|
The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission at Thursday’s meeting approved two changes to Arkansas’s 2025-26 waterfowl season to shorten the number of days in the annual special early teal season and to increase the daily allowed bag limit on northern pintails from one to three. The changes are the result of regulations frameworks released by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in cooperation with the Mississippi Flyway Council.
Arkansas’s 2025-26 special early blue-winged teal season will be Sept. 20-28.
According to the 2024 Waterfowl Breeding Population and Habitat Survey, blue-winged teal population estimates dropped to 4.6 million birds, which triggered shortened seasons for teal throughout the flyway from 16 days to nine days.
“At greater than 4.7 million birds, the management plan calls for a 16-day early season for hunters to have more opportunity to harvest these early migrants,” AGFC Waterfowl Program Coordinator Brett Leach said. “We’ve dropped under that threshold, so the more conservative early season of nine days was enacted in the federal frameworks. We have set the season to still take advantage of two full weekends at the end of September.”
Leach points out that although Arkansas typically harvests less than 25,000 blue-winged teal, Minnesota, Louisiana and Texas harvest the species in much greater numbers, and the framework applies throughout the Mississippi, Atlantic and Central flyways. (The Pacific Flyway does not have an early teal season.)
Although the 2024 pintail population of 1.98 million birds is lower than blue-winged teal populations, the Mississippi Flyway Council and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have recommended moving the daily limit to three birds for the 2025-26 season under the new interim harvest strategy.
“As we continue to study waterfowl populations, we are learning more and more about what drives increases and declines,” AGFC Wildlife Management Chief Luke Naylor said. “The models for pintails are being updated to reflect the latest data, and we consistently see that daily bag limits play a much lower role in population dynamics than other factors like declining habitat. The pintail population is below the long-term average, but most of that decline happened more than 40 years ago from habitat loss through land conversion on their nesting grounds. The population has been fairly stable since the 1980s.
The interim harvest strategy of a three-pintail daily bag limit is a cautious step toward offering more opportunity for hunters for those few hunts during the season when they have the chance to add an additional pintail or two to their bag limit.
Again, pintails are not a huge part of an Arkansas hunter’s harvest, but The Natural State is a higher harvest state in the Mississippi Flyway.
“The interim strategy calls for three years of this higher limit when supported by pintail population status, with evaluations and monitoring to keep an eye on any population effects,” Leach said. “As one of the leading states in the Mississippi Flyway in pintail harvest, it’s important that we work within this new strategy to accurately measure any unforeseen effects. The strategy calls for three years of a three-bird bag, but those seasons do not need to be consecutive. It just so happens that the population estimate during the first year of the new strategy supported an increased daily bag limit.”
The Commission also heard the first reading of new dates for the Veterans’ and Active-Duty Military Waterfowl Hunt. If approved, the hunt will run concurrently with Arkansas’s Youth Waterfowl Hunt Feb. 7-8, 2026. This will add an additional day for veterans and active-duty military personnel.
Arkansas’s 2025-26 Waterfowl season will be as follows:
Special Early Teal Season: Sept. 20-28, 2025
Duck, Coot and Merganser Seasons: Nov. 22-Dec. 1, 2025; Dec. 10-23, 2025; Dec. 27, 2025-Jan. 31, 2026
Special Youth, Active-Duty Military and Veteran Hunt (PROPOSED): Feb. 7-8, 2026
Early Canada Goose Hunt: Sept. 1-Oct. 15, 2025
Regular Canada Goose Season: Nov. 22-Dec. 1, 2025; Dec. 10-23, 2025; Dec.27, 2025-Jan. 31, 2026
White-fronted Goose Season: Oct. 25-Nov. 2, 2025, Nov. 22-Dec. 1, 2025; Dec. 10-23, 2025; Dec. 27, 2025-Jan. 31, 2026
Snow, Blue and Ross’s Goose Season: Oct. 25-Nov. 2, 2025; Nov. 22-Dec. 1, 2025; Dec. 10-23, 2025; Dec. 27, 2025-Jan. 31, 2026
Light Goose Conservation Order: Feb. 1-6, 2026; Feb. 9-April 25, 2026
The Commission heard from Chief Financial Officer Emily Shumate, Chief of Fisheries Tommy Laird and Chief of Operations Mike Cantrell about damages incurred from recent storms, including major flooding damage to the Jim Hinkle Spring River State Fish Hatchery. The hatchery was flooded by as much as 30 inches of rain during the deluge that worked its way across the state in early April, and conservative estimates for initial repairs exceed $5 million.
“We lost a lot of fish that were in the tanks, and there was massive scouring and undercutting from the dam being compromised,” Laird said. “It took a few days to resecure the bridge leading to the hatchery to even begin the evaluation.”
Laird said the hatchery has roughly 100,000 to 150,000 fish left that were not flushed into the Spring River or killed during the flood, and that 14 of the 24 tanks rebuilt in 2023 had live fish in them when the water receded.
“We may be able to provide about three months' worth of stockings with those fish, but we have a lot of cleanup and work left to do,” Laird said. “I especially want to thank the staff at that hatchery for doing everything they could to save what equipment they could before the water got too high. They worked in rising water to move all the heavy equipment and vehicles used at the hatchery, except one UTV. They had to abandon that one UTV because the water had already risen to a foot over the bridge during their last trip out.”
The Commission unanimously authorized a budget increase of $500,000 from gas lease funds to cover construction costs and begin recovery in the area.
“We know the final cost is going to be much more than this, but this authorization will keep us moving as we assess the total damage and plan for the future,” Shumate said. “The transfer is for $300,000 to go to the Spring River hatchery, and the remaining $200,000 is to begin work on all the other areas we’re seeing damage across the state.”
In other business, Commissioners:
A video of the meeting is available on the AGFC’s YouTube Channel.