With any luck -- if you're a waterfowler, that is -- this month will be anything but warm across Oklahoma. Because when there's little red showing on the thermometer prior to jolly old St. Nick's arrival later this month, a bounty of mallards usually fills the Sooner State sky -- a sight guaranteed to warm a cold duck hunter's heart.

If a limit of greenheads is on your Christmas list this month, consider these three December hotspots.

EUFAULA LAKE
Without question, Eufaula Lake, sprawling over 102,500 acres near McAlester, has historically been one of the state's waterfowl hunting hotspots. When conditions are right, the duck hunting there leaves waterfowlers dreaming of flocks of ducks, not sugarplums!

"Eufaula has the potential to raise a lot of natural forage, and if we can get some winter water in the lake that floods those shallow zones, it can be tremendous," said Alan Stacey, the wetland habitat biologist for the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation. "Of course, the lake will usually have a lot of duck hunters too, because the hunting can be so good."

That said, Stacey is the first to admit that drought and low water conditions have put waterfowling a little off the pace recently. "There have been a few successive years down there that haven't been very good," Stacey said. "Some of the traditional Eufaula hunters have written it off and gone elsewhere."

Another reason for Eufaula falling rank as a duck-hunting hotspot: The ducks that have visited the lake often congregate around shallow mudflats that are difficult to access by foot or by boat. However, Stacey noted, the Eastern Oklahoma reservoir could again be good for duck hunting whenever rains return to the Sooner State.

Add cold, snowy weather in the middle and upper portions of the Central Flyway to the scenario of a refilled Eufaula and the hunting could even approach red-hot status!

"Eufaula is a potential hotspot if conditions develop for this particular year," Stacey said. "The lake has been down and low for a couple of seasons, minimum -- but that's not necessarily a bad thing."

Say what?

"Due to the dynamic nature of a lake being flooded one year and being down the next, it can do some good," Stacey said. "Take this year and some of the good we're seeing. Right now, there's a pretty good zone that's a couple of feet below the conservation pool level, where we have good, native moist-soil plants growing.

"We also have some of the Japanese millet that we seeded there last year -- about 800 acres worth. A lot of that was high and dry throughout the season last year since there was no inflow; this year, we've got a good volunteer crop of Japanese millet growing. So combined with some of the good conditions we currently have for moist-soil plants, that lake is looking good."

The bottom line is this: If the rains come, Oklahoma duck hunters will surely want to keep Eufaula in mind!

KAW LAKE
Any discussion of December duck hunting hotspots in the Sooner State has to include 17,000-acre Kaw Lake, an Arkansas River impoundment lying near Ponca City and the Oklahoma/Kansas border. Why? Simple: mallards -- and lots of them!

"We've had a successful Japanese millet seeding program there," Stacey said. "If you consistently provide a large enough forage base out there, and you do it year in and year out, then you begin to develop (migratory) traditions with the birds."