Duck and goose hunting seasons are about to open in Oklahoma. What kind of a year will it be?

Will big flights dawdle on Oklahoma lakes and ponds, or will the migratory flights be skimpy?

Will the states north of us in the Central Flyway have really mild fall and early winter temperatures, leaving lots of open water where ducks can relax for weeks? Or will it ice-over early and push birds farther south before we can take advantage of the bounty?

For years when I was outdoor editor of a newspaper in Tulsa, in the days before such information could be found easily on the Internet, I would eagerly await each spring the bulletins issued by Ducks Unlimited and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service describing the nesting conditions in the Canadian and northern U.S. states Prairie Pothole Region, where most of our ducks are hatched and fledged.

In some years there isn't enough water in those areas to provide quality breeding habitat. This year, though, water was abundant there in the spring. Flooding was a problem in several low-lying communities there, but heavy rains and heavy late-spring snows should have provided plenty of water in the shallow marshes and ponds so that ducks and geese had many nesting areas to use.

In general, populations of the more popular species have been on the rise in recent seasons in the Central Flyway. This year's information hadn't been compiled and published at this writing, but the overall trend has been sharply upward since 2005, with mallard populations well above the long-term averages.

Harvests in Oklahoma have been high also. The 2007 mallard harvest in Oklahoma was about 220,000. That is more than twice the long-term average since 1961, when researchers first began collecting data. The 2007 gadwall harvest was pushing 90,000 birds, or more than three times the long-term average.

Goose harvest numbers have been much higher recently also. The Oklahoma Canada goose harvest, for example, has been near 50,000 birds in recent years, compared with the long-term average of closer to 15,000 or 16,000 birds.

So, while population dynamics of some species have been erratic in recent years, the most desired species have been doing well in the Central Flyway. Oklahoma harvests have risen as a result.

One thing I learned, though, and confirmed with the opinions of a couple of die-hard waterfowling friends, is that while the breeding conditions up north and the fall flight forecasts issued by the flyway council were important, a much bigger factor for Oklahoma hunters is the amount and timing of local rains and the manipulation of water levels on Oklahoma's reservoirs.

For even in a bounty year on the breeding grounds, when ducklings hatched by the millions, there was a chance that lots of ducks would never make it as far south as Oklahoma if the weather was too mild north of us.

And if our lakes and ponds were low and the shallow margins of lakes were dry, ducks might pass us by quickly and head directly for the coastal plains, marshes and estuaries of Texas and western Louisiana.

Not only do the water levels during the duck-hunting seasons affect the numbers of ducks to be found locally, but the water levels during the summer months can be important as well.

If we have a very wet year in which our ponds and large reservoirs stay full throughout the summer, less vegetation grows in the shallows. If we have a year that is more normal, in which the water drops below the normal levels, then more seed-producing plants may grow in those lake-edge areas, which may be flooded again when fall rains arrive, producing food that may tempt ducks to hang around longer.