Hunting Archery Duck Deer

Waterfowl hunters and bird- watchers, do try this party game at home. Do not, however, try it in motion sickness-prone areas, such as the back seat of a car or in a small airplane performing tight banks mere feet above cottonwood treetops.

Scatter a multitude of beans and rice grains on a table. Then quickly estimate the number of beans and the number of grains. Chances are, you will be about half right.

“That’s perfect,” biologist Todd Sanders said when a passenger with an untrained eye reported 30 geese on a pond 100 feet below. Sanders noted 60 geese on his clipboard.

“Most people guess about half of what’s there,” he said.

Sanders and his crew of aerial waterfowl census takers are remarkably accurate and in close agreement, however. That’s because, for them, the game of beans is no idle diversion. It is part of their training regimen.

“We work at it constantly,” said Darren Proppe, one of the eagle-eyed research assistants who has been helping Sanders count ducks and geese from one of the division’s four Cessna Skywagons.

Sanders and crew are about to wind up the second year of a three- year study wildlife commissioners ordered to determine why duck hunting seems poorer than it once was - and what might be done about that.

The study focuses on the South Platte River corridor, from Greeley to Nebraska, because that is where hunters bag more than 60 percent of ducks harvested in Colorado and where 25 percent of riparian properties are public state wildlife areas.

Next week, the crew will take the last of 15 flights in this second round, which started in September. The numbers-crunching will incorporate hunter survey results.

“In the first year, we learned how many waterfowl we have on the South Platte River and how they’ve been using it,” Sanders said.

In this second year, he has brought telemetry into play, fitting 38 wild ducks with radio locator backpacks. He bagged some data that should open eyes among waterfowl hunters.

In short, the mystery of whether migrating ducks have been wintering along the South Platte or skipping through to southerly climes is solved. They stay here all winter.

Sanders knows this because only one of the monitored ducks has gone missing. The rest stayed. Even duck No. 626, which hid for a few weeks, turned up happy as a clam last week in a slough a few miles south of Sterling.

“They are not just passing through,” Sanders said. “That means it’s very easy for hunters to educate them. These birds know how to avoid the gun, and they do a very good job of avoiding hunters.”

His counts have shown that ducks roost on large reservoirs and avoid the river, where hunting pressure is greatest. In both years of the study, ducks flocked to the river only during brief frigid periods when the reservoirs froze over.

In warmer weather, most ducks leave the reservoirs and the river and lounge in scattered, shallow wetlands, which are countless. Sanders routinely counts about 100,000 ducks in the study area.

But, he says, these days there are so many more reservoirs, recharge ponds and hunting ponds that the uncountable total probably matches 300,000, the estimated population when ducks were easier to count on fewer bodies of water in the late 1970s.

That is little consolation to many duckless hunters, of course. Sanders says it appears ducks actually do like the South Platte River, but their memories are longer than anyone thought.

“It’s not that they aren’t using the river,” he said. “It’s that they are avoiding areas where they are shot at.”

In fact, early telemetry data suggest ducks alerted to gunfire will stay away from an area for four weeks or more.

“So there is enough evidence to suggest that the one-week closure between our second and third seasons is not enough to get the birds back,” Sanders said.

His suspicions proved out on a flight last week. Ducks were partying abundantly on the river at Tamarack State Wildlife Area and near Red Lion State Wildlife Area - public hunting areas, post-hunting.

“That’s a slew of ducks down there,” said Dave Younkin, the veteran pilot who is key to this research. “It’s unusual to see them. Somebody must have closed the hunting season.”

In fact, the hunting season then had been closed for 12 days, but hunting pressure had been low to nonexistent two or three weeks before that. So after four weeks, the ducks were back on the river.

In the face of rumblings that new wildlife commissioners less interested in waterfowl might be seeking to cut off funding for the study’s third year, Sanders insists it is crucial to keep going.

He proposes an experiment next year to learn more about how long ducks will avoid areas where there has been shooting. The results will help wildlife managers set rules for seasons and public hunting areas and tell private clubs how best to manage their properties and ponds.

“The final piece of the puzzle is how do these birds respond to hunting pressure,” Sanders said. “Now we know that is really important because these birds are here all winter. I think we can accomplish that next year, if we don’t drop the ball.”

Ed Dentry

dentrye@RockyMountainNews.com