WEAVER BOTTOMS, MISSISSIPPI RIVER

Tom Hexum first saw these waters as a 15-year-old, 40 years ago. The Mississippi was different then. There was more vegetation and you could hide a duck boat easier then than you can today. Also, there were more ducks.

Tuesday, the final day of Minnesota's duck hunting season, Hexum, of Rochester, was on the river again. With him were pals Doug Opsahl, also of Rochester, and Keith Peterson of Winona. These are real guys with real jobs, citizens at large. But on this day they were playing hooky from their obligations. Grizzled in the manner of true river men, if not quite river rats, they carried with them vintage decoys, repeating shotguns and enough egg salad sandwiches, coffee and cookies to last until sundown.

"My dad, who was born in 1928, hunted these river bottoms before me," Hexum said. As he spoke, the four of us hunkered in a stand of phragmites, spread among two boats. Pete, my yellow Labrador, was also along.

We didn't expect to see many ducks. Yet ducks were the reason we were on the river. Rarely sighted as they might have been in many parts of Minnesota this fall, we owed them nonetheless on this season's last day a proper fare-thee-well as they scattered to Gulf Coast wetlands, Arkansas bottomlands and the choppy waters of Chesapeake Bay.

"The most ducks we got in one day this year on the river was five," Hexum said. "Keith and I were actually fishing that day. We threw our guns in the boat as an afterthought. We shot the five ducks without putting out a decoy."

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Tom Hexum of Rochester has hunted the Mississippi River near Weaver, Minn., for decades. Here he pets Pete, a yellow Labrador, on the last day of the 2009 Minnesota duck season, while scanning the sky over the river for birds.

An argument that duck hunting will never die no matter how low duck populations sink could have been made convincingly Tuesday by anyone scanning the boat access at Weaver, a small burg lying just downriver from Wabasha, Minn.

This was a fair weather day, with no hope of a major duck movement into or out of the Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish Refuge, which extends from Wabasha to Rock Island, Ill., some 260 river miles south.

Still, a dozen or more pickups and other rigs were at the landing, some pulling two-bit trailers designed to carry nothing more than two-bit duck boats. Other trailers were sturdier, and newer, the province of serious waterfowlers whose specialty craft were painted camouflage and powered by surface-drive outboards.

None of these men (and they were exclusively men) expected to shoot many, if any, ducks. Yet waterfowlers perhaps uniquely among all sportsmen realize they have only so many autumns remaining. So they hunt opening day and as many days thereafter as they can. And, properly, they close the season hunting as well, on lakes or rivers or in fields, regardless of prospects for success.

So, with the season behind us, how was it?

Terrible? (Yes, largely.) So-so? (For some.) Good? (At times, in places.)

Duck-hunting seasons are difficult to assess in large part because ducks are mysterious. Not quite so in the manner of the Holy Trinity, perhaps. But mysterious nonetheless.

What is known is that Minnesota now welcomes fewer of these birds in spring than it once did; that it produces fewer ducks in summer than it has historically; and that fewer ducks migrate through Minnesota than in the past, due probably to wetland drainage and the degrading of remaining waters -- and due also, perhaps, to a generalized westward movement of migratory routes.

We also know that Minnesota has lost some 40,000 duck hunters in the past decade or so, at least in part due to poor hunting.

"We used to shoot 175 ducks a season out here," Hexum said. "It's just not there now."

Still, parts of northern Minnesota this fall offered some of the best diver hunting seen there in recent years. Consider also that the Upper Mississippi refuge was home to more gadwalls (as many as 60,000) at the peak of their migration than mallards (42,000) at their peak -- something that almost never occurs.

Additionally, the Upper Mississippi refuge not many weeks ago held 430,000 canvasbacks and 170,000 scaup -- a lot of birds (scaup particularly) relative to recent years.

"This will be one of our better years at the refuge in the past 10 or 12 years," said U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service refuge biologist Eric Nelson.

And yet ... the Minnesota season was, in sum, disappointing, said Department of Natural Resources waterfowl specialist Steve Cordts, who, like everyone, struggles to understand what is primarily affecting ducks here.

Does Minnesota have too few refuges? Have migration routes truly moved west? Are we shooting too many birds? Not producing enough? Is the wetland habitat in western and southern Minnesota so poor (or nonexistent) that it can no longer support reasonably large numbers of mallards and other ducks?

It's true that fewer hunters scour the Mississippi River bottoms today than in the past, Hexum said. "But those who do have good attitudes. They support restoring the flyway and digging in their heels until it's done," he said, adding:

"But the guys who are out here today, the last day of the season? They came here knowing they wouldn't shoot many ducks, if any. They're here for the memories. For nostalgia.

"For what was."

Dennis Anderson danderson@startribune.com