It’s December, so naturally a sportsman’s thoughts turn to baseball. Oh, that the boys of summer could be so lucky.
Come sunrise Saturday, we get a second chance, an opening day do-over, if you will.
And duck hunters making their way back to the dugout for the season’s second opener in northeast Colorado are hoping that it won’t be deja vu all over again.
Sure, the forecast calls for another hot one. But the big difference between the start of the second split and the original Oct. 11 opening day of duck season north of Interstate 70 and east of I-25 is that many ducks are already here. And after a two-week reprieve from hunters, they’ve been getting comfortable.
“Woods Lake is loaded without about 30,000 ducks right now,” Cash Hogsett, manager of , said of the club and guide service’s property near Wiggins. “I’m hoping we can get after them on Saturday.”
As in Colorado have understood for the month of December, the series of cold-weather systems that began with mid-November’s intense “polar vortex” has pushed both ducks and geese out of northern breeding grounds this fall, creating flurries of opportunity for hunters on the southern edge of the fronts.
Coupled with the ideal spring nesting conditions that saw duck populations in the Prairie Pothole Region climbing to the , Colorado’s eastern plains have witnessed a solid early-season migration, although many more birds remain still to come.
“As always, the key variable is cold weather to the north,” Jim Gammonley, waterfowl biologist for Colorado Parks and Wildlife, posted on the agency’s . “Although some duck species migrate south early no matter the weather conditions, many mallards and Canada geese can stay far north of us until the cold weather forces them to move. Hunters need to watch for cold fronts to push birds south from southern Canada, the Dakotas, Montana and Wyoming and plan their hunting trips accordingly. If you see snow and cold-weather systems north of here, plan to be in your blind as soon as possible.”
With the duck season’s first split coming to a close Dec. 1 in the state’s waterfowl-rich northeast region, jumping into the blind when the weather turned cold wasn’t always possible. But the closure is designed with hunters in mind, ideally creating an overall season that best coincides with migration patterns.
With local water largely free of ice and several large flocks taking up residence, it would seem that the timing is working out.
Earlier this year, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service surveys estimated a total breeding duck population in the Prairie Pothole Region to our north at 49.2 million birds, an increase of 8 percent from 2013. That’s the largest population estimate since waterfowl surveys began in 1955.
Mallards, the and most popular breed among Colorado duck hunters, reached a breeding population of 10.9 million birds, second only to the record of 11.2 million mallards set in 1958.
The most recent aerial waterfowl survey conducted by the South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks reported more than 300,000 mallards still lingering on the Missouri River along with nearly 100,000 Canada geese and nearly 30,000 light geese. Of course, it will take another round of cold and snow to our north to motivate those birds to move in our direction.
“We have open water on the Missouri River, no snow and access to a lot of food,” South Dakota’s chief waterfowl biologist, Rocco Murano, told . “And it seems that we have this large group of mallards that are determined to remain as far north as they can. It is going to take some serious weather to get them out of here.”
Although temperatures are expected to start dropping next week, the National Weather Service in Sioux City, S.D., isn’t calling for any significant weather events in the next 10 days, certainly nothing comparable to the frigid weeks of November.
The downside to that prognosis is that the birds that have made it to Colorado so far are likely to be the only birds we see until there’s enough snow to cover up food sources along the Missouri River.
With the added pressure of hunting resuming in Colorado on Saturday, it’s possible some ducks may begin to move north. Hunters have until Jan. 25, 2015, to discover for themselves.
