Victorian duck inquiry: Hunting has “small effect” on numbers

Leading waterbird ecologists have analysed what factors contribute most to duck population decline. Find out how hunting ranks.

Australia’s top waterbird ecologist Professor Richard Kingsford’s analysis “found a very small effect” of hunting on ducks, with habitat loss the key driver of declining waterbird populations.

Victoria’s inquiry into duck hunting has been swamped with almost 9500 submissions, as one of Australia’s leading ecologists reveals the annual harvest has little impact on waterbird numbers.

Hunters with Field and Game Australia have long argued duck hunting has minimal impacts on the populations they harvest each season.

But one of the Murray Darling Basin’s leading ecologists, University of NSW professor Richard Kingsford, has confirmed hunters’ argument.

Prof Kingsford told Victorian Parliament’s Select Committee into recreational native bird hunting he had analysed 30 years of data on whether there was any effect of hunting on those species.

“We found a very small effect, which was considerably overridden by the loss of habitat effect,” he said.

Prof Kingsford and Deakin University ecology chair Professor Marcel Klaassen both told the inquiry that hunting could have an impact when breeding populations plummeted in drought years, as ducks took refuge in Victoria – especially rare species such as the Australasian shoveler.

But in regard to more common species, such as wood ducks, Prof Kingsford said they “have certainly been the least affected of perhaps all of the duck species, because they have taken over farm dams and golf courses and they breed in all sorts of places that they probably did not breed in the past”.

“We still believe that in the big systems they have been impacted by the loss of habitat with river regulation, but they are one of the species that are certainly a lot less affected than others,” he said.

Prof Klaassen said: “The fundamental issue here is that we have been losing waterbird habitat, wetland habitat, over decades as a result of increasing extractions and regulation of the rivers for the Murray Darling, and we see that in the impacts on freshwater organisms that rely on those flows”.

Yet Field and Game Australia chairman Danny Ryan said it was hunters in the late 1950s who lobbied to establish the scheme, whereby they bought duck stamps to put on their license each season to fund the eventual acquisition of 181 state game reserves.

“Every state game reserve owes its existence to Field and Game Australia,” Mr Ryan said.

He said hunters were still managing many of those wetlands, having recently signed a memorandum of understanding with Parks Victoria to continue that work.