The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service published its final rule<\/a> setting frameworks for the 2023-24 migratory bird hunting season late last week. The announcement followed months of public comment and consultation with the four Flyway Councils, and it includes some good news for waterfowlers on the East Coast. The bag limit for Eastern mallards in the Atlantic Flyway is going back to four birds, only two of which can be hens.<\/p>\n This welcome change comes roughly five years after the federal agency cut mallard limits in half<\/a> across the flyway. In its 2018 decision, which went into effect during the 2019-20 hunting season, the USFWS cited overall declines in the Eastern mallard breeding population as the primary reason for the change. Long-term survey data showed bird populations in the flyway peaking around 1999, and then steadily declining by around 50 percent between 2000 and 2017. Harvest data from the 17 states that make up the Atlantic Flyway showed similar declines.<\/p>\n The reasons for the decline were harder to nail down. Researchers pointed to shifting migration patterns, and the fact that Eastern mallards are harder to count because there are two separately surveyed populations: ducks that nest in Maine and eastern Canada, and those that nest in the eastern U.S. from New Hampshire down to Virginia. There was also a lack of historical data because mallards aren\u2019t native to the Eastern Seaboard and haven\u2019t been studied as closely there as they have in the other three flyways.<\/p>\n Many waterfowlers weren\u2019t happy about the bag reduction. Some wondered if officials had a decent grasp of Eastern mallard populations and called for more research. A few years later, as some of this research bore fruit, some of those same hunters began to ask the question: Was this bag limit reduction even necessary?<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cWe were pretty vehemently opposed to the two-bird limit,\u201d Delta Waterfowl\u2019s chief policy officer John Devney tells Outdoor Life<\/em>. \u201cI don\u2019t want to be unnecessarily taking opportunity from hunters when it isn\u2019t supported by the best available science.<\/p>\n \u201cBut this is an example of learning, understanding, and reflection,\u201d Devney continues. \u201cImprovements to [the USFWS\u2019] model and improvements in data have gotten them to the understanding that this is a sustainable strategy. It\u2019s not like they went out and tried to get to four. This is just what the science suggested was a reasonable pathway.\u201d<\/p>\n Pat Devers is the Atlantic Flyway representative for the USFWS. He paints a fuller picture of how Eastern mallard management has changed since the late 1990s.<\/p>\n At that time, Devers says, the USFWS as still using mallards as the baseline duck species that the hunting season frameworks revolved around. (Mallards always have and still do \u201crun the show\u201d in terms of setting season length and bag limits in the other three flyways, says Devney.) But as Eastern mallards continued their decline through the early 2000s, the agency started to rethink the way it managed ducks in the Atlantic Flyway.<\/p>\n \u201cThere was always some concern that Eastern mallards didn\u2019t really represent all the birds that were being hunted from Maine to Florida. And when you coupled that long-term concern with a more recent concern that something was going on with Eastern mallards, we figured it was a good time to change how we set hunting regs,\u201d Devers says. \u201cSo, we made a switch to what we call a multi-stock adaptive harvest management framework. It considers the status of ringnecks, wood ducks, goldeneyes, and green-winged teal\u2014and then we set hunting regulations based on the status of those populations.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n This new framework strategy<\/a>, which the USFWS formally adopted in 2018, meant that Eastern mallards would now be managed individually in the Atlantic Flyway with their own separate harvest strategy.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat we really needed then was an interim strategy that would allow us to set a good bag limit for mallards that we thought was sustainable, and then we could let the season length be set by the multi-stock framework,\u201d Devers explains. \u201cSo, we did a simpler analysis that we call a potential take level analysis, and that told us we could have a two-bird daily bag limit for a 60-day season \u2026 at least until we could get a new harvest strategy developed.\u201d<\/p>\n Developing a new strategy took time. And over the next five years, the USFWS homed in on the science surrounding Eastern mallards and re-built its harvest models to bring in more available data. This includes the waterfowl surveys that are conducted annually<\/a> in the Atlantic Flyway\u2014and are a joint effort between more than a dozen U.S. states, the USFWS, and the Canadian Wildlife Service\u2014along with data from the Harvest Information Program and pre-season banding, which together help managers estimate overall harvest rates.<\/p>\n They also worked in another component: post-season banding data. This requires state agencies to trap and band mallards after hunting season ends, and it gives them a better idea of mortality levels during the rest of the year.<\/p>\n \u201cThe other major advancement is what we call an integrated population model. This allows us to put all this data into our model at the same time to get the best estimates of survival,\u201d Devers says. \u201cBy sharing info across all those different parameters, it\u2019s kind of like a tug of war. If our population data shows an increase, but our survival and harvest rate and reproductive rates don\u2019t show as much of an increase, it\u2019s going to balance between all those data sets to settle on the best estimate.\u201d<\/p>\n Importantly, this new management framework\u2014and the model that supports it\u2014would allow the USFWS to adjust its harvest strategies annually in response to what the population surveys showed each spring. And in 2022, when the Atlantic Flyway Council officially adopted the new framework, Devers says something fortunate happened: They found more birds.<\/p>\nThe Role of Eastern Mallards in Setting Hunting Regs<\/h2>\n
Better Science, More Birds, or Both?<\/h2>\n
![\"atlantic](\"https:\/\/www.outdoorlife.com\/uploads\/2023\/08\/18\/atlantic_flyway_mallards_3.jpg\")