Waterfowl hunters adjusting to tweaked bag limits

The weather’s cooling off, the birds are flying south and hunters are sitting in blinds waiting for a flock to come in to their decoys.

They’re also adjusting to a couple of tweaks in waterfowl bag limits.

Changes in recommendations from the Pacific Flyway Council prompted an increase in the northern pintail duck bag limit from one to three and a reduction in the goose bag limit by one – from four to three in some areas and three to two in others.

The drop in the goose limits came as a surprise to some hunters. It’s meant to address a declining trend population estimates for some goose species, according to a Federal Register notice about the change.

Matt Wilson, a waterfowl specialist for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, said springtime goose counts across a wide swath of the continent have shown declines for the past several years, and that they dropped below a threshhold that required cutting bag limits by one bird.

He said the reduced bag limits will likely be in place for at least two seasons.

Washington recognizes seven subspecies of Canada geese. Only one of those – the western – actually nests in Washington, according to Wilson. The rest stopover during their migration.

Chris Bonsignore, a retired biologist and avid waterfowl hunter, said the shift in the goose limit in particular was a surprise.

“It’s unusual,” he said. “We have not seen this kind of a change in many years in my recollection.”

Wilson said that’s true, but that it was once common for limits to change in small ways from year to year. The difference now is that harvest totals don’t change much year to year.

“It’s much more stable now, but it means the changes are less frequent,” Wilson said.

The increase in the northern pintail bag limit was less of a surprise for those who have followed waterfowl conservation. It reflects a change in how biologists think about conserving the species.

Pintails have struggled for decades, regularly falling below managers’ population goals. A population estimate from the 1950s put the total number of pintails above 10 million. The most recent count estimated there were 2.2 million.

Restrictive hunting limits have been in place for years, but biologists now believe that hunting isn’t a driving factor in the species’ struggles. Wilson said habitat loss is a bigger factor, along with male to female ratios.

That made waterfowl managers were comfortable allowing hunters to knock a few more down each year.

It’s good news for hunters, though pintails likely won’t become the dominant species taken in Eastern Washington.

There are good numbers of them on the west side of the state, but other species are more common on the east side. They migrate through on their way south from Canada to California.

They’re usually around early in the season, said Kent Contreras, who hunts ducks and geese along the Pend Oreille River.

“It seemed like every opener we would have for the first two weeks we’d have a lot of pintail,” he said.

That hasn’t been the case so far this year. He’s been hunting regularly, and said there have been days when everyone in the blind gets a pintail but that he hasn’t seen as many as he’d expect.

“The pintail were not here like they were in years past,” he said.

He prefers mallards, and has always been careful about shooting pintails to avoid exceeding the limit. He’s glad to see the limit rise, in particular because he had been seeing so many in recent seasons.

Most of the pintails disappear after the initial burst, Contreras said. Late in the season, he starts seeing more as the birds make their way north again.

“Right around January, we get kind of the reverse migration,” he said.