Wellington> Hunting News May 2007

Regulation Changes for 2007 Season

During the 2007-08 hunting season Wellington hunters will have a reduced opportunity to hunt mallards with the length of the main game season being pruned from 8 weeks to 6 weeks and the daily bag limit being dropped back to ten. This effort to conserve mallard numbers may seem surprising given the very damp spring and early summer which produced an abundance of shallow ephemeral wetland habitat on which mallard hens could rear their broods. Given that it was such a good breeding season, why should Fish & Game move to constrain hunter opportunity by cutting the length of the hunting season this year?

To understand the reason for this caution, hunters need to realise that the job of conserving mallard populations is a bit like the job facing the manager of an investment fund. The size of the population of breeding mallards is like the capital invested in the fund and the number of juveniles that are successfully reared each summer can be likened to the interest generated by it. Ducks that are killed represent the withdrawals from the fund, and the bulk of those withdrawals are made by hunters. The fund manager’s task is to maintain the capital in the fund by ensuring that withdrawals do not exceed the amount of interest it generates. Sustaining mallard populations would be a tricky proposition for any prudent fund manager, the amount of “interest” generated each breeding season varies, and all you can do to prevent the fund’s beneficiaries (hunters) from eroding the capital base is to limit the maximum size of individual withdrawals (daily bag limit) and the period over which they can be made (length of hunting season).

Getting this balance right is complicated by the fact that the rate at which withdrawals are made varies from year to year. Mallard abundance is only one of the key factors influencing hunter success; the other is the weather. In years when autumn rainfall is high and the start of the hunting season sees abundant surface water, mallards tend to be more dispersed and the harvest rate can fall off despite there being plenty of birds around. Conversely, during years which experience dry autumn conditions, the total area of wetland contracts as shallow water bodies dry up and by May, the birds are crammed onto those that remain. In these situations the harvest rate can be high despite mallard abundance being low, and it is at these times that there is a serious danger of the withdrawals made by hunters depleting the mallard population. That is exactly what happened between 1996 and 1998 when successive dry autumns saw high harvest rates maintained despite a 50 percent fall in mallard abundance. Those high harvests could not be maintained and hunter’s fortunes declined steeply culminating in very lean seasons in 2000 and 2001.

Fish & Game is anxious to avoid a repeat of that situation and we are mindful that, in spite of the favourable breeding conditions last spring, mallard numbers have fallen over the past four years and any gains represented by the high number of juvenile birds arising from last year’s breeding season could be easily wiped out given the extremely dry conditions that are forecast during this year’s hunting season. Summer rainfall has been at least 25 percent below normal levels across the Wellington Fish & Game Region, and although these conditions hold the promise of a great season’s hunting, they also hold the threat that hunting pressure will exacerbate the recent decline in mallard numbers.

But whilst Fish & Game is taking steps to conserve a declining mallard resource, paradise shelduck numbers in the Wairarapa, Manawatu and Horowhenua lowlands have continued to build over the past five years, and in some areas their depredations on crops and pasture have become a serious headache for farmers. Given their prominence in the bags of hunters in the Manawatu and Horowhenua over the last few seasons, it is hard to believe that they only became legal quarry in this part of the Wellington Fish & Game Region as recently as 1997. A decade later they are now sufficiently abundant that Fish & Game can offer hunters the opportunity to pursue them during a special summer season that will run from 2 February to 2 March 2008 in the Manawatu and Horowhenua lowlands (Area A1) and the bird’s traditional stronghold in the Wairarapa lowlands (Area B1) with a daily bag limit of 3.

To see the regulation for Wellington, click here

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