Pleasant surprise: Minnesota duck hunting has been pretty good this fall

A couple of things about duck hunting this fall in Minnesota:

1) It's been pretty good. Not great, perhaps. And not good universally throughout the state. I know, for instance, that some hunters — perhaps many — consistently have reported empty skies this fall.

That said, I'm seeing something different.

Example: The opener was good in west-central Minnesota where I hunted. Lots of ducks, and a wide variety of ducks.

Also, since then, the weather has largely cooperated with duck hunters, seemingly moving at least some ducks into the state with each little front. This is particularly apparent in parts of northern Minnesota, where ringneck hunting in particular has been productive.

With the recent storm, activity has picked up. As I reported in my column Friday, lots of birds, particularly ringnecks and canvasbacks, are in the Weaver bottoms and down along the Mississippi to the Iowa border.

Additionally, reasonably good numbers of ducks are now in the south-central and north-central parts of the state, some of them obviously northern birds — gadwalls and mallards in particular.

Meanwhile, reports are that lots of ducks moved into the Dakotas with the stormy weather last week. And a friend of mine emailed me Monday morning from his camp an hour or so north of Winnipeg, saying there were "lots and lots" of fat mallards just now reaching that area. "It's late this year," he said. "Lots of ducks and no hunters."

2) I've also observed this fall while duck hunting in Minnesota — in a variety of locations — that there seems to be no shortage of hunters. Everywhere I go, at every public landing, there are hunters.

This obviously doesn't square with what the DNR is reporting about license sales, namely that we've lost some 30,000-40,000 waterfowl hunters in the last decade or so. Fair enough. But perhaps this is happening not only because birds have been scarce, but because, in part, the number of hunters is adjusting downward to the number of places available to hunt.

That is, as habitat has been lost, affecting duck numbers, resident and migratory, hunters have responded — in part — by withdrawing from the sport in some reasonably equal proportion. And not only because ducks are fewer. If there are no places to hunt without being crowded by other hunters, regardless of one's chances to kill ducks, why go?

Some part of this might be true, because it seems that the places that remain in Minnesota where ducks can reasonably be expected to be found — especially this year, as the word gets out that some ducks are around — seem also to have their capacity of duck hunters.