When I was a child, I always knew duck season was near when my uncle Jack Jernigan called my dad.
As soon as Dad picked up the phone, Uncle Jack greeted him with a highball on his duck call. You could hear it across the room.
A version of that tradition continues between Alan Thomas and me, minus the highball. He always calls a few days before the season opens, and he's always so excited that he can barely hold a thought for more than 20 seconds.
Al is a veritable digest of short-range and long-range weather reports, hydrology reports for the Mississippi River Valley, and waterfowl migration reports. He's always accurate, but as a child of the '80s, I subscribe to the "Trust but Verify" school of thought.
Here's how it looks for Saturday, opening day of duck season in the Natural State.
From now through Friday, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the upper Mississippi River Valley is expecting below-freezing temperatures and northwest winds from the Canadian border roughly to the Iowa-Missouri line.
Snow is forecast for northern Minnesota and northern Wisconsin, and also for eastern Nebraska and most of Iowa. Snow will continue eastward into Illinois through Saturday.
The good news is that weather will push a lot of ducks south. The bad news is that it probably will only push them to Missouri. Ducks generally don't fly farther south than they must, and the abundance of moist soil habitat in Missouri will be very hospitable to them until it gets cold enough to drive them into Arkansas.
That means that eastern Arkansas will probably not get a big push of new ducks for the first part of the season.
The short-term outlook is better for western Arkansas because of extreme weather that's coming to western Kansas and Oklahoma. That forecast includes blizzard warnings.
Extreme cold, wind, snow and ice will push a lot of birds down the Arkansas River, and many will take refuge in the Arkansas River Valley.
Those new arrivals will reinforce significant numbers of early migrants that are already in the River Valley. There's a little bit of everything out there right now, including mallards, gadwalls, wigeons, teal and pintails. Hunters who have scouted have a good chance of enjoying a stellar opening weekend.
Size matters
When I was younger, I was enthralled with the 3.5-inch, 12-gauge shotshell for duck and goose hunting. I used them almost exclusively when they first came out because I believed that if a lot of power was good (3-inch), then more power was better (3.5 inch). Curiously, I never had any desire to own a 10-gauge, whose ballistics the 3.5-inch 12 was supposed to approximate.
My first shotgun in this class was a Mossberg 835. I hated it. It was heavy, and it handled like a deadfall from an oak tree. It was also the hardest kicking gun I've ever fired.
It also had some nasty characteristics, not the least of which was a slightly malformed chamber that enabled a fired 3.5-inch shell to swell so big that it locked up the action. I had to remove the barrel to extract spent 3.5-inch shells, which essentially reduced the gun to a single shot.
My next gun was a winner, a Winchester Super X2. It fired everything flawlessly, and it patterned every load with consistent densities. It kicked a lot lighter than the Mossberg with 3.5-inch shells, too, but it still brought me to the same sore place at the end of a day.
I noticed over time that my response to the additional recoil and muzzle blast was a noticeable flinch. Any increase in firepower from the 3.5-inch shell was offset by degraded accuracy that resulted from degraded shooting discipline.
The ballistic advantage of a 3.5-inch shell over a 3-inch shell is debatable anyway, but I found that I killed more ducks with fewer shots using the smaller shells. I shot them better because I could control the firepower better. For that same reason I avoid supercharged 3-inch shells like Remington's Hyper-Steel, which kick a lot more than the regular Remington Sportsman shells that I prefer.
For the distances that I shoot at ducks and turkeys, 3-inch shells work fabulously.
Even so, my duck/turkey 12-gauge gun is chambered for 3.5-inch shells. I like having the option for the big shell if I want it, but also because the resale value for 3.5-inch capable autoloaders is higher than for 3-inch guns.
Sports on 11/19/2015