Fish & Game expects healthy start to game bird season

Fish & Game officers in the central North Island are hopeful of a healthy start to the game bird season now only 10 weeks away, based on information gathered in their summer banding programme.

The game bird hunting season begins the first Saturday in May.

Eastern Region officers based in Rotorua have completed the banding of more than 1,100 mallard, grey and hybrid greylard over recent weeks at about ten sites throughout the region – including the coastal Bay of Plenty and as far away as the East Coast.

Senior Fish & Game Officer Mathew Mc Dougall says the summer banding programme is now in its 17th year with the information gathered used to help set the regulations for the coming season – in particular season length and bag limits.

The work has shown that while duck populations were fairly low heading into the breeding season, it appears to have been a “reasonable” one, with a fair number of juveniles present.

This would translate into a good opening to the season as the juvenile birds which are less wary, make up a high proportion of the ducks that hunters bag.

Mr Mc Dougall says that as a “best guess” at this stage, the remainder of the season might be “reasonably tough.”

But waterfowl populations may now be turning a corner after reaching a low point last season. Fish & Game had carried out a lot of work on correlating population cycles with weather patterns, and a definite link had been established.

Populations seemed to fit an 11-year cycle, and after reaching the bottom of a trough, were “probably on the way up again now.”

The banding programme had turned up an intriguing “re-capture ” case – a mallard banded at Turua on the Hauraki Plains in early January turned up in a trap a couple of days later at Kaituna Wildlife Management Reserve in the Bay of Plenty, 90 kilometres away.

“This would seem to indicate that the birds obviously don’t much mind being trapped and handled in the banding process.”

Banding, which normally begins in early January, is only one element of the population monitoring work which includes aerial observations. Areas which come under the strongest hunting pressure are normally trapped more intensively.

BACKGROUND:

The annual banding involves capturing the ducks in baited ‘crayfish-type’ traps which let them in, but not out again. Coded bands are attached to their legs before they are released. This provides information to compare with the previous breeding season, which helps in setting duck shooting limits.

Fish & Game uses banding to find out survival rates for juveniles and adults, males and females.

Recovery of a band also means the distance between the banding site and recovery site can be calculated, as can the time elapsed since banding - giving an indication on how long the bird lived for.
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