Ducks: Seasons, Limits and Harvest

The Ducks tab on Public Lands (the first tab, beside the roost readings) has a Duck season line above the list. Open it for a state's duck season for the year ahead: the dates, the daily bag, and the limits for individual species such as mallard hens, pintail, scaup and canvasback. It is free on every plan.

Read it as a summary, not the regulation. Dates and limits change every year, agencies correct them after they publish, and zones, wildlife area rules, shooting hours, steel shot and licence requirements are not all here. The card says when we read the rules and links to the agency's own page. Check that page before you hunt.

What the card shows

• Duck season — each zone's segments, written as date ranges, with youth and veteran days where the state has them. Opens in 23 days, Open now and Season over say where the season stands today.
• Daily bag — the total ducks a day and the possession rule, then the limit for each species the state names.
• Federal limits — the most the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service allows in the state's flyway. States choose their seasons inside that and can be stricter, so the state's numbers are the ones that apply.

States we have, and states we don't

We list the states whose agencies publish their rules in a form we can use, and the Atlantic Flyway states, Illinois and Indiana from the federal seasons memo. For a state we don't have, the tab says so and still shows the federal limits for its flyway.

Some agencies' terms don't allow us to republish their pages, and a few block automated access. Those states stay off the list until the agency says yes.

Duck harvest by public area

Where a state publishes how many ducks hunters reported at each public hunting area, each unit's row on the Ducks tab gets a duck line under its roost reading: ducks per hunter-day (which ranks the areas, in fifths, within the state), the count and hours behind it, and the species where the state lists them. Sort by Ducks per hunter-day to put the best first. Areas with too few hunter-days to mean anything show the count and no rank. It is a Premium feature; a free plan sees the state's sample unit's duck line in full.

• Reported, not total. The figures are what hunters reported at each area, and how the state counts them differs: check-in records in South Carolina, trip counts at Illinois's state-run sites, daily hunter and duck counts in Kentucky and California. A rate in one state does not compare with another's.
• Not every area is a unit on the map. Areas the state reports that we could not match to a public land unit are listed under more duck areas below the list, without a map link or rank.
• Which states. South Carolina, Illinois, Kentucky, California and Wyoming. Other states either publish duck harvest only for the whole state or their terms do not let us use it.

A unit's card on the map shows the same duck line under the roost reading, on a Premium plan.

Ducks in the state

Under the season line, a second folded card, Ducks taken in your state, gives the picture from the federal surveys, free on every plan:

• Harvest survey — about how many ducks hunters took in the newest season, against the average of the five before it, how many active duck hunters and days afield that was, the species that made up the take, and ten seasons of bars. It comes from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's harvest survey, which asks a sample of hunters and scales their answers up, so it is an estimate and recent seasons can be revised.
• January survey — the winter count of ducks in the state, where the file still has one. For most states east of the Central Flyway the newest count is from 2019 or earlier, and the card says so rather than present it as this winter.
• Breeding ducks — the spring survey of the north-central U.S. and Canada, which is where many of the ducks that migrate south are raised. It counts breeding birds; it does not say what will pass through your state.

These are state and survey-area numbers. They do not say anything about a particular wildlife area; for that, see the harvest line on each unit above.

Ducks by county

South Dakota publishes resident duck hunters and ducks by county. On a Premium plan its Ducks tab lists them below the units, most ducks first, as survey estimates (they are expanded from the hunters who answered, so small counties are noisy) and without a rank, because a county is not public land.