Oregon duck hunters have been duped by El Niño before, and this season's equatorial ogre appears to be larger than ever, already contributing to sporadic fall hunting, even for local birds.
El Niño patterns tend to split the West's winter weather systems, sending them south to drench California and north into British Columbia, leaving the Pacific Northwest dry well into November.
“It's been kind of slow so far,” reports Brandon Reishus, migratory game bird coordinator for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW). “But we kind of expected it to be pretty weather-less this year. There's a week or two of (modest) rain coming, though, so at least we'll finally see some water on the ground. Anything helps.”
While Sauvie Island, home to Oregon's banner public hunting area, began the season with success rates below average, last week's hunts yielded well over two and even three birds per gun, thanks to a recent shot of cold in Canada.
Mallards and green-winged teal make up similar shares of the harvest and lead the totals, followed by wigeon, pintails, and shovelers, in that order.
Farther south in the Willamette Valley, “mallard ratios are high,” notes Kelly Warren, Ducks Unlimited's regional biologist for western Oregon.
He adds that the shot of cold across Canada has accelerated the migration. “The mallards I was seeing at the start of the season were quite different in plumage and behavior from what we're seeing now.”
Warren says that valley hunters are finding plenty of mallards—local ducks on private lands around federal refuges and along the Long Tom River, south of Monroe.
Whether this will last as hunting resumes Thursday after a hiatus of a few days remains to be seen, as Canada is once again basking in unseasonably warm weather.
Reishus and Warren point to a partnership among DU, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho to outfit mallards on Alberta's prairies with radio transmitters. This partnership will allow researchers to track the birds' movements to gain more information about distribution patterns.
“So far, those we have banded aren't moving from up there,” Reishus observes.
Warren agrees: “They're stuck in Alberta,” he says. “It's 68 degrees in Calgary.”
Along the Oregon coast, wigeon and pintails dominate harvests in the north, with some southbound teal lingering in southern coastal estuaries.
Strong numbers of wigeon provided a few great days for Ted Teufel of Bay City, near Tillamook. Teufel, who includes estuary hunts in his guide service, notes, “Pintails and some greenwings are here and there, but wigeon will stick around for the season. There are mallards in the Tillamook area, but they're working fields of freshly harvested corn.”
The coast is lacking its normal fall rains, “but at least it's been nice and cold, so we have that going for us,” Teufel adds.
In southeast Oregon, hunting is decent at Summer Lake's vast spring-fed marshes. That success seems logical, given the lack of water across the high desert.
Areas of eastern Oregon that did get some water are already drying up again, reports Warren.
Canada and cackling geese are stubbornly resisting their usual push south into the Willamette Valley, hanging out from Sauvie Island and Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge across the Columbia River and north, where Warren hears that they're abundant in southwest Washington.
Reishus notes that the season's first cases of avian flu have been reported among geese that have moved into the valley. The disease has been a seasonal problem for the past several years.
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