The most anticipated hunting season opener every year is the one coming up in a few days.

The Teche Area’s many duck hunters and other waterfowlers around the state, mostly on the western side, will go into the marsh and rice fields Nov. 9, opening day of the 2024-25 Louisiana duck hunting season in the West Zone. The West Zone’s first split kicks off the season Saturday.

Duck hunters around here gravitate to three general areas in southwest Louisiana – Atchafalaya Delta Wildlife Management Area, particularly Wax Lake Outlet; Pecan Island/Grand Chenier and Gueydan. Three area waterfowlers plan to go to one of those locales before the shotguns start roaring in earnest.

Kyle Broussard of Loreauville plans to hunt on his lease in the Pecan Island area; Danny Bulliard of St. Martinville expects to be in a duck blind on his lease near Gueydan, and Loreauville’s Hunter Neuville has scheduled a trip with half-a-dozen hunting buddies to the Atchafalaya Delta WMA.

All are hopeful a tropical storm projected to spin this way goes off on a different tangent or peters out before reaching Coastal Louisiana. TS Rafael won’t be welcome by anyone.

“If the hurricane times it right, it’ll be right here in time for duck hunting,” Bulliard said, unhappily, on Monday.

Broussard said, “We’re going to kind of watch the storm this weekend. We have decoys out, our blinds brushed and we’re ready for the opener. I hope the storm takes a turn”

Some of the area’s youngest outdoorsmen got a taste of duck hunting this past weekend when they hunted Saturday and/or Sunday during the youth-only duck hunt in the West Zone.

Broussard, co-owner of GatorTail, said his sons, Owen, 17, and Max, 14, had a field day both days while hunting Nov. 2-3 with a friend in the marsh around Grand Chenier. He is hopeful the success carries over on his lease to the east this weekend.

“They did well on Saturday and they did well on Sunday. They had a really good weekend,” Broussard said about Owen, a senior, and Max, a freshman, who both are in the middle of the high school football season with the Loreauville Tigers.

Broussard said his sons and their friends, Luke Frederick and Elliott Landry, both seniors at LHS, killed mostly teal gadwall and redheads and saw a spoonbill during their time in the duck blind. He believes the area to the west had more ducks and less water, unlike his own lease.

Nevertheless, the 46-year-old all-around outdoorsman who owns the worldwide mud motor brand with his father, Blaine Broussard of Loreauville, is cautiously optimistic, noting he’s seen a few teal, gadwall and “tree ducks” (also known as Mexican squealers or whistling ducks).

Bulliard, meanwhile, brushed and repaired duck blinds, distributed decoys and otherwise prepared for another opening weekend since he began duck hunting in 1952. Bulliard, 76-year-old plant manager at Cajun Chef Products, and his long-time friend, Carroll Delahoussaye of St. Martinville, have been hunting and fishing together 39 years and are ready to enjoy another opening day.

They saw some teal but not one big duck on his lease during the eight hours in the rice fields, Bulliard said Monday. However, there were “a whole bunch” of pintails on flooded property approximately five miles away, unfortunately.

“They go there every year. People tell me two weeks ago they had a lot of specklebellies” in the area, he said, noting there were none to be seen this past weekend.

He’ll be in his duck blind with Delahoussaye, his grandson, Matthew Bulliard and a friend of his, and Luke Barras. Hopefully, he said, they’ll have birds working over the decoys.

“If we kill 10 ducks in my blind, probably all teal, it’ll be a good hunt. I’m not expecting a limit,” he said.

Neuville, at 22 the youngest of the three duck hunters going their separate ways opening day, will wind up in a place of concealment when legal shooting hours start Saturday somewhere on Atchafalaya Delta WMA. Exactly where is up in the air. He and his friend, Braden Gaspard of Centerville, and five other waterfowlers their age plan to get to a spot, wherever that is, in two boats.

“I’m pumped up … I think it’s the most excited I’ve been in a while. Just, hopefully, the birds show up. I’ve got some high expectations from last year,” the composite tech for Bell Helicopter said Monday.

“Me and my buddy went last weekend and we’ve been fishing in the area, so we have kind of a general idea of a couple areas that are holding birds. We’ve been seeing a few birds, nothing really promising yet. Hopefully, we get a push this week.”

Neuville’s first duck hunt was with his father, Tony Neuville of Loreauville, at age 5 or 6, he said, but added mostly he hunted ducks after that with his dad’s good friend, Wayne LeBlanc of Loreauville.

“He (LeBlanc) taught me pretty much everything I know,” he said.

His plan for the duck hunting season is to concentrate first on the Delta. When it gets cold, then he’ll target the Atchafalaya Basin. After that, he’ll be back and forth.

The 2024-25 East Zone opener is scheduled for Nov. 16. The East Zone’s first split will close Dec. 1.

The daily bag limit for ducks is six total ducks per hunter with no more than four mallards (no more than two females), three wood ducks, two canvasbacks, two redheads, one black duck and one pintail. Also, only one scaup can be taken for the first 15 days of the season with two per day allowed for the remainder, and no mottled ducks may be taken for the first 15 days of the season with one per day allowed for the remainder.

The table was set several months ago when the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service released the 2024 Waterfowl Population Status Report. U.S. F&WS officials said there were an estimated 34 million total breeding ducks in the traditional survey area on this continent. That was a 5 percent increase of the 2023 estimate of 32.3 million and only 4 percent below the long-term average (since 1955).

That Aug. 20 report was hailed as a ‘massive conservation win” because it shows the first increase in the number of breeding ducks surveyed since 2015.

Of course, as any waterfowler will tell you, all the migratory birds in the world don’t amount to a hill of beans for us unless weather patterns, i.e. cold fronts and such, push them south from upper North America. More specifically, past Missouri and Arkansas, where claims of “short-stopping” the ducks have been the norm for about a decade.

Jason Olszak, waterfowl program manager for the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, has been getting a bird’s-eye view of the current number of ducks in Louisiana this week during his first aerial waterfowl population survey of 2024-25. He was scheduled to go up with his staff Monday through Thursday with the first flights along transect lines in Coastal Louisiana from Wax Lake Outlet west to below Lake Charles.

Olszak plans to release the numbers on Nov. 8, the day before the season opens in the West Zone.

DON SHOOPMAN is outdoors editor of The Daily Iberian.