Missouri Harvest Report: What 32,000 Birds Across 31 Species Tell Us About the Mississippi Flyway
Across two seasons, hunters on the BlindBook platform have logged 32,642 individual bird harvests spanning 31 species, 15 states, and 73 clubs. It's the largest structured, species-level, sex-identified harvest dataset collected in real time by any private platform in North America.
And 87% of it — 28,251 birds — comes from Missouri.
That concentration isn't a limitation. It's a feature. Missouri sits at the heart of the Mississippi Flyway, the most heavily used migratory corridor on the continent — carrying roughly 40% of all migrating waterfowl and shorebirds in North America.1 The flyway's 14 member states collectively account for nearly half of all U.S. duck hunters.2 When you're building a harvest data network, Missouri is the right place to start.
The Missouri Dataset
Thirty-four Missouri clubs have logged 6,914 birds in real time during the 2025–26 season and 21,337 historical records backfilled when clubs joined the platform. Those records cover 30 properties spanning over 23,000 acres of actively managed waterfowl habitat — moist-soil units, green tree reservoirs, flooded timber, and agricultural food plots.
Every record includes species identification, sex (on the majority of records), harvest date, and property-level geographic context. This isn't survey data estimated after the fact. It's field data captured the same day birds are taken.
Species Composition: The Full Missouri Profile
| Species | MO Harvest | Drake:Hen | Conservation Context |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mallard | 2,633 | 2.29:1 | Continental population 17% below long-term avg3 |
| Gadwall | 1,178 | 2.98:1 | Population trending up nationally |
| Green-winged Teal | 810 | 3.03:1 | Highest drake skew — warrants investigation |
| Northern Shoveler | 690 | 1.64:1 | Lowest drake skew among major dabblers |
| Northern Pintail | 574 | 2.81:1 | Continental population 41% below long-term avg3 |
| Wood Duck | 374 | 2.66:1 | Key early-season species |
| Ring-necked Duck | 149 | 3.50:1 | Primary diver in MO harvest |
| American Wigeon | 126 | 2.31:1 | — |
| Canada Goose | 88 | 10.67:1 | Small sample; likely behavioral bias |
| Blue-winged Teal | 43 | 3.10:1 | Early migrant; predominantly Sept harvest |
What the Sex Ratios Mean
Mallards showed a drake-to-hen ratio of 2.29:1 in Missouri — slightly below the platform-wide average of 2.38:1. For a species that drives bag limits and season frameworks across the flyway, that kind of state-level variation matters. It could reflect regional differences in habitat quality, hunting pressure, or hen survival rates — exactly the kind of granularity that federal surveys don't capture.
Green-winged Teal posted the most extreme drake skew of any duck at 3.03:1 across 810 birds. A persistent ratio that high could indicate differential migration timing between sexes, or it could flag hen mortality pressure worth investigating. This is the kind of signal that gets lost in aggregate surveys but emerges clearly with species-level, sex-identified data at the state level.
Northern Shoveler stood out at the other end: 1.64:1, the lowest drake-to-hen ratio of any major dabbling duck. Understanding why — whether it's behavioral, migratory, or habitat-driven — requires exactly the kind of continuous, multi-property data that BlindBook captures.
Seasonal Patterns
Missouri's harvest arc tracks the migration pulse through the Mississippi Flyway:
| Month | MO Birds | % of Season |
|---|---|---|
| September | 112 | 1.6% |
| October | 96 | 1.4% |
| November | 4,214 | 61.0% |
| December | 2,165 | 31.3% |
| January | 298 | 4.3% |
| February | 26 | 0.4% |
November is the undisputed peak — 61% of all Missouri live-logged birds were taken in a single month, reflecting the main migration push through the state. December accounted for another 31%, and the combined Nov–Dec window captured over 92% of the season's harvest.
The September data is almost entirely early-season teal and wood duck. The small but meaningful late-season tail — January and February — captures wintering populations and late-migrating species that are chronically underrepresented in traditional surveys.
Habitat as a Data Source
The 23,000+ acres of managed Missouri habitat on BlindBook aren't just a backdrop — they're part of the dataset. When species composition shifts on a managed property from year to year, it tells a story about water levels, food availability, and whether management practices are working.
WaterfowlAI is a committed supporter of the Great River Habitat Alliance (GRHA), a Missouri-based 501(c)(3) working to conserve confluence floodplain habitat in partnership with MDC and Ducks Unlimited. GRHA's Henges Conservation Center is an active BlindBook club — and one of the highest-performing properties on the platform, demonstrating that well-managed habitat produces measurable results. That's not just a hunting metric. It's a habitat quality indicator — the kind of data that agencies and NGOs can use to evaluate whether conservation investments are producing outcomes.
For organizations like Ducks Unlimited and Delta Waterfowl, which collectively invest hundreds of millions of dollars annually in habitat conservation, this kind of property-level data creates something they've never had at scale: measurable proof that specific habitat investments are producing results. That's not just good science. It's the difference between telling donors “we conserved 1.2 million acres” and showing them “properties we invested in saw 40% higher species diversity than surrounding areas.”
What This Means for Research
For university researchers, this dataset represents something that hasn't existed before: a continuous, structured, species-level harvest record from private lands — the land type that dominates waterfowl hunting but produces almost no data for science. The sex ratios, seasonal timing, and property-level context in this dataset are publish-ready and available for academic collaboration at no cost to research institutions.
Graduate programs in wildlife biology — including partners at UC Davis and LSU — can use this data to study questions that were previously unanswerable without expensive, dedicated field surveys: How do drake-to-hen ratios vary by geography and habitat type? Do managed properties show different species composition than unmanaged land? How does migration timing shift year over year on the same properties?
These are fundable research questions. And the data to answer them is already being collected.
The Broader Platform
Missouri is the anchor, but BlindBook is growing. As the network expands into Arkansas, Illinois, Tennessee, Texas, and beyond, the Missouri dataset provides the baseline — the densest, most complete state-level harvest record on the platform, against which other states' data can be compared.
What This Data Is — and What It Isn't
This is aggregated, anonymized harvest data generated as a byproduct of club operations. No individual hunter, club, or property is identified. No data is sold to third parties.
It is not a replacement for USFWS surveys. It is not a population estimate. It is a continuous, structured, real-time record of what hunters are actually taking in the field — by species, by sex, by date, by geography — at a resolution that no existing survey program provides.