A couple of welcome cool fronts have moved through Alabama recently, increasing the hope that the state’s waterfowl seasons will start with a bang when the early teal season opens Saturday, September 13, and runs through September 21.

Several reports have indicated that blue-winged teal are on the move with the changing weather patterns. Unfortunately, the most recent survey from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) indicates the teal numbers have not rebounded as hoped, and another nine-day early teal season is in store for next year. Although the overall number of ducks in the survey is basically unchanged since last year, blue-winged teal numbers were down 4% from 2024 and down 13% below the long-term average.

Despite the lower numbers, if the weather is right, Alabama’s hunters could experience a successful start to the waterfowl hunting seasons. The daily bag limit during the early teal season is six birds per person. Hunting hours are one-half hour before sunrise to sunset.

Seth Maddox of the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources’ (ADCNR) Wildlife and Freshwater Fisheries (WFF) Division is on the Mississippi Flyway Gamebird Technical Committee, which is meeting this week in Bloomington, Indiana. The committee will study the most recent data and provide technical assistance to the USFWS for consideration of future waterfowl management in the Mississippi Flyway, which extends from the farthest northern reaches of Canada to the Gulf Coast.

“The survey data is almost identical to last year’s except for the pond count,” said Maddox, Assistant Chief of the WFF’s Wildlife Section. “The pond count was down, which tells us the habitat conditions were not quite as good as they were in 2024. That tells us that production this summer was probably down a little bit from normal.”

Waterfowl hunters will have to make sure their blinds are in top shape, with concealment an important issue because of the makeup of the birds that will be headed south this fall and winter.

“There will likely be fewer juvenile birds in fall flight this year than we typically see,” Maddox said. “Juvenile birds provide a lot of hunting opportunity because they’re naïve to the migration and the hunting pressure.”

Maddox said the pond count in the prairie pothole regions of the northern U.S. and Canada likely doesn’t tell the whole story of the nesting success of the waterfowl population, which was estimated at 33.980 million this year, compared to 33.988 million last year.

“Looking more into it, when they fly over and do the pond count, it’s just a snapshot in time,” he said. “Even though the habitat conditions were poor at that point, they got rain later in the summer, which improved the habitat conditions. For the early-nesting birds, they got a chance to re-nest. For the ones that were successful, they had good brood-rearing conditions later in the summer.”

Although Maddox suspects the fall flight might be a little suppressed, he said duck hunters who persevere throughout the season may well be rewarded as they were last season.

“Overall, I think what we saw last year was a late migration,” he said. “We had warmer weather until January, and then we got those two snow events, one in north Alabama and one on the Gulf Coast. Those arctic blasts really pushed birds down late. We didn’t really start seeing good numbers of birds until mid-January. We really rely on ice and snow cover north of us to push birds down south.

“It was a slow season up until mid-January. If you got discouraged early in the season and didn’t go hunting any more after the first of the year, you probably had a poor season. But I think the people who are diehard hunters and stuck with it until the end of the season were rewarded in the last two weeks.”

Waterfowl hunters and managers consider the mallard as the bellwether species when it comes to overall numbers and hunting success. The Adaptive Harvest Management framework is based on the number of mid-continent mallards, which are counted in the middle of the U.S. and Canada in the Mississippi and Central flyways. That data drives season lengths and bag limits for mallards but also for the entire duck season framework.

However, the focus on mallards doesn’t hold true for Alabama, according to Maddox.

“Gadwalls have taken the place of mallards,” he said. “It’s now the bread and butter bird for Alabama. Mallards hold out as long as possible until they are forced to migrate south by cold and ice and snow cover on the ground. Gadwalls are photo-period migrators. As the days get shorter, gadwalls start to migrate south in anticipation of colder weather. They kind of get ahead of the cold weather. Gadwall is a species we can pretty much rely on every year.”

For ducks, coot and merganser, another 60-day season is set in two segments, the first November 28-29 and the second December 5-January 31, 2026 (www.outdooralabama.com/seasons-and-bag-limits/waterfowl-season).  The bag limit is again six ducks with one significant change. The daily bag limit on pintails has been increased from one to three.

“We basically have experimental seasons for pintails right now,” Maddox said. “The Pacific Flyway is a big flyway for pintails. In California, once they’ve shot their one bird, there’s nothing flying but pintails.

“There’s an overabundance of males in the population right now, and most hunters harvest males because they are easy to pick out among the other birds. So, we’re doing an experiment to see if the population can sustain more harvest potential. We need three years of a three-bird bag limit to do an evaluation to see if it’s sustainable.”

Maddox said hunting isn’t the main factor in waterfowl population dynamics. What drives populations, especially pintails, are habitat conditions where short-grass prairies have been turned into agricultural fields.

“The timing of nesting and the timing of (crop) harvest overlap each other,” he said. “If the pintails nest in agricultural crops and the combine comes through to harvest the crops, it’s damaging nests. Habitat conditions are driving the pintail population, not hunting. Because we think there’s an overabundance of males, we can sustain more harvest on males.”

For many duck hunters in Alabama, the target species is the wood duck, which can’t be counted using traditional methods because the wood duck’s habitat is in forested areas. WFF uses banding data to assess the wood duck population.

“We’ve wrapped up the banding season in all five districts,” Maddox said. “We rely on banding data and band return data to evaluate wood ducks, and the numbers look good. I think it’s been seven years since we went to a three-bird bag limit. We felt at that time the population could sustain that additional harvest opportunity. So far, it’s played out that way, and we’ve had no impact on the population.”

Not a part of the waterfowl framework, the sandhill crane is another migratory species Alabama hunters have the opportunity to harvest through a limited quota permit system (www.outdooralabama.com/seasons-and-bag-limits/sandhill-crane-season). Registration is currently open with 750 permits available.

“The sandhill crane population is doing well,” Maddox said. “There are three states in our flyway with crane hunting seasons. The population is growing in numbers, and they’re expanding their historical range of the last 100 years. I expect to have another good crane season.”

David Rainer is an award-winning writer who has covered Alabama’s great outdoors for 25 years. The former outdoors editor at the Mobile Press-Register, he writes for Outdoor Alabama, the website of the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources.