“This hunting strategy works from Saskatchewan to Louisiana,” Cox says. “New water makes fresh food available to ducks, and they swarm to it. Hunters who understand this and who adapt to their specific hunting conditions can have the best shooting of the year while new water is still running in the gullies.”

Hunt the Leading Edge

Before retiring this past spring, Dennis Widner of Bald Knob, Arkansas, spent 36 years working on national wildlife refuges in the Southeast. For the past 20 years, he was manager of the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge in east-central Arkansas, a major wintering area for mallards. When seasonal rains come, the Cache River bottoms feature some of the best flooded-timber duck hunting in North America.

“To a duck, rising water means a smorgasbord,” Widner says. “The table is set with an abundance of fresh, new foods. So when heavy rains fall and water starts breaking out in the bottoms, the ducks come to feed on acorns, invertebrates, and moist-soil plants.”

Ducks follow what Widner calls the “flood head” as it makes its way downstream through the bottoms. “The ‘flood head’ is that initial surge of water that moves down a watershed after a heavy rain,” he explains. “On the Cache, for instance, a two- to three-inch rain in the headwater will cause the channel and oxbows to overflow into the adjacent bottomland hardwoods. Then, as this surge moves downstream, ducks will follow it to take advantage of the continual new supply of food. They’ll stay right with that leading edge, so hunters who are behind the flood head need to move downstream to catch up with it.”

As the flood spreads, ducks will orient to what Widner calls the “feather edge,” where water meets land. “This is where the most new food will be concentrated and where it’s most accessible to the ducks, so these shallows are where the ducks like to be,” he says. “They might rest and preen in deep-water areas nearby, but most feeding will take place in just a few inches of water along the outer edges of the flood head.”

Keeping up with the flood head involves scouting and checking water elevations at different points along the river. “On the Cache, you can find ducks by driving roads parallel to the bottoms and watching with binoculars,” he explains. “Then once you get in the right area, you need to fine-tune your search to find a hunting spot for the next morning.