Shooting for Satisfaction: 2024 NZ Duck Hunter Satisfaction Study

Written by: Matthew Garrick   

Worldwide, duck hunters have a long history as an important group for funding wetland habitat restoration and conservation 

A long-term decline in duck hunter numbers in North America led to significant investments in social science research to better understand drivers of duck hunter behaviour and satisfaction and the impacts on hunter numbers (i.e., licence holder recruitment, retention, and reactivation) in recent years. 

This research has repeatedly found that one of the most important aspects of hunter satisfaction is hunter success, in particular, meeting individual harvest expectations in terms of the number of birds shot.

Being a relatively small organisation and one that is solely funded from licence sales, Fish & Game has a much more limited funding pool for waterfowl research. Because of this, it is important to maximise bang for buck by utilising international study design to progress research objectives. This means we can’t always do big research projects, and replicating and building off previous proven methodology is a must.

In New Zealand, nationally, despite a minor declining trend in recent years duck hunter numbers are relatively stable. This is primarily due to the fact that duck hunters have extremely high rates of retention. In other words, once a hunter buys a licence once, they are highly likely to continue buying licences in future years. 

Personally, I live for watching ducks come in, feet down, back flapping into the spread. For me, it’s even more satisfying when hunting trafficking birds that you have to convince to come in somewhere they haven’t been going on a daily basis. If you add a black labrador that makes difficult retrieves look easy, it’s a no-miss recipe for a good time. Like many duck hunters, it’s unlikely I will ever miss a duck hunting season until I am six feet under.

The Conservation Act 1987 is a critical piece of legislation that outlines the functions of Fish & Game. One function includes assessing “the success rate and degree of satisfaction of users of the game resource”. Although we know from international research that shooting ducks is important to duck hunters (somewhat unsurprisingly), a coordinated national hunter satisfaction survey has never been completed in New Zealand. One thing that makes New Zealand so unique is that in our small geographic area, hunting regulations vary drastically. Mainly, daily bag limits for greylards (grey or mallard ducks or any hybrid of the two) vary from a low of six up to 50 per person per day.

International research has not been able to investigate how differences in waterfowl bag limits influence hunter harvest expectations and hunter satisfaction, as there is little variation in bag limits across North America (generally speaking, daily bag limits for ducks vary between six and eight).

Every year, Fish & Game monitors game bird harvest through a phone survey that is conducted throughout the season. Many of you reading this will have been called and will have taken the time to answer a few questions – so thank you for that. During each survey period, every Fish & Game region takes a random sample of their licence holders and calls them to ask about hunting activity during the previous hunt period. Questions include where, when, and how many birds were shot per day by species. As Opening Weekend is the most important weekend of the entire season (approximately 60 per cent of whole season harvest of greylards occurs in the first two days of the duck season), the first call period of the season is only in relation to these two days, with subsequent call periods being two-week windows.

This last duck season, 11 of 12 Fish & Game regions participated in a coordinated Opening Weekend satisfaction survey run in conjunction with the traditional phone harvest survey. After the typical harvest questions, surveyors asked hunters a series of satisfaction questions. The survey design allowed us to relate satisfaction scores back to hunter success and hunter harvest expectations (in terms of the number of birds expected to be shot) and tie these back to regional regulations.

We found that most duck hunters in New Zealand are ’satisfied’ to ‘very satisfied’ with their hunting experiences, and hunters’ satisfaction ratings were highly related to how successful they were harvesting greylards (Figure 1). In particular, when a hunter shot the number of ducks they expected to shoot, those hunters were virtually always satisfied to very satisfied with their hunting experience. Conversely, when hunters did not shoot the number of ducks they were expecting to shoot, a large portion of these hunters were dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with their hunting experience.

We also saw that the number of ducks hunters expected to shoot varied by regional bag limit, in that the higher the bag limit, the more ducks hunters expected to shoot. This is despite the fact that on average, hunters in regions with a bag limit of 12, 15, and 25 all shoot similar numbers of ducks on the Saturday of Opening Weekend. This means that larger bag limits appear to be increasing the numbers of ducks hunters expect to shoot.

Further, we saw that the fewer ducks a hunter shot (and importantly, the further away the number shot is from the number of ducks hunters expected to shoot), the more likely the hunter would rank their satisfaction lower.

Say, for example, if we had three hunters, one in Auckland/Waikato, one in North Canterbury, and one in Central South Island, that each had the same hunt in terms of the number of greylards shot, they would have vastly different perceptions of how the hunt went. What I mean is, if they each shot five greylards, the hunter in Auckland/Waikato would feel satisfied, the hunter in North Canterbury would feel neutral, and the hunter in Central South Island would feel dissatisfied. This pattern appears to be related to the expectation of shooting more ducks in regions with higher bag limits.

On the other hand, Sunday harvest and expectations are extremely similar across the whole country. Generally speaking, hunters expect to shoot only a few birds and are lucky to harvest a couple.

This survey has shown there are three types of hunters in New Zealand, there are those that meeting harvest expectations entirely drives their satisfaction, there are those whose satisfaction is only partly driven by meeting harvest expectations, and then there are those that couldn’t care less how many ducks they shoot. Across all our hunters, these three groups of hunters seem fairly similar in size.

Personally, I probably fit best into the second group, where a day out of the office in a wetland with my shotgun and dog is a good day, but a day in a wetland with my shotgun and dog when I bag a few ducks is even better.

Many of the hunters made comments during the survey in relation to their satisfaction scores, highlighting that a lot of different variables impact hunter enjoyment. There were multiple comments from hunters that rated scores quite high despite low numbers of ducks being shot.

They explained this was because the ducks they had harvested were “high quality”, typically in reference to the nice plumage of “green heads”. One hunter I surveyed said he had harvested enough ducks in his life and that, at this point, he identified as a swan hunter and got the most enjoyment out of targeting and shooting a few swans. One other particularly memorable call was a hunter who referenced being quite dissatisfied with his Opening Weekend experience, mainly because his firearm was seized by Fish & Game Rangers (a gentle reminder to ensure you follow the rules and regulations so you can have the best experience when you encounter Fish & Game in the field).

This Opening Weekend may be a good time to reflect on what it is that drives you to go duck hunting, whether it is harvesting birds, spending time with family and friends, being outdoors, or spending time with retrievers (dogs or children).

Good luck out there this season.