Report Confirms Duck-Hunting Season A Dud Minneapolis
July 18th, 2005 by Administrator
Report Confirms Duck-Hunting Season A Dud (AP) Minneapolis Many Minnesota duck hunters thought the last season was a dud, and a new batch of federal statistics backs that up.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s survey of the fall duck harvest shows a decline of nearly 23 percent from 2003 to just under 684,000 birds.
The biggest decline was in mallards. Hunters killed about 179,000 of them in 2004, down 41 percent from the 304,000 mallards shot in 2003.
Hunters averaged 7.6 ducks for the season, down from 10.1 ducks for the previous year.
“That’s a big drop,” said Steve Cordts, state Department of Natural Resources waterfowl specialist. “For a lot of hunters, it was a very poor season.”
Those declines were while there were about 2,000 more hunters in the field than in 2003, and those hunters spent more days hunting than the year before.
The figures come from a national survey of waterfowl hunters under the Harvest Information Program. About 70,000 hunters were surveyed, including about 2,000 in Minnesota.
The Minnesota DNR had not released the results of its own survey of hunters. Cordts said he expects they will mirror the national figures.
Steve Wilds, regional migratory bird chief for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said the federal numbers appear to support the bleak reports from many duck hunters last season.
“We didn’t expect to have a great season,” he said, “but it was maybe a little worse than we expected.”
Hunters probably are in a similar duck season in the fall, Cordts said. Previously released DNR figures showed duck numbers were down 37 percent from last year and state mallard numbers down 36 percent.
“I don’t expect it to be a super year, but if we have pretty good production, it should be somewhere near an average duck season,” Cordts said