Six-duck limit gives hunters wrong message
Conservationists from Aldo Leopold to Jimmy Robinson have tried to get across the idea that the estimation of a successful hunt doesn’t have to be the number of birds in the bag.
The unexpected happened last weekend in Minnesota: Ducks showed up for opening day. Most were teal, bluewing and greenwing, and most were likely not raised here, but in Canada. And most Minnesota hunters responded as the Department of Natural Resources suggested. They shot as many as they could.You really have to wonder what we’re thinking. If we’re thinking. The state’s wetland base is declining — still. And most wetlands remaining in Minnesota are polluted, degraded and/or filled with carp.
Yet given the choice to restrict Minnesota waterfowlers to four ducks this fall, as was the case last year, rather than six, DNR leadership — overriding the recommendation of its own professionals — chose the higher limit.
Perhaps Minnesota hunters were demanding more ducks? Not so. The DNR itself surveyed waterfowlers and found more than 80 percent were satisfied with four ducks a day.
Maybe Minnesota was home to a surplus of returning breeding ducks this spring? Guess again: Breeders were down more than 20 percent from 2005.
Note to the DNR, courtesy of Aldo Leopold and Jimmy Robinson: You don’t have to shoot them all.
You wouldn’t know it by the signals the DNR sends to Minnesota waterfowlers, most of whom — having never been engaged in a conversation about waterfowl management — know little more about ducks than how to kill them.
Instead, the DNR, believing its role is less that of waterfowl manager than duck distributor, sends hunters a different message: Value your time afield by the number of birds in the bag.
In Minnesota, after all, we shoot ducks in mid-September that are barely fledged, under the guise of Youth Waterfowl Day. On opening day of the regular season, we begin shooting at 9 a.m. rather than noon, as has been the tradition since 1947. And the state’s 4 p.m. closing has been shortened by two-thirds to include just the first nine days of the season.
All in the name of more hunter “opportunity.”
It is true that six ducks vs. four ultimately will result in a higher kill whose proportion likely will be negligible. But the higher limit also keeps hunters in the marsh longer, disturbing birds that are pressured enough already in Minnesota. This has implications for hunters who might still be trying to kill their first, second or third ducks of the day, and implications as well for the next morning’s hunt, by which time many birds wisely would have flown south.
Minnesota does not have a duck problem. It has a people problem — they’re the ones, who drain and mismanage wetlands — and a duck-management problem.
It wasn’t always so. When Roger Holmes headed the agency’s wildlife division, he shied not a whit from regulating the state’s ducks conservatively. Similarly, the retired DNR waterfowl biologist Bob Jessen was an avid waterfowler. But he spoke without reservation first and foremost about a duck’s welfare instead of hunter opportunity.
Who can blame a hunter last weekend who shot until he had six ducks in the bag? Big Daddy DNR said go for it. So it must be OK.
What an opportunity lost to educate the hunting citizenry, as should be the DNR’s charge, rather than, in the name of providing a public service, greasing the skids for higher harvests.
No duck is as beautiful as one on the wing, no morning richer than one passed in a marsh. Neither experience, rightly, should be measured by game reduced to the hand, particularly so if that measurement is institutionally encouraged.
Yet Minnesota hunters can be forgiven if that’s the lesson they’ve learned.
The late Jimmy Robinson generally allowed no guest at his Manitoba duck camp to shoot a legal limit, holding them instead to what he called a “sportsmen’s” limit, or two fewer than the province allowed.
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