Twenty-four freshly killed teal were the table fare Saturday afternoon for approximately a dozen outdoorsmen from the Teche Area who converged on a hunting camp near Gueydan.

Friends and family were at Troy Romero’s camp on a lease southeast of Gueydan and northeast of White Lake. Romero and his son, Tucker, 11, donated nine of those ducks for the meal after a successful teal hunt that morning, the opening day of the special teal hunting season across the state.

The Romeros got in their duck blind about 6:10 a.m., the elder Romero said Saturday before the nearly dozen people at the hunting camp settled down to watch LSU play Auburn.

“It was a little slow. I think we might have had five ducks by 7 o’clock,” he said. 

Then it slowed even more but the bunches of ducks were larger as they grouped more in flights but moving less frequently, the veteran waterfowl said.

Apparently, there were other duck hunters in the area getting their shots, he said.

“It was pretty good,” he said. “I heard a lot of shots, so I know there were a lot of birds in the area.”

The experience of teal hunting with his son was, once again, a rewarding one, he said. It was the Highland Baptist Christian School student’s third time actively hunting during the teal hunting season after years of tagging along.

“We love it,” he said.

Bag limits of six teal per person were, for the most part, hard to come by for those who hunted Saturday. There might be a good reason, according to state waterfowl leader Larry Reynolds.

Based on an aerial waterfowl survey flown Monday through Wednesday, an estimated 48,000 blue-winged teal were in southwest Louisiana for the long-awaited and ultra-popular opening weekend,  Reynolds said.

The state Department of Wildlife and Fisheries biologist also reported an estimated 5,000 blue-winged teal in southeast Louisiana and another 5,000 or so blue-winged teal at Catahoula Lake for a total of 59,000 blue-winged teal, the earliest migrating duck on the continent.

This year’s estimate is 84 percent lower than last year’s estimate at this time of the year of 373,000, 32 percent below the most recent five-year average of 183,000 and 75 percent below the long-term average of 236,000, Reynolds said.

And it the second-lowest estimate for blue-winged teal on record for the survey with only the 50,000 estimated in 2013 being lower, the waterfowl biologist said.

The estimate for the southwest region of the state is the second-lowest ever, he said.

The Romeros were near the right place because, according to Reynolds, the majority of the blue-winged teal counted in the survey were in agricultural habitat with notable flocks seen in flooded fields south and west of Gueydan and southwest of Crowley, he said. 

The largest concentration was between Welsh and Jennings north of the surveyed area.

Romero said he and his son planned to hunt teal again this morning.