get-n-birdy wrote:Make it a 100 day, 10 bird season then we don't have to worry about it. In 10 years there'll be so few guys waterfowl hunting in Minnesota, season length and limits will be cute little asterisks that really won't mean much. You could make the daily limit a bakers dozen at 13 and most mn guys would still shoot 8 birds for the season. A daily limit seems idiotic for a state that averages 2 more birds per year, per guy than a daily limit.
No way the feds/USFWS would allow that.
I agree with you on the daily bag limit. The average hunter in MN averages a little over a duck an outing....as on somewhere between 1.1 to 1.3 ducks per outing, at least that's in the ballpark of what it used to be ten, maybe fifteen years ago. I haven't kept up with what the current figures are.....
With that being said, you could raise the limit to twenty and it'd make next to no difference in the overall total harvest.....since the vast majority of guys rarely shoot a limit.....hell, even approach shooting a half a limit.
That's why what matters much more than anything in correlating hunting seasons to amount of harvest = days allowed for hunters to go afield.
It'll be interesting to see how the feds handle, or don't handle, the decline in hunter numbers.
So far harvests have stayed remarkably about the same.
Something seems off in the overall picture.
Declining hunter numbers + declining duck numbers = somehow equals harvest amounts still at or near all-time highs
