LITTLE ROCK — 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
