Duck season uncertainty as harvest reaches record low

The number of ducks taken by Victorian hunters has slumped to millennium-drought levels due to shorter seasons, bag limits and Covid restrictions.

Hauling in the harvest: Hunter numbers are up, but restrictions meant the duck harvest has crashed. Picture: Yuri Kouzmin

Victorian duck hunters’ harvest has slumped to levels worse than they endured during the millennium drought.

Even prior to Covid restrictions coming into place, the harvest had slumped to 238,666 birds in 2019, not far off the drought-driven 2009 low of 222,302 birds taken by hunters.

Since then a combination of shortened seasons, low bag limits and Covid restrictions have driven the duck harvest down even further, to 52,456 birds in 2021, according to Game Management Authority data.

At the same time the number of licenced duck hunters in Victoria has grown from 18,348 in 2009 to 24,330 in 2021.

Annual duck harvest (number of birds taken). Source: Game Management Authority

Now as Covid restrictions ease Victorian duck hunters are once again staring down the barrel at yet another heavily restricted season, despite La Nina flooding wetlands and other states lifting quotas and bag limits.

Data compiled by ecologists Marcel Klaassen and Richard Kingsford recommends the daily bag limit for Victorian hunters be cut from 10 birds down to just four for the 2022 season, based on breeding conditions and water availability.

Professor Kingsford’s Eastern Australian Waterbird Survey, conducted in October last year, found 48 per cent of surveyed wetlands (including dry wetlands) held no waterbirds and total game duck abundance was down 58 per cent on 2020.

The aerial survey team counted birds on any water body greater than 1ha in size across 10, 30km-wide bands over eastern Australia.

Eastern Australian Waterbird Survey bands for 2021.

But the survey makes little mention of the La Nina driven big wet dispersing birds over larger areas, which could potentially lower the count within the bands surveyed.

It’s a point that professor Kingsford acknowledged, given birds could disperse to Lake Eyre and other areas outside the survey bands, but said the impact of the big wet was likely to kick up the abundance index in the 2022 survey.

Professor Kingsford’s University of NSW team found the total breeding index (nests + broods) was 2494 for 2021 “a considerable increase from the previous year (364) but still well below the long term average”.

The GMA is using Professor Kingsford’s work, plus its own survey results, to recommend what limits Victoria’s Agriculture Minister Mary-Anne Thomas and Environment Minister Lily D’Ambrosio should impose on hunters this season.

The GMA’s own survey, conducted in October last year, estimates the state’s game duck abundance at 2.94 million, compared to 2.42m in 2020, a 20 per cent increase.

NSW Department of Primary Industries 2021-2022 Annual Waterfowl Quota Report, conducted in late-April to July last year estimates game duck numbers in the Riverina were up 250 per cent on 2020, from 463,404 to almost 1.5m, reflecting improved conditions.

Field and Game Australia chief executive Dean O’Hara said improved conditions and bird abundance meant hunters expected a full 87-day season this year and access to the full daily bag limit of 10 birds.

He pointed out that the South Australian Government had already announced a full season, with an eight-duck daily bag limit, which will run from March 19 to June 26.

NSW is allowing farmers and hunters to harvest 10 per cent of the estimated 1.5m birds in the Riverina.

A GMA spokesman said it had made its recommendation to the two Victorian Ministers, but at this stage was awaiting a decision, which is normally made this time of year.