Black-Bellied Whistling Duck (photo courtesy of Robert Woegner/Pixabay)
The Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries announced a new experimental black-bellied whistling duck season starting this year. LDWF Waterfowl Program Manager Jason Olszak says the season will run from October 3rd to the 11th and will offer hunters the opportunity to exclusively target the species in early October for the next four years.
Shooting hours for the special season will be sunrise to sunset. The daily bag limit is four ducks with a possession limit of 12.
It’s against state law to target the black-bellied whistling duck season during the September teal season, but they are allowed to be harvested during the regular duck season that runs from November into January.
Olszak says the decision was made to create an October season season specifically for the black-bellied whistling duck, because there has been a growing abundance of the species in the state.
“They’re lightly harvested during the regular duck season; so for about a decade and a half, we’ve been interested in pursuing additional harvest opportunities earlier in the year,” Olszak explained.
Olszak says historically, black-bellied whistling ducks left the state or gravitated towards urban areas, but recent research shows that’s changing.
“More and more, we’re seeing them out in the wild areas in the marsh where they could potentially be harvested all throughout the season, all the way through the end of January,” Olszak noted.
Hunters see Black-bellied whistling ducks during the September teal season and their numbers decline in the fall because they migrate to Mexico and Central America by early to mid-fall.
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