Author: ruffatt1@illinois.edu

Upper Illinois River Lower Illinois River Upper Mississippi River Lower Mississippi River

We managed to get the Illinois River flight in on Friday, September 21st. The airplane was down for maintenance early in the week and winds were excessive late in the week. The wind was gusting to 29 mph on Friday along the central Mississippi River, which prevented our flight. We had a push of ducks […]

We’re back at it again! We flew the first teal flight of 2018 on Tuesday, September 4th. Blue-winged teal abundance was above average (22%) along the Illinois River for the first week of September and totaled 20,340 teal. We saw average numbers of teal along the central Mississippi River (4,120 birds). The larger concentrations of […]

We flew the waterfowl survey on December 26th 2017 and the air temperature was 3 degrees. Almost everything was iced up, and when we found ducks, they were tightly packed into a little bit of open water. I have included a couple of photos to illustrate my point. Duck numbers were down considerably along both […]

We flew the waterfowl inventory on Tuesday, December 19th . Nearly all of the ice that formed over the last couple of weeks was gone, and we still had a bunch of ducks around for the 3rd week in December. We estimated 184,710 total ducks in the Illinois River valley, which was 31% down from […]

We flew the waterfowl inventory on Thursday, December 7th and brrrrr… is it getting cold. Ice was forming on many of the refuges along both the Illinois and Mississippi rivers; however, we started running out of ice down around the Grafton area. Total ducks remained 6.5% above average for early December when we counted 218,600 […]

We flew the waterfowl inventory on Wednesday, November 29th. The Illinois River was 45% above the 10-yr average for total ducks. However, we have been hovering around 325,000 ducks for a couple of weeks now. The Illinois River had 172,090 mallards, but they were only up 1% from last week. The Mississippi River was 61% […]

We flew the waterfowl inventory on Monday, November 13th just 3 days following the Illinois River flight from last week. We usually would not do back-to-back flights, but the weather forecast was unpredictable for the rest of the week. Despite the short turn around, total duck abundance (387,440) on the Illinois was up 22% from […]

We flew the waterfowl inventory of the Mississippi River on Monday, November 6th. We had some electrical issues with the plane at the start of the survey, preventing us from getting the Illinois River flight completed. I hope to fly the Illinois River on Friday, November 10th. Total ducks on the Mississippi River were staggering […]