Northeast Has Best Numbers for Mallards

More of Arkansas’s ducks were found in the middle to northeastern parts of the state, according to the most recent Arkansas Game and Fish Commission aerial survey.
Observers during the Dec. 16-20 survey flights saw more than half of the mallards counted in the Delta in the Cache, Black-Upper White and Little River survey zones and, like in November, many of these ducks were in the northern portions of these zones. Mallard hot spots were limited to portions of southern Jackson and western Craighead counties along with Big Lake National Wildlife Refuge and Big Lake Wildlife Management Area, according to the report released last week.
The most telling number about the 2019-2020 water season, though, was the count of nearly 1 million light geese (lesser snow/blue and Ross’s) and about 158,000 greater white-front geese in Arkansas’s portion of the Mississippi Alluvial Valley (or Delta), compared with an estimated 898,656 total ducks in the same region.
On-the-ground anecdotal reporting indicated a “tremendous” number of snow geese on the ground in the Walnut Ridge area just off U.S. Highway 67 in the northernmost reach of the state, along with continuous good reports of both snow geese and speckle bellies (greater white-fronted geese) into the central and southern portions of the Arkansas Delta. Meanwhile, anecdotal reports of