"The hunts we made in the 2005-06 season in Delacroix were some of the best I've ever made in my life," Herrmann said. "We saw many clumps of drifting grass in places that were normally open water. It was almost like a broken marsh. That improved hunting substantially. We did very well in the first split, but in the second split, it was spotty. We had ducks for a week and then someone else had them for a week. When new birds came in, they ate whatever they could find and left."

Katrina obliterated much of St. Tammany Parish on the north side of Lake Borgne. Pearl River WMA, near Slidell, suffered extreme damage. The southern 10,000 acres of the 35,032-acre area consist of fresh to brackish marshes; swamp and bottomland hardwoods dominate the remaining two-thirds of the property. The storm knocked down about 70 percent of the trees in the swamp and cut a new tributary off West Pearl River just south of U.S. 90; the officially nameless cut was dubbed "Katrina Lake" by some locals.

"St. Tammany Parish took a severe hit from Katrina," Reynolds said. "The new lake actually held quite a lot of waterfowl last season. We are going to try to shore up the breach to continue the flow-through and make the pond it formed permanent waterfowl habitat."

On the northern shoreline of Lake Pontchartrain, slightly to the west of Slidell, 17,095-acre Big Branch Marsh NWR was pretty well torn into by Katrina. People hunt the mallards, pintails, wood ducks, mottled ducks, teal and gadwalls among other species it normally holds.

"I hunted Big Branch NWR for the first time during the 2005-06 season," Herrmann said. "We had some good hunts during the first split. We killed a lot of good birds. We killed mostly mallards, teal and gadwalls. In the second split, it wasn't as good."

On the far western shoreline of Lake Pontchartrain, 8,325-acre Manchac WMA near LaPlace is largely intact. Extremely popular with people from New Orleans, Baton Rouge and surrounding communities, assorted ducks are there to hunt. Many hunt the Prairie, a large, shallow open-water system. If you can escape the crowds and hunt the marsh's hidden potholes, you might attract more ducks, and a better variety.

In southwestern Louisiana, surging salt water flooded marshes all the way to the Intracoastal Waterway south of Lake Charles, Reynolds said. Subsequent storms in the Gulf of Mexico kept the tides abnormally high for a long time. Consequently, salt water "burned" much of the marsh in southwestern Louisiana. Extremely saline water also entered some rice fields, destroying crops.

With so much salt water, farmers couldn't harvest their second rice crop; thus, many fields resembled baited ponds, there being an enormous amount of waste grain available for ducks and geese. Many birds roosted in the salty marshes, but they fed on abundant grain in rice fields to the north.

"Some areas in southwest Louisiana had a lot of ducks early in the season, especially in the area close to the Intracoastal Waterway," Reynolds said. "Other areas were almost devoid of ducks. In late December and early January, duck populations declined sharply in the southeastern part of the state. We saw a huge increase in southwest Louisiana in the same marshes that did not hold a duck in November and early December. That could be because nobody hunted in those marshes, and the ducks found refuge there."