Migration Alert: Habitat and Ducks Numbers Improving for Oregon Waterfowlers

After a slow start, waterfowl hunting in Oregon is picking up and optimism is growing among hunters statewide. Ducks and geese are filtering into western Oregon from the north as new storms approach on the heels of a late-October drenching.

"I'd say it's been pretty close to an average season," says Brandon Reishus, migratory game bird coordinator for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. "We had a shot of calendar migrants earlier, but they were only here for a little bit without much weather to hold them."

Now, he observes, the first rains have fallen, ponds and marshes are getting seasonal water, and more ducks are showing up every day. Habitat will continue to improve as wet weather is forecast for the weekend and beyond.

"It's cooled down a little, and the newly flooded habitats will move birds around," Reishus predicts.

The action has also been picking up on Sauvie Island, along the lower Columbia River near Portland.

"Birds seem to be filling in," reports Darleen Beall, office manager at the island’s 12,000-acre state-owned wildlife area and keeper of its daily hunting and harvest records. 
She reports that after some slow hunting days the bird-per-gun average has jumped to more than two ducks per day, sometimes three.

Kelly Warren, DU regional biologist for western Oregon, predicts many of those birds will move off the island when the corn and other grain crops are depleted and spread across the valley, where "we'll have a good mix of birds and water on the landscape."

Reishus reports the action has been less exciting in the upper Columbia River basin, but "hunting should pick up in the next few weeks as we get big pushes of migrants coming down from Alberta. Those mallards are the bread and butter up there, and they're calendar migrants to some degree."