Creating a duck impoundment on your property can provide a great opportunity for waterfowl hunting, conservation, and to better familiarize you with your land! By designing and managing a wetland habitat, you can attract and sustain a variety of duck and waterfowl species. However, building a quality duck impoundment requires careful planning and consideration. Here are the most important aspects of a successful duck impoundment!

What is a Duck Impoundment?

Before getting into the most integral parts of a duck impoundment, it’s important to understand exactly what a duck impoundment is. During a recent episode of the National Land Podcast, NC Land Professional Matthew Eakes described duck impoundments as, “An assortment of levees, dikes, or whatever term you want to use. It’s got a water control structure to hold water on a specific area for a certain amount of time throughout the year, whether you want to hold it for a long time or just a short time during duck season. That’s what a duck impoundment is.”

Essentially a duck impoundment is an area that is designed to generate food and act as an attractive space for ducks to graze, affording hunters a consistent game population and hunting locations.

Most Important Duck Impoundment Qualities

Location

Location is one of the most important factors in determining the right spot for your duck impoundment. Areas that are typically great for duck impoundments are low-lying depressions or flat fields. It’s also a good idea to assess the surrounding landscape for any runoff issues that could affect water quality or cause flooding.

If you’re looking for the best duck-hunting land in the United States, then it doesn’t get much better than Hyde County, North Carolina as NC Land Broker Aaron Sutton explained during a recent episode of the National Land Podcast. Aaron stated, “Hyde County is North Carolina’s Stuttgart and anybody up and down the East Coast of the United States who duck hunts has probably heard of Hyde County. The old saying is that every duck that flies up and down the Atlantic Flyway comes through Hyde County at some point in their life, and most of them on multiple flights throughout the year. So it’s home for a few hundred-thousand ducks at any given time in December and January until they’re ready to fly back North.”

Water Availability

One of the most important parts of a duck hunting property is water availability since properties without water available on-site will need to have that water pumped in from another source, which can be a costly and time-consuming endeavor. 

In areas where freshwater isn’t as available, most landowners will need to pump water from agricultural fields and ditches or dig wells to pump water from deep underground up into their duck impoundment. The geographic location of the property is the number one factor in determining where that water will be coming from.

Duck Impoundment Size

Size is another factor to consider when building a duck impoundment, and it can vary depending on your situation. If you want more of a hunting club-style property with multiple different groups hunting in different locations at the same time, then you’d be looking at a minimum of around 20-60 acres of land. If you’re going to be the only person or group hunting on this property, then you could go as big or small as you’d like. 

It’s also important to take into account shooting lanes and how you’d like to set up the various blinds around your impoundment. Most experts recommend around 7-10 acres of land per blind to ensure hunter safety. So the size of your duck impoundment or duck hunting property could also be determined by how many blinds or shooting lanes you’re hoping to have on the property.

As Matthew Eakes stated during his appearance on the National Land Podcast, “It’s mostly about what your goals are and what you want to achieve that determines the right size for your duck hunting property.”

Soil for a Duck Impoundment

According to Sutton, Eakes, and Lyle, soil quality is possibly the most important factor in determining whether a location will make a great duck impoundment or not. It can even influence the size of a duck hunting property since a landowner could have 500 acres of land with only 10 acres of usable soil. This is because duck impoundments require nutrient-rich soils to produce food for game to graze on. Strong clay soils are also necessary to build dikes and levees that will hold water and typically require some digging to find.

NC Land Professional Jacob Lyle explained this, stating, “When you’re building a dike or a levee, you need to have what people call ‘good dirt’ or a nice core to keep that water contained, whether it’s the bottom of a pond or a levee or dike around a duck impoundment. Sometimes in Hyde County, you’ve got to dig really deep to find that versus my neck of the woods, where that’s basically what we’ve got on the soil surface with hardly any topsoil.”

If you’ve got more questions about building a duck impoundment or what to look for in a prospective duck-hunting tract, contact your local Land Professional today!