Author: ruffatt1@illinois.edu

Holy shmoly, we have a bunch of birds for the end of October! We flew the waterfowl survey on Halloween Day and estimated nearly 700,000 ducks on the Illinois and Mississippi rivers. If you didn’t have a successful central zone duck season opener, I’m sorry because you should have. We estimated 341,355 total ducks along […]

We flew the second regular season waterfowl survey on Thursday October 26th. The flights were delayed from rainy weather earlier in the week. I’m sorry to say we weren’t able to get the Mississippi River flight in this week. Thursday’s winds were approaching 30 mph gusts by 11 a.m. and there was just no way […]

We flew the third teal flight on Thursday, September 21st , despite the record breaking temperatures. Teal abundance (18,875) was similar to the previous week (18,420 teal) along the Illinois River valley (IRV) but was 34% below the 10-yr average. Specifically, blue-winged teal numbers dropped again and represented a mere 30% of the total teal […]

We flew the second teal flight on Thursday after the fog lifted around 11a.m. Teal abundance actually dropped (5%) along the Illinois River compared to the previous week. We lost about ½ of our blue-winged teal from last week, but American green-winged teal numbers nearly doubled. I estimated 18,420 teal in the Illinois Valley from […]

What a difference a week makes! We flew the waterfowl survey on Wednesday, December 21st, and the survey locations along both rivers were almost entirely frozen. As the saying goes, “the ol’ lady is singing”. Just as the Illinois Central Zone duck season closed, we lost 805,000 ducks compared with last week’s estimate of 1,148,990 […]

We flew the waterfowl survey on Monday, December 12th , and many locations were nearly frozen. Despite the ice, we found substantial numbers of ducks holding on in small pockets of open water or in the windswept areas of big water. I have had many questions from the hunters about the arrival of migrating Canada […]

We flew the waterfowl survey on Wednesday, December 7th, just as ice was forming from the arrival of the “Siberian Express” from the northwest. Extreme cold weather usually means mallards, and this front was no exception. Illinois River mallards were up 8% from last week, even though they were 17% below average. While mallards were […]

We completed the waterfowl survey on Tuesday, November 29th following the arrival of new ducks into Illinois over Thanksgiving. Duck numbers (301,955) on the Illinois River were up 6% from last week and 38% above average for the last of November. Most of the increase was due to the arrival of some mallards which now […]

A major weather system tracked across the Midwest over the weekend of November 18th , and many of us were expecting a big push of ducks. But from what many hunters witnessed in the duck blind, we only had a small movement of ducks into the Illinois River valley on Saturday morning, or the mallards […]

We completed the latest waterfowl survey on Monday, November 14th . The field reports of new migrants arriving on November 8-9 th were verified in this week’s numbers. We estimated 333,095 ducks in the Illinois River valley which was 15% above average and up 56% from the previous week. A big chunk of that increase […]