Fourteen months of drought have taken their toll on Arkansas’s wetlands, and the effects will be felt much more by waterfowl hunters as the first segment of Arkansas’s duck season begins Nov. 21. Although the season is a month away, Arkansas Game and Fish Commission Director Doug Schoenrock is preparing commissioners and the hunting public for an uncharacteristically dry season.
“We’re still more than a month away until duck season opens, but we need to talk now to prepare you and our hunters about the effects of this prolonged drought on both public and private land,” Schoenrock said at the agency’s Oct. 7 committee meeting in Little Rock. “Much of Arkansas is more than 20 inches behind in cumulative rainfall totals. That sort of deficit doesn’t disappear after a few 1-inch rains.
“The AGFC is monitoring conditions and making sure the information across all of our wetland-focused wildlife management areas is available for everyone to see, but it’s largely in the hands of Mother Nature,” Schoenrock said. “Hunters may need to temper their expectations with the forecast we’re getting for the beginning of duck season.”
Low-water woes
David Luker, AGFC assistant chief of wildlife management, presented the hard facts about the lack of water.
“At the beginning of October, we had adequate water to flood only 42 percent of the moist-soil units we manage on AGFC-controlled land. Those numbers will drop as long as this drought continues,” Luker said.
Jeffrey Cothren, AGFC Wetland Habitat Program coordinator, gave a little more detail on those numbers, and the outlook isn’t promising.
“The 71 units that still have some water to flood total about 4,627 acres, but we currently have the capability to flood only 42 huntable moist-soil units, which is 3,553 acres; 2,020 of those acres are at Steve N. Wilson Raft Creek Wildlife Management Area,” Cothren said. “Even then, the best-case scenario for that area is to have 34 permit hunt locations available by Christmas, and that’s with us pumping water from the White River 24/7, which has already started. Even with the drought, staff have created some of the best moist-soil vegetation that I’ve ever seen and they should be proud of that effort; we just need the water to flood it for the ducks.”
Even some of the areas with dedicated water in AGFC-owned lakes are feeling the heat. Lake Charles, which feeds greentree reservoirs in Shirey Bay Rainey Brake in northeast Arkansas, is currently only 4.5 feet deep as land managers begin making decisions about this year’s flooding capabilities.
“The lake was already 4 feet below normal pool last year before flooding the GTRs and still has not recovered. It’s now more than 8 feet below normal pool. The water left isn’t sufficient to flood the GTRs, and we would almost certainly collapse the existing fishery for little to no benefit to waterfowl or duck hunters. We have decided that we will not use water from the lake to flood the GTRs until the lake recovers.”
The same scenario is playing out at Harris Brake Lake and Harris Brake WMA in the Arkansas River Valley. The GTRs on Harris Brake Lake take a large volume of water to flood because the depth of the main channels in the system is well over 10 feet in some places. All of the channels must fill before the water overtops the banks and floods these GTRs. Harris Brake Lake is currently 2.5 feet low; using the remaining water in the lake would cause major damage to the fishery and provide little, if any, wetland habitat for waterfowl or hunters.
The problem with pumping
Hunters desperate for a solution often ask why the AGFC doesn’t simply “turn on the pumps” to add water to these wetland areas. The answer to that question is complex, but it ends with a simple reality: “You cannot pump water that isn’t there.”
According to Luker, roughly 95 percent of the AGFC’s artificially flooded wetlands rely on rainfall and surface water. Some are filled by gravity-fed canals connected to nearby lakes, but many must have water transported using relift pumps placed in rivers, streams, and ditches. After 14 months of drought, most of these water sources have run dry or are too low to draw from using current infrastructure. Pumps that can be used have begun pumping already, and the agency has invested in more portable pumps dedicated to Cypress Bayou, Prairie Bayou and Steve N. Wilson Raft Creek WMAs. Staff are also working with the local irrigation district at Ed Gordon Point Remove WMA to procure additional water through a dedicated canal leading to the WMA, but the availability of water through that means is limited as well.
Groundwater is not the solution, either. Pumping a few 40-acre fields is much different than supplying the massive acreage required to flood the land the AGFC controls. Furthermore, the reduction in rice acreage across Arkansas this year has greatly reduced the amount of water available on a landscape level needed to provide ducks and other waterfowl energy during their migration.
“Pumping from the ground for wildlife causes a litany of issues, including the reduction of the water table farmers and cities depend upon,” Schoenrock said. “And the volume of water needed during this drought overcomes what we can responsibly pump. We’ve run pumps on Lake Ashbaugh in Northeast Arkansas nonstop for the last 16 months, and the amount of water lost to evaporation and seepage there still leaves that lake incredibly low. We’re at the point where the pumps installed last year have already been worked to death from constant use. Ashbaugh is providing some habitat, but it’s not sustainable at this rate if we don’t get help from rain.”
Cothren explains that a few wells exist on WMAs, but the volume of water needed to flood the surrounding areas using wells would take months and could be surpassed by one or two well-placed rains. “We have already initiated pumping on most of the small areas where we have groundwater available, but it’s not a long-term solution,” Cothren said.
Universal issue
The issue isn’t solely a public land problem. Private leases and hunting clubs are also suffering from a lack of moisture.
“I spoke to David Graves in our Private Lands Habitat Division, who coordinates the Waterfowl Rice Incentive Conservation Enhancement program, and he said that only five to 10 of the 47 hunt locations enrolled for this year currently have adequate surface water available to flood,” Luker said. “Of the 4,569 acres enrolled in the program, 967 are Wetland Reserve Easement acres; only about 100 acres of that can be flooded with the water currently available to those landowners.”
All rice fields and WRE acreage enrolled in the WRICE program have strict requirements to use only surface water for flooding, ensuring that most of the water table underneath these areas is reserved for drinking water and agricultural use.
“Even with that, the water table is so low right now that I recently spoke to a farmer who said he dug 9 feet deep before finding soil that had any moisture content,” Luker said. “There are a lot of farmers in some of these drought-stricken areas who are experiencing dry wells and surging pumps because the water level of the aquifer has taken such a hit during the last year and a half.”
Rice sparse
According to the 2026 Prospective Plantings Report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, rice acreage in Arkansas dropped from over 1.1 million acres to 851,000 acres. This is the first time since 1983 that rice acreage dropped below 1 million acres. Rising fertilizer and fuel costs, combined with lower market price estimates, drove many rice producers to pursue lower-cost alternatives such as soybeans and corn.
“Water across the Arkansas landscape is needed to meet habitat needs for migrating waterfowl and shorebirds,” Luke Naylor, AGFC chief of wildlife management, said. “We work with a lot of native vegetation and other food sources on public land to give a complete package of nutritional needs, but rice production and flooded rice fields have always been key drivers of duck numbers and are essential to their energy needs during migration and winter. We should expect lower duck numbers statewide and tougher hunting conditions as duck season begins. That said, timely winter rains can turn this around, given that much less water is needed to provide at least temporary habitat and hunting opportunities on rice fields.”
Watching water
The AGFC has a set of tables dedicated to keeping the public informed about planned operations for the moist-soil units and greentree reservoirs it operates to benefit wetland habitat. Visit www.agfc.com/wetlandmanagement to learn more and see updated tables of wetland conditions and flooding plans for this winter.
Visit https://www.agfc.com/education/arkansas-waterfowl-rice-program-wrice/ to learn more about the WRICE program and track hunt locations available for the 2026-27 duck hunting season. Each hunt location will be evaluated weekly and will only be entered into the draw if enough water is present to offer waterfowl habitat and hunting opportunity.
