Early goose season

[Fish Felon]

I've never heard of geese being rocket netted, only ducks.

Besides the couple of paid members of the USFWS, state department, researcher, whomever has the banding permit, everyone else involved are volunteers.

As far as geese being banded, my guess is SD is still doing it to prove that their goose harvest consists of more resident geese versus migrant geese than the harvest models currently attribute to them.

MN and WI for sure did that to get the feds to allow for a longer season and increased limit. I believe ND did it as well in order to prove what they needed to in order to get their limit drastically increased a few years back. I have no idea what the dark goose limits are in SD since I haven't hunted there in quite some time and our group didn't get drawn this year in our first effort to go back....but I'm guessing they are banding in an effort to verify they shoot less migrant geese than the USFWS says they do in order to increase limits.

My guess is they'll always band at least some dark geese, resident and migrants especially. Look at MN for instance and how much the EPP harvest and migration/staging/wintering has changed in our state compared to just a decade ago? Look at the change in use in numbers and timing at LQP? At Rochester? The NW part of the state? Fergus? What impact will the decline in waterfowl hunters have on the goose harvest? Etc., Etc....

Migration patterns and harvest have been and always will be fluid and ever-changing. For this reason band data will always be important.

[lanyard]

Things are born. Then they die. The end.

[Fish Felon]

The other thing to keep in mind is that band data is and has traditionally been the most accurate obtained. The statistics used and gained from it are remarkably accurate.

HIP has become much better as people have become used to it and more now purchase licenses online in the comfort of their home by themselves...that part is key.

When HIP first came out MN still used paper licenses you had to purchase at a retailer. Guess what? The 40-70 year old duck hunters that shot 2-6 ducks the season before, your typical MWA member, didn't like having the 16 year old ask them how many ducks they shot the year before while in front of thirty other dorks waiting in line to purchase a license at Gander Mountain the night before opener. The feds might as well just burned all the figures they got those first years since they were total bullshit. Plus no one knew that it was reported state by state...so the guys that were going to the Dakotas and shooting a few dozen gadwalls each year and only a teal and a wood duck in their home state of MN or WI over reported their harvest every time combining them.

Let's say all the habitat work on shallow lakes in MN pays off and we become the leading harvester of Canvasbacks (I think we're right up there as it is).

How would you know for certain that we're shooting the shit out of canvasbacks? That on Lake Christina alone ten-thousand plus were getting killed each year compared to almost zero just a few years ago?

There'd be some incidental reports and a handful of bag checks by wardens that are more official but guess what?

Hunters and fisherman are full of shit and their reports are almost completely unreliable.

Band data would definitely show when canvasbacks are using Christina in peak numbers, how long they're staging, how many are being killed, what the sex ratio being killed is, what the juvy to adult [age] ratio is, what breeding area is being hit the hardest by the drastic increase in harvest, all that would be known within a season from band data. Maybe in years when the limit is two like this coming season they'd have to lower the limit at Christina to one as a result, or close it to canvasback harvest altogether during a couple weeks that coincides with peak staging in effort to keep MN from taking more than their share of the harvest on a species very susceptable to being overharvested.

Waterfowl populations and migration are extremely dynamic. I'm not sure why there's this misconception amongst waterfowlers that they are stagnant. Especially from guys like fouler---who will tell you all about how different it is from a few decades ago in terms of blue bills, snow geese, mallards on Swan Lake, he'll talk about it ad nauseum.

[tornadochaser]

HIP is a joke. "10+" Accounts for opening weekend for me. Especially when we can shoot 8 the first 2 weeks out here.

Sent from my XT1080 using Tapatalk

[Trigger]

HIP is a joke. "10+" Accounts for opening weekend for me. Especially when we can shoot 8 the first 2 weeks out here.

Sent from my XT1080 using Tapatalk

If you were a statistician I bet you would have a different view point. Im not a statistician so I understand what you're saying. But when I had a statitician explain it to me, it made sense. But I forgot what he said. Something about anyone over being an outliar and not being statistically relevant.

[get-n-birdy]

I learned how to count like the common man

[Bullet21XD]

I don't think i've ever killed a duck.

[Fish Felon]

0-1, 0-2, 0-3, 0-4....

get-n-birdy, are you from Detroit too?

Aaaalways!


HIP is I'm sure decent at this point. It's crazy what they can do with stats. They even have models that take into account the outright liars (not the outliers) perfectly.

All it takes is a sample group comprised of 120 members and the results on a bell curve are virtually unchanged. 120, 1200, 12000, 120000, 1200000....

....it stays the same after 120.

Stats are sweet.


The hard part is knowing how to model what you're trying to find out and getting an accurate data set that isn't flawed for what you're trying to accomplish. Get 120 that isn't flawed and you're golden like a shower.

[get-n-birdy]

Nope. I've learned how quickly hope dies early in the playoff's. I was born and raised in Get-ur-hopes-up-looser-ville.

Maybe the MWA can get it so we can't shoot geese within a 100 miles of a banding area. Heck they could team up with PETA. Or have they already?