ALERTS ARE NO LONGER SUBSCRIBER-ONLY DuckCast can now tell you when a marsh you saved has its best day of the season, whether or not you subscribe. Save a region, say yes when it asks about notifications, and that is it. Free gets one alert per region per season, plus one when a state you watch lights up somewhere else. DuckCast Pro is the rest of them: every threshold, every time conditions change, all season. FIXED: THE WRONG STATE'S MARSH If you had a region saved, the Tomorrow's Hunt card could show a region from a different state, with that state's date and regulations link, while the map above it showed the state you actually picked. The map, the scores and the region rankings were always right. The card underneath them was not.

SIX SPECIES Gadwall, wigeon and green-winged teal join mallards, pintails and snow geese. All 90 regions now carry a score for all six. The three new species get their own season curve in every state, sized from the federal harvest survey state by state instead of assumed to follow the mallard. The species picker is now a row of chips; swipe it sideways. THREE STATES STOP OPENING ON MALLARD In the latest federal harvest survey Texas hunters took more than five green-winged teal for every mallard, and Louisiana and Mississippi hunters took more gadwall and teal than mallards too. So Texas and Mississippi now open on green-winged teal, Louisiana on gadwall, and the species you pick stays picked across a relaunch. SCORES ARE HELD TO THE SPECIES A strong front used to push every species in a region toward the same number. A score now stays within two points of what that species' numbers look like there on that date, and Why This Score Is Moving says "Held to the season curve" when that is what is happening. Mallards in the Texas Hill Country no longer score like mallards in Arkansas. A NEW ICON A duck in flight inside the ring.

THREE NEW STATES Twenty-seven new regions. Nine in Louisiana from the southwest rice prairie across to the northeast delta, nine in Oklahoma from the Panhandle out to Eufaula and Red Slough, and nine in Texas from the High Plains playas down to the Laguna Madre. The Central Flyway chain is now unbroken. One Arctic front can be followed from prairie Canada through North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas into Oklahoma and on to the Texas coast, six scored states each reading the weather off the one above it. LOUISIANA DOES NOT LEAD WITH MALLARD Every state before it did. Louisiana is a wintering terminus where pintail, gadwall and teal carry the hunting, so the app now holds a lead species per state and opens Louisiana on pintail instead of on the duck the prairie is about. TEXAS IS TWO WINTERING GROUNDS The High Plains playas and the coast run on opposite schedules, so Texas is the first state scored with two separate region curve groups instead of one. The playas are shallow, freeze solid, peak in early December and empty into January. The coast never really locks, so it climbs through December and holds across the whole of January, which is when the state's midwinter survey finds most of its birds there. OKLAHOMA IS A CORRIDOR Kansas above and Texas below both hold birds for the winter. Oklahoma is mostly where they stage on big water on the way through, so its January is a decline rather than a peak, and the curves say so instead of promising a hunter on Eufaula that his best week is still ahead. The Panhandle season runs October 10 to January 13 with no split, which makes it shorter than the rest of the state rather than merely earlier. PUSH ALERTS DuckCast now watches your saved regions while you are not looking and sends a notification when one turns. It asks permission the first time you save a region, not on launch. Pro. CLUB LEADERBOARD Start a private group for your club or lease, share the six character code, and everyone's season sits on one board. It ranks on total birds, so posting a slow morning can only help you, and it hands out three crowns rather than naming one winner: most birds, best day, most mornings out. Your hunt log stays on your phone. Nothing reaches a group unless you post it, one morning at a time, and your notes never go at all. Pro. YOUR HUNTS VS THE FORECAST Log a morning and DuckCast scores it against what the forecast actually said that day, so you can see what your best hunts had in common instead of guessing. The log never leaves the phone; the comparison happens on it. Pro. RADAR Thirty-five NEXRAD sites now cover all ten states, adding Lake Charles, Fort Polk, Vance, Oklahoma City, Frederick, Amarillo, Fort Worth, Austin, Houston, and Corpus Christi. FIXES The field feed factor collapsed to nothing every January. Harvest curves restart each crop year, so on January 1 the model read the new year's zero percent harvested instead of carrying last autumn's finished harvest through the winter. Every state lost close to a point of score at midnight with no weather behind it, and it was worst in Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana, whose peak is January.

FIVE NEW STATES Forty-five new regions. Nine in Missouri from the Loess Bluffs down to the Bootheel, nine in South Dakota from the Prairie Coteau glacial lakes across to the Missouri River reservoirs, nine in Nebraska from the Rainwater Basin playas across to the Sandhills lakes, nine in Kansas from Cheyenne Bottoms out to the southwest playas, and nine in Mississippi from the Tunica cutoff down to the coastal marsh. Missouri, South Dakota and Nebraska all needed something North Dakota and Arkansas did not. Missouri's mallard peak lands in late November in the northwest and holds into late January in the Bootheel, nearly two months apart inside one state. South Dakota runs four duck zones whose closing dates are five weeks apart, because the shallow Coteau basins lock early while the Missouri mainstem stays open on winter releases. So season timing is now scored per region instead of per state, and the forecast tells you early or late for where you actually are. Nebraska splits every one of its three duck zones, one of them for three weeks in the middle of December, so the curves are written to stay high on both sides of a closure rather than peaking inside it. It also has a real September teal season, September 5 to 13, which neither Dakota holds. South Dakota and Nebraska are the first states whose entire upstream watch is another state DuckCast scores, and together they make a chain. One Arctic front can be followed from prairie Canada through North Dakota to South Dakota and then into the Rainwater Basin, and it means something different at every stop: the end of the season up top, the arrival in the middle, the fill-up at the bottom. KANSAS BREAKS THE NORTH TO SOUTH RULE Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks says the north-to-south model is the wrong one for that state: inside Kansas the type of water drives timing more than latitude does. A shallow marsh near the Oklahoma line can peak in late October while a reservoir near the Nebraska line does not peak until late December. So the Kansas curves are grouped shallow to deep instead. Cheyenne Bottoms peaks in mid-November and locks; the north central reservoirs sit a degree further north and peak six weeks later. MISSISSIPPI IS THE FIRST MEASURED CURVE Every other state's season curve is reasoned from agency prose, harvest timing and latitude. Mississippi's is fitted to counted birds: MDWFP flies four aerial waterfowl surveys over the Delta every winter and publishes them against a seventeen-year running average. Three of the nine regions cover the Delta, because that ground carries most of the duck hunting in the state. The coast is the exception the survey cannot see: brackish marsh that never locks, so it holds birds after a freeze has shut the Delta down. ALL STATES One map for the whole network. Every region scored, with the freeze line drawn across all seven states, and its own live and demo modes. Open it from the bottom of the state picker. RADAR Twenty-four NEXRAD sites now cover all seven states, adding Kansas City, St. Louis, Springfield, Paducah, Sioux Falls, Rapid City, Omaha, Hastings, North Platte, Cheyenne, Topeka, Wichita, Dodge City, Jackson, Columbus, and Mobile. THE STATE PICKER Tap the state chip and pick from a list. It used to step to the next state on every tap, which was two taps at three states and would be six at seven. FIXES The radar read said birds were flying "against the wind" on every night it confirmed movement, including the many nights the wind was behind them. It now says which. The paywall and the reports screen both said nine regions. The number is now derived, so it cannot go stale again. The header no longer truncates on any tab. Upstream station readouts on the map no longer draw through each other or through the map's own captions. The demo scenario now carries hunter reports in every state. South Dakota's reports screen came up empty.