool Fronts Bring Hope for Alabama Waterfowl Hunters

By DAVID RAINER, Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources

A couple of welcome cool fronts have moved through Alabama recently, increasing the hope that the state's waterfowl seasons will start with a bang when the early teal season opens Saturday, September 13, and runs through September 21.

Several reports have indicated that blue-winged teal are on the move with the changing weather patterns. Unfortunately, the most recent survey from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) indicates the teal numbers have not rebounded as hoped, and another nine-day early teal season is in store for next year. Although the overall number of ducks in the survey is basically unchanged since last year, blue-winged teal numbers were down 4% from 2024 and down 13% below the long-term average.

Despite the lower numbers, if the weather is right, Alabama's hunters could experience a successful start to the waterfowl hunting seasons. The daily bag limit during the early teal season is six birds per person. Hunting hours are one-half hour before sunrise to sunset.

Seth Maddox of the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources' (ADCNR) Wildlife and Freshwater Fisheries (WFF) Division is on the Mississippi Flyway Gamebird Technical Committee, which is meeting this week in Bloomington, Indiana. The committee will study the most recent data and provide technical assistance to the USFWS for consideration of future waterfowl management in the Mississippi Flyway, which extends from the farthest northern reaches of Canada to the Gulf Coast.

"The survey data is almost identical to last year's except for the pond count," said Maddox, Assistant Chief of the WFF's Wildlife Section. "The pond count was down, which tells us the habitat conditions were not quite as good as they were in 2024. That tells us that production this summer was probably down a little bit from normal."

Waterfowl hunters will have to make sure their blinds are in top shape, with concealment an important issue because of the makeup of the birds that will be headed south this fall and winter.

"There will likely be fewer juvenile birds in fall flight this year than we typically see," Maddox said. "Juvenile birds provide a lot of hunting opportunity because they're naïve to the migration and the hunting pressure."

Maddox said the pond count in the prairie pothole regions of the northern U.S. and Canada likely doesn't tell the whole story of the nesting success of the waterfowl population, which was estimated at 33.980 million this year, compared to 33.988 million last year.

"Looking more into it, when they fly over and do the pond count, it's just a snapshot in time," he said. "Even though the habitat conditions were poor at that point, they got rain later in the summer, which improved the habitat conditions. For the early-nesting birds, they got a chance to re-nest. For the ones that were successful, they had good brood-rearing conditions later in the summer."

Although Maddox suspects the fall flight might be a little suppressed, he said duck hunters who persevere throughout the season may well be rewarded as they were last season.

"Overall, I think what we saw last year was a late migration," he said. "We had warmer weather until January, and then we got those two snow events, one in north Alabama and one on the Gulf Coast. Those arctic blasts really pushed birds down late. We didn't really start seeing good numbers of birds until mid-January. We really rely on ice and snow cover north of us to push birds down south.

"It was a slow season up until mid-January. If you got discouraged early in the season and didn't go hunting any more after the first of the year, you probably had a poor season. But I think the people who are diehard hunters and stuck with it until the end of the season were rewarded in the last two weeks."