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Teal season a wingshooter's old standby

One thing that still holds true: You have to be fast on the trigger

By SHANNON TOMPKINS

Sept. 20, 2009

Spend time afield during nearly 40 September teal seasons, and you learn some things are amazingly predictable.

I shot behind — way behind — the first teal I swung on this past weekend, exactly like I did when I tried to connect with a blazing-fast bluewing whipping over decoys set among flooded second-crop rice on a September morning in 1969 — the first year teal season became a regular affair.

Same kamikaze teal twisting and wobbling low over the decoys. Same left-to-right angle. Same shotgun. Same result.

Birds right on schedule

In a world of discomfiting change, where so much of what seemed immutable and dependable proves to be anything but, it's reassuring to know some things remain steadfast. Teal season offers plenty on which to rely.

This teal season has bolstered that belief. Everything has followed the rules.

The early-migrating blue-winged teal have been right on schedule. The first waves left the prairie pothole country of the north-central United States and southern prairie Canada in mid-August.

When they began arriving on the Texas coast a couple of days later, they stopped on whatever patches of shallow wetlands they could find in the marshes and coastal prairie, resting and recharging for their next push toward wintering areas in Mexico and Central and South America.

They didn't find a lot of water down here — Texas has been in a hellish drought, you know.

But wherever there was decent habitat, teal gathered. And because rice prices are decent this year, there's been at least a modest amount of habitat on the prairie, if very little in the marshes.

The first waves of migrating bluewings are composed mostly of adult males. Adult drakes are the first to molt, regrow flight feathers and head south. They are joined by a smattering of adult bluewing hens that either didn't nest or lost their clutches or ducklings early and didn't attempt renesting.

Most of the adult hens and their broods molt and fledge later and are the last ones to leave nesting grounds. The majority of bluewings don't get here until sometime in October, when the number of southbound bluewings peaks in Texas.

Because the bluewing migration chronology is as dependable as the change of season, it follows that a high percentage of the birds taken during teal season should be adult drakes. And that certainly was the case on my teal hunt this past weekend. Fully 80 percent of the teal we took while hunting a shallow flooded wetland in Matagorda County were adult males.

Easy pickings

We had a wonderful hunt. We were on a fine piece of water — the kind of habitat teal love. The morning was cool — at least by September standards. Company was outstanding. Nellie, the Chesapeake Bay retriever, was on her game. And although action was not swarming-like-mosquitoes fast (as some teal hunts can be), it was steady, with regular visits from flocks of bluewings that boiled low over the prairie, swung over open water and bored like a squadron of jet fighters toward the opening we'd left among the decoys.

When you're in the right place, taking a four-teal limit can be fairly easy — so long as you figure out that teal are not slow-poking doves and you have to really swing and get the barrel out ahead of the little ducks. Teal are called “rice rockets” for a reason. Our experience seemed to track that of many of the 30,000 or so Texas waterfowlers participating in this brief (16-day) opportunity.

Most hunters with access to decent teal habitat along the coast have enjoyed at least fair — sometimes outstanding — hunting.

Guided groups hunting second-crop rice fields and/or shallow flooded flats on the prairie west and southwest of Houston had excellent shoots.

Teal numbers thinned by the end of the weekend — pretty typical as bluewings don't take kindly to heavy hunting pressure and can move out, en masse, particularly when they are hassled on a relatively limited amount of habitat.

Teal hunting was surprisingly good in some of the marshes, where drought had left most areas in very poor shape for attracting and holding the flighty little ducks.

Saturday saw a crowd of 68 hunters on the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department's Justin Hurst Wildlife Management area near Freeport — fewer hunters than normal, but a lot under the dry conditions that left the Hurst WMA's impoundments bone dry with only a few salty marsh ponds available for hunting. They averaged 1.9 teal per hunter.

Best may be yet to come

Sunday, 27 hunters averaged 1.6 teal per person.

That's about the same results seen on the J.D. Murphree WMA near Port Arthur, where hunters averaged 1.8 teal on opening day, 1.4 on Sunday and a little more than two teal apiece during the Thursday hunt, said Murphree staffer Danny Smith.

Light crowds at TPWD's Mad Island WMA near Bay City and Guadalupe Delta WMA near Port Lavaca averaged two to three teal apiece over the opening weekend. And those numbers surprised many folks, because the marsh ponds not dried out by the drought have been extremely salty and lacking in aquatic vegetation, which attracts teal.

As often is the case, this final week of teal season (it ends Sept. 27) could produce the best hunting. Teal numbers in Texas can wax and wane this time of year as one wave of birds pushes south and the next surges in.

But inevitably, more teal are in Texas at the end of September than during the middle of the month. And with a decent cool front predicted to shove down the center of the country early this week, expect a big boost of bluewings to ride that north wind south from the Dakotas to Texas.