Texas duck season is already open in the High Plains Mallard Management Unit, which opened October 24. The South Zone opens Saturday, November 7, and the North Zone follows on November 14. The daily bag is still six. What is not the same is the ground you will be hunting on: roughly 80 percent of Texas was in active drought as of September 15, mallards just posted their lowest breeding estimate in 33 years, and teal season got cut to nine days because blue-wings fell under the threshold.
And yet the two species a Texas coastal hunter actually lives on came in above their long-term averages. This is a more complicated season than the headlines make it, so here are the dates, the numbers underneath them, and the honest read.
The 2026-27 calendar
| Zone | First split | Second split |
|---|---|---|
| High Plains Mallard Management Unit | Oct. 24–25, 2026 | Oct. 30, 2026 – Jan. 31, 2027 |
| North Zone | Nov. 14–29, 2026 | Dec. 5, 2026 – Jan. 31, 2027 |
| South Zone | Nov. 7–29, 2026 | Dec. 12, 2026 – Jan. 31, 2027 |
Dates are as published in TPWD's Outdoor Annual for the 2026-27 license year. Youth and veteran days come before each zone's opener: October 17–18 in the High Plains unit, October 31–November 1 in the South Zone, and November 7–8 in the North Zone. Goose zone dates and the Light Goose Conservation Order are in the same publication and I would confirm those directly rather than take them from an aggregator, because several of the ones circulating this month are wrong.
Daily bag: six in the aggregate, including mergansers. No more than five mallards, of which only two may be hens; three wood ducks; three pintails; two redheads; two canvasbacks; one scaup; and one dusky duck — mottled duck, Mexican-like duck, black duck and their hybrids. Possession is three times the daily bag, so 18. Check the dusky duck dates separately in the Outdoor Annual; in recent seasons the dusky season has opened later than the regular season, which is the rule people forget on opening morning in the marsh.
The survey numbers, and the one nobody is reading
The 2026 USFWS breeding survey landed in early September. Total ducks came in at 33.4 million, against 33.9 million in 2025 and six percent below the long-term average. That headline is the decoy. The species lines are where the story is:
| Species | 2026 estimate | vs 2025 | vs long-term average |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mallards | 5.9 million | −11% | −26% (lowest in 33 years) |
| Northern pintails | 1.9 million | −11% | −48% |
| Blue-winged teal | 3.9 million | −11% | −22% |
| Redheads | — | — | +26% |
| Canvasbacks | — | — | +32% |
| May ponds | 4.8 million | +14% | −9% |
Read the redhead and canvasback rows again. Those two diving ducks — the birds that make a Laguna Madre or a coastal bay hunt work — are the only lines on the board sitting well above their long-term averages, in a year when everything with a green head is falling. That is the single most useful fact in this survey for a Texas coastal hunter, and it has been almost entirely buried under the mallard headline. It is also a bag-limit problem rather than a gift: two redheads and two canvasbacks is where those hunts cap out regardless of how many birds are in front of you.
The pond count is the leading indicator and it cuts both ways. May ponds up 14 percent overall, but prairie Canada up 29 percent while the U.S. prairies fell 10 percent. Water came back where it matters for next year's hatch; it did not come back in the Dakotas. We went through the mechanism in the national duck outlook.
The Texas half of the problem is local
The birds have to land somewhere, and Texas is dry. As of September 15, the Drought Monitor had Texas at 37.9 percent D1, 24.4 percent D2, 14.2 percent D3 and 3.6 percent D4 — roughly four-fifths of the state in some stage of drought.
TPWD waterfowl program leader Kevin Kraai said in the department's September 8 teal release that habitat is drying across several important teal regions, that hunters should expect a below-average season, and that properties holding dependable shallow water and food will matter disproportionately. That last clause is the practical one. In a wet year, birds spread across every playa and stock tank and every hunter gets some. In a dry year they pile onto whatever is still wet, and the difference between a good season and a bad one is entirely about whether you have access to one of those places.
Rice is the other variable and it is not a water story. USDA estimated Texas planted rice acreage at 125,000 acres for 2026, possibly finishing near 100,000, driven by prices and global oversupply. Coastal-prairie duck hunting has been subsidized by rice agriculture for sixty years. That subsidy is shrinking for economic reasons no amount of rain will fix.
Teal season already showed what this adds up to: nine days, September 19 through 27, at six birds a day, shortened because the blue-wing estimate fell under the 4.7 million threshold that buys a 16-day season. We wrote about hunting the front rather than the calendar in September, and that advice applies harder in a dry fall.
The rule change you have not heard about
On August 31, USFWS published two rules that end annual Federal Register rulemaking for migratory bird frameworks. Harvest limits now live in a Migratory Game Bird Hunting Memorandum, published on or before February 28 every third year, updatable in between when the biology requires it. States still submit season proposals by May 31 every year and still set their own seasons, so nothing about this fall changes for you.
What is worth noting is the process. All four Flyway Councils and 14 states objected to the three-year cycle. USFWS proceeded anyway. Reasonable people can read that two ways: an annual regulation that mostly restates last year's regulation is redundant paperwork, and killing it frees staff for biology. Or: four scheduled Federal Register documents a year were four searchable, calendar-fixed moments when the public could watch the process work, and a memorandum on a three-year clock leaves a thinner trail. Both are true at once. You do not have to pick a side. You do have to change where you look.
What to do about a dry season
The gear answer follows straight from the habitat answer. Dry years mean walking farther to less water, hunting smaller water, and standing in it longer for fewer birds. That is a waders-and-mobility problem rather than a decoy-count problem.
- Insulated waders you can actually walk in. A Texas coastal hunt is a wet problem more than a cold one until January, when it is both. An insulated breathable chest wader like the SUMMIT 1600g covers the back half of the season; we laid out the full argument in the Gulf Coast wet-weather guide and compared options in the Texas waders guide.
- Scout water, not birds. In a dry year the map changes weekly and last season's spot may be a mudflat. The playa that held water in October is the one worth a November drive.
- Expect to move. Concentrated birds means concentrated hunters, and the spread that worked on opening weekend gets educated fast. Mobility beats a bigger rig.
- Divers are the opportunity. If redheads and canvasbacks are the two lines above average, then a bay setup is the hunt with the best odds attached to it this year. That is my read of the survey rather than a TPWD forecast, so check TPWD's waterfowl outlook and the latest habitat reports before you commit to a spot.
Licenses have not changed: a Texas hunting license, the Migratory Game Bird Endorsement at 17 and up, HIP certification, and the federal duck stamp at 16 and up. The federal stamp is $25 and the 2026-27 stamp is valid through June 30, 2027. The rest of the waterfowl shelf — blinds, bags, layout gear — is built for exactly the kind of season where you have to go find the water instead of waiting on it.
One more thing worth holding onto. A dry Texas fall following a dry Texas spring is the second half of a pattern we wrote about in June in a tale of two Texases. The rain that fell this year did not fall evenly, and neither will the birds.