And suddenly, the sky was full of the dark silhouettes of mallards, gliding overhead and landing among the standing stalks. Yesterday this field had been bone dry. Now it was flooded and a beehive of duck activity. Although the clouds were still heavy and low, I could easily imagine a rainbow, because we had certainly found the “pot of gold.”
Indeed, flooding rivers, rising potholes and ponds, and fresh “slash” water in fields and pastures can offer exceptional duck hunting. New water spilling into woods and swamps or pooling in agricultural fields provides an abundance of food, and ducks know it. How they find newly flooded areas so quickly is something of a mystery. But it is no mystery that waterfowlers who secure permission to hunt these fresh food sources and get there when the ducks do, or shortly thereafter, often find treasure at the end of their own duck hunter’s rainbow.
The Lure of New Water
Paul Link is a graduate student in Louisiana State University’s School of Renewable Natural Resources. For his master’s thesis, Link conducted a radio-telemetry study of mallards in the Bayou State, observing the birds’ movements, habitat use, and survival rates. His research showed that ducks will indeed change locations and foraging habits after a heavy rain.
“Our birds definitely moved within 24 hours after a significant rainfall event,” Link explains. “Beforehand, they might have been on a regular movement pattern from a diurnal [daytime] roost site to a nocturnal foraging site. But then the rain would come, and the ducks would change locations and foraging habits. Our missing bird list [those whose radio signal couldn’t be picked up] would often triple. We usually couldn’t find them from our telemetry trucks. We’d have to get in an airplane and search extensively for missing birds.”
Link says it was nothing for these mallards to move more than 20 miles from their previous locations to recently flooded habitats. “They loved to feed in freshly flooded cattle pastures and rice fields, where I suspect they fed on invertebrates, seeds of moist-soil plants, and waste rice. I’ve also found mallards using temporary water on idle rice ground and even in sugar cane fields. They’re pretty adaptable. They just go where the recently flooded habitats are. If you find new water, you’ll likely find the birds.”