Photo by www.dansmalloutdoors.com

Sitting in his duck blind one Saturday morning last winter, Jerry Garner came to the realization that everything that he'd read, Googled, heard and learned in over 30 years of waterfowl hunting in Mississippi wasn't worth much.

"It was my third straight miserable hunt," he recalled. "Saturday and Sunday one weekend and that Saturday morning -- awful: I think I killed one duck each day the previous weekend, and then didn't see a single duck I wanted to shoot that morning. The sky was beautiful, but it was empty. I kept looking for some big ducks in the sky and never saw one. Not one.

"I had such great expectations. To be honest, I was ready to quit the sport. Might still."

Here was the problem, as the 49-year-old hunter who's been chasing ducks throughout the Mississippi Delta since he was a teenager explained it: "Everything I'd studied, everything I'd heard and everything I knew told me I should have had a lot of ducks on my lease. There had been ducks around that part of the Delta for over two weeks. Most of the neighboring leaseholders had been hunting and had done well. They'd hunted the first weekend of the season and then the next. They'd done some shooting, but it didn't sound like they had overdone it, because they had moved around and made a conscious effort to leave by 8:30 or 9 each morning.

"I took up some invitations and hunted elsewhere with some cousins in the north Delta. I let my lease rest, providing sanctuary for ducks for the first two weekend seasons and then for the first week of the season. Ducks had been in the south Delta. There had been no pressure on my lease. I had water, and it was flooded food.

"There should have been ducks. Everything pointed toward there being ducks. I just knew it was going to be good shooting.

"Then -- nothing."

Garner looked for evidence of someone having poached on his lease, but found none. He had no explanation for what he'd experienced. Frustrated, he shut down his duck hunting for the remainder of the season; when he let friends use his lease, they, too, eventually gave up.

This may come a little late to help Garner, but here's the official analysis, courtesy of one of Mississippi's waterfowl project leaders, biologist Scott Baker of the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks.

"Statewide, it seems that everybody had a fair to good opening weekend or two to the season," he explained. "Then, it slowed. From mid-December to mid-January it was slow statewide. I think some ducks came in early and gave hunters some good early shooting; then, after they were pressured, they left, and there wasn't a strong-enough weather pattern to bring in another migration flight. There were some pockets that held up during that middle part of the season, but for the most part, there was not a lot of ducks."

While no harvest figures were available by the deadline for this story, Baker asserted that the 2006-07 shooting would likely fall "about in line with the past five seasons." Not good news for most Mississippi duck hunters -- and particularly bad for Jerry Garner.

"I have come to accept less-than-great hunting over the past decade," he admitted. "My lease has always been decent -- at least average from what I read and hear other hunters write and say. Over the past five years, I've had a few limit hunts, but usually we average about three or four ducks each between two to four hunters. I've come to expect a good day to yield a three-duck average. Four to six -- well, that's a great day. But increasingly, we're seeing a lot more of the zero-to-twos. And that's what is bothering me."

When it comes to predicting the upcoming season, biologists and hunters can only thing look back at trends. For most Mississippi duck hunters, that's not a good thing; for some others, not so bad.

It all comes down to where and how you hunt," Baker observed. "Obviously there are going to be some places -- some big clubs -- that always hold ducks and always have good hunting." Those clubs, like Fighting Bayou near Itta Bena, are pipe dreams for the majority of waterfowlers, who generally lack the means to pour money (all but literally) into duck ponds and to enrich the habitat. Most big outfitters offering to book hunts have the advantage of having enough water to rotate their hunters and never overshoot ponds.

"For the smaller guys who don't have those advantages," Baker cautioned, "the best thing I can tell them is that they don't need to overpressure the ducks. We've been good about getting early flights the last few years, but if you get a good early flight in, and you put a lot of pressure on them, they leave. In mild winters -- and we've had a lot of them lately -- you can't depend on wave after wave of migration to replenish your hunting areas."