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The 2026-27 Waterfowl in the Southeast report covers federal hunter counts, a weaker mallard breeding survey, a steady season framework and an audit of 139 waterfowl operators. Here is what each chapter found.

Gooch WMA on the Obion River is West Tennessee's public-duck icon, and right now its draw calendar is in full motion: early-segment permits to claim by Oct. 26, a mid-segment application window opening Oct. 21, and in-person leftover drawings at the Kenton gym. Here is how TWRA's 2026-27 tier system actually works, how Gooch differs from Reelfoot, and how lodges and private-ground operators can serve the hunters the draw leaves behind.

Draw results are landing across the Southeast this fall, and most applicants will hear no. Here is the honest framework for choosing between a WMA duck draw, a lease, and a guided hunt, with verified 2026-27 draw rules for six states, the odds agencies actually publish, the Arkansas guiding prohibition every operator must respect, and the Plan B playbook that turns results day into bookings.

Sloughs WMA quota results land in mid-October, and most applicants learn they did not draw. Here is how Kentucky's Sauerheber, Jenny Hole, and walk-in system actually works for 2026-27, why the Sloughs standby line is a Monday night at the WMA office rather than a pre-dawn crowd, and how lodging, lease, and private-field operators in the Ohio River bottoms can serve the hunters left holding a plan without a place to hunt.

The 2026 September teal season ran nine days in most of the Southeast and five in Kentucky and Tennessee. The window is closed, but the work is not. Here is how to review what the short season taught you, convert this year's teal clients before the November duck openers, and build the teal season countdown content for September 2027 starting now.

At the bird's-foot tip of the Mississippi River, Delta National Wildlife Refuge is building new marsh and losing old marsh at the same time. This deep dive explains how crevasses, the spring flood pulse, roseau cane die-back, and hurricanes shape the ducks, geese, shorebirds, and pelicans at the bottom of the flyway.

Far-west Kentucky is where the Ohio meets the Mississippi and the ducks come down the bottoms. This field report walks the Jackson Purchase WMAs, the managed water of Ballard and Boatwright, the reclaimed mine grasslands of Peabody, and the timing signals that shape the 2026-27 season from teal to the late-January push.

Louisiana's coastal marsh is among the most important wintering grounds for ducks in North America, and it is disappearing. This is the ecology of a landscape-scale crisis: what land loss and saltwater intrusion mean for gadwall, pintail, and the non-migratory mottled duck, and for the Mississippi Flyway that depends on this coast.

From the rice levees of Vermilion Parish to the fraying marsh edges of Cameron Parish, feral hogs occupy the seam between farmland and wetland. Their rooting threatens both a rice economy that feeds millions of wintering waterfowl and a coastline already losing ground to the Gulf.

The Atchafalaya Basin is often described as the largest bottomland hardwood swamp left in North America, and one of the most feral-hog-saturated landscapes in the country. Here, dense cover and near-impossible access have turned a management problem into something closer to a permanent ecological condition.

In the Arkansas Delta, an invasive land mammal is colliding with a continental migratory-bird resource. The Grand Prairie around Stuttgart, the Mississippi Flyway's premier duck-wintering ground, runs on rice and managed moist-soil wetlands, and feral hogs root up both. This covers that collision: how rooting destroys the waterfowl food base the refuges cultivate, the cost to farmers, and why Arkansas, still on the invasion's leading edge, may be one of the few places it can

Between Kentucky Lake and Lake Barkley runs a 40-mile federal peninsula, 170,000 acres of Forest Service land that anchors the deer, turkey, waterfowl, and bass of western Kentucky. This field report walks Land Between the Lakes: the two impoundments and the canal that joins them, the enclosed elk and bison herd, the public-land hunting, the famous crappie and bass, and the Mississippi Flyway ducks.

Wheeler National Wildlife Refuge is a closed north Alabama sanctuary that does something unusual: by holding thousands of ducks and a large wintering flock of sandhill cranes, it pushes birds onto the surrounding Tennessee River country. This report walks the refuge-and-reservoir interface: the sanctuary effect and its spillover hunting, the bass of Guntersville, Wheeler, Wilson, and Pickwick, the crane spectacle, and the Sipsey Fork trout.

The Atchafalaya is the largest river-swamp in North America — 1.4 million acres of cypress, bottomland hardwood, and moving water where the Mississippi is forever trying to change course. This Louisiana field report walks the pulse-driven floodplain: the Old River Control Structure holding the river in place, the spring flood that grows the crawfish, the summer drawdown that stacks the bass, the fall low water that stages the ducks, and the Cajun guide economy that works it a

Where the Tennessee River was dammed into Kentucky Lake, widely cited as the largest man-made lake by surface area east of the Mississippi, the impounded West Tennessee corridor grew two standout fisheries: ledge bass over the old river channel, and a Mississippi Flyway diver-duck concentration on the open water. This field report walks the impoundment ecology, the ledge structure, the waterfowl timing, the Paris Landing basecamps, and the outlook for the guides who work the

Reelfoot Lake is the strangest water in Tennessee, a flooded-cypress basin born when the 1811-1812 New Madrid earthquakes dropped the land and drowned a standing forest. The result is one of America's great duck and crappie waters, a national wildlife refuge that protects Mississippi Flyway habitat, and a heritage-resort tradition reaching back a century. This field report walks the seismic origin, the flooded-cypress ecology, the refuge and its rules, and an operator market

September early teal is the Southeast's shortest, fastest, most beginner-friendly waterfowl season -- and the gateway that turns dove hunters and first-timers into November duck clients. This hub maps it: how the federal framework sets the season length from the blue-winged teal population estimate, how the states structure their seasons, the three teal geographies, the six-week marketing sprint, and the lean economics of a nine-day season that feeds the whole fall pipeline.

Bayou Meto WMA is one of the best-known public flooded-timber duck woods in the country, some 33,000 acres of AGFC greentree reservoir on the edge of the Arkansas Grand Prairie. This field report walks greentree-reservoir management and the timber-health debate now reshaping it, the DIY public-hunting tradition and its unwritten etiquette, and the free public-land information niche that has opened as private leases price out the average hunter.

The Mississippi Delta is one of the most legible duck-and-deer landscapes in America: flooded green timber, rice and catfish country, oxbow lakes, and bottomland hardwood on deep alluvial soil. This field report walks the geology, the rice sheet-water and moist-soil management feeding the Mississippi Flyway, the Yazoo Backwater pumps debate, the bottomland deer woods, and an established duck market with room to tell its own story online.

Kentucky is two outdoor states in one license year: reservoir bass-and-waterfowl country in the west on Kentucky Lake, Lake Barkley, and the flooded Mississippi bottoms, and in the east one of the continent's great comebacks, a free-ranging elk herd rebuilt on reclaimed coal mines. This field report walks all four Kentucky ecologies, the migration and rut timing that drive them, the basecamps that anchor them, and the opportunities for operators who tell these stories well.