Is the Central Flyway Overtaking the Mississippi?

Griffen Walden for SPLIT REED

I’m now in the final leg of my twenty-second trip around the sun, and I’ve been duck hunting since I was about 12. So that takes us back to the 2010-2011 season. I can recall those cold winters, and the few years that followed very well; from around that ’10 – ‘11 season up to about 2015, I had many limits in my days afield.

Being from Memphis, what was considered to be some of the best duck hunting in the world was always just a few hours away in Arkansas & Mississippi. I thought I had it made – how can a kid be this lucky to get into duck hunting, and already be standing in timber, consistently holding a full strap by shortly after daylight seemingly every time I went out, for years? See, in my mind, the Midwest was the plains – meant for upland bird & mule deer hunting. The hardwood of the south was what I knew to be the duck hunting Mecca, that people would fight for an invite to, and wait years to book a trip to hunt. But there I was, killing ducks weekend after weekend, not thinking a thing of it.

But then somewhere around my starting college, maybe in 2016 or 2017, I clearly remember a season where we just didn’t kill as many birds. I hunted all the same places across that area and went out roughly the same number of times, but there just weren’t as many ducks and geese, and it seems it’s stayed that way since. When I used to drive from Memphis to Brinkley, Arkansas to hunt, I can remember what seemed like every rice field being covered in white, and not because of snow. I recall pulling off the side of the road with my friends and parents to count the ducks we could see through the hardwood from the shoulder of the highway. Now when I return home from Fayetteville to Memphis for breaks and drive clear across the state, I just don’t see that anymore. A field of snow geese is pretty exciting for me to notice nowadays, and even more so a timber-hole full of mallards.

Far before Split Reed, I kept up with waterfowling in social media. Circa 2012, around the age of my first iPhone and getting a Facebook account, etc. I used to spend hours scrolling through photos of people standing in the timber with ducks pouring in through the limbs, and full straps nailed to trees – the location tag almost always saying ‘so-and-so, Arkansas or MS.’ Now when I check Instagram to look at what’s going on in the broad world of duck & goose hunting, it seems like everything I see is tagged in Oklahoma or one of the Dakotas. I actually hunted Oklahoma myself just a few weeks ago and bagged more birds than I had in the past two years combined in Arkansas.

What is going on?

What has changed that in my first years of duck hunting, the lower Mississippi flyway showed me more success than many see in a lifetime, but now I struggle to even see a field of snows, while folks in the central flyway are literally making a killing?

After some research, I found that it’s true – things have changed for the worse for the Mississippi flyway and have improved for the Central flyway in recent years. But the good news is it isn’t necessarily permanent. Attached below is probably the most interesting link and compilation of data I’ve ever seen when it comes to waterfowl, and it’s from the ultimate source – U.S. Fish & Wildlife, Population Status of Migratory Birds.

This page has data tracing waterfowl population & wetland habitat in its entirety, dating back to 1999. This unbelievable source has just about every piece of information you need to get to a common conclusion – duck numbers are on the decline. Now this doesn’t mean that there are fewer ducks in existence, it means that fewer ducks are migrating, and much less venturing as far as Mexico, every year. And those that do choose to head south, take the colder flyway out of two landlocked options – the central.

The second crucial piece of information necessary for explaining these altered migration patterns, or lack thereof, is the weather of the past few years. 2019 proved to be the second warmest year on record, and these spikes in temperature show a pretty direct correlation to yearly migration stats.

Here’s a link to the U.S. government’s Climate Studies site.

So, essentially what has been slowly happening over the past century, is now accelerating at a much more rapid pace in recent years. Warmer temperatures are causing less waterfowl to migrate in the first place. Those ducks that do migrate are choosing the central over the Mississippi flyway more & more consistently due to lack of cold temperatures, which are now only to truly be found in the Midwest.

So I hadn’t lost my touch in Dixie and wasn’t just having a bad luck streak. The changes happening before my eyes turned out to be very concrete, and I’m not the first to take notice of it. Ducks Unlimited, U.S. Fish & Wildlife, and similar entities have conducted studies & published information regarding these recent changes in temperature, and their effects on waterfowl migration patterns. While there’s always some variance in yearly flights, and there are still plenty of honey-holes along the lower Mississippi, as for right now, it looks like Oklahoma & the surrounding states are the place for large quantities of ducks & geese.

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Cover photo courtesy of Cade Trickey