Best Way To Curb Spring Duck Kill? Legalize It, Feds Say
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service can’t stop natives in Alaska and Canada from killing waterfowl during during portions of spring and summer. So the federal government is working on a plan to make it legal.
“The proposal would authorize a spring and summer subsistence hunt, but at least that way we might get some agreement on bag limits and certain closures,” said Bruce Batin, FWS spokesman in Anchorage.
The proposal is known as the “protocol amendment” to the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1919. The act was passed by Congress two years after the United States and Canada signed the first species treaty to protect ducks, geese, shorebirds, and other migrants that migrate across international boundaries.
The treaty set guidelines on the time and manner in which waterfowl are hunted by sportsmen. However, the agreement did not address natives who traditionally had depended on spring migrants as their first new protein source after a long winter.
“I guess you could say these indigenous people in Canada and Alaska have resisted the law,” Batin said.
“That’s an understatement,” said Rupe Andrews, an outspoken critic of the plan and former Alaska sport fisheries director. “They go into goose factories like the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta and shoot the adults when they come in on the wing. Then they trap them when they are flightless. They even take their eggs.
“In the old days, this might not have had much of an impact. But times have changed. Now they have motorboats and unplugged guns and worst of all, they don’t even need the meat.”
Robin West, FWS migratory bird coordinator, said his agency has no legal choice but to seek some sort of compromise with the natives.
“In Canada, the international treaty is in conflict with the law of the land,” he said. “The 1982 constitution guarantees preexisting rights to Canada’s aboriginal people. We’re not trying to increase the level of harvest. We just want to legitimize what’s happening.”
In Alaska, native hunting outside treaty-authorized seasons is a major enforcement headache for FWS agents because of legal uncertainties involved in abrogating native hunting agreements.
“The agency has been prosecuting only the strongest violations, such as waste and using airplanes,” Batin said. “We’ve focused on working with Alaska natives, saying there are certain species in peril, such as Pacific black brant, emperor geese, cackling geese, and white-fronted geese.”
In some areas, native groups have refrained from hunting dwindling species.
“It’s worked pretty well,” West said. “Cackling geese rebounded enough so we could offer the first sport season in 10 years last fall.”
Should the protocol amendment be ratified, the number of natives who hunt throughout the year in Alaska could increase from about 11,700 to more than 12,300, West said, noting that making spring hunting legal would entice some natives who have held back to avoid any hassles with the law.
However, West also said there’s no way of estimating how many Canadian natives might be enticed into spring hunting.
“It might not be a significant number because Canada has no law against it at the current time,” he said.
“It could be in the millions,” Andrews said.
Currently, subsistence hunters kill about 161,000 migratory birds a year, roughly five times the number harvested by Alaska sport hunters, West said.
“But the subsistence take also includes eggs taken from birds such as gulls, and most of the waterfowl are taking during legal seasons,” he said. The number of birds taken by Canadian subsistence hunters is unknown, but substantially greater, he said.
“Any sort of agreement is still several years and many meetings away,” West said. “But if we can negotiate an amendment with Canada, we would be able to close subsistence hunting during nesting and brood rearing.”
That alone could give waterfowlers a net gain in birds, he said.
Andrews argues, “There are no guarantees that it would be anything better than a serious backward step for waterfowl conservation.”
, DataTimes