It’s time to end recreational native bird hunting across Australia

Below are facts from our waterbird experts about recreational native bird hunting and its ecological impacts in south-eastern Australia.

Recreational hunting adds an unnecessary pressure to declining duck populations.

• Just as droughts are known to cause population declines for waterbirds, we know that we need prolonged wet conditions to simply maintain waterbird population sizes as they are.
• In order to recover waterbird populations to healthy pre-1980 levels, breeding and recruitment conditions for waterbirds need to not only be good enough to maintain the population at its current size, but to grow the population. Successive quality breeding seasons are needed for population recovery.
• Long-term monitoring across Eastern Australia shows that duck species populations have not yet recovered after previous repeated years of drought and low rainfall.
• While the last few seasons have been wet in some areas, the bounce back of waterbird populations has not been sufficient to restore populations to healthy sizes. Several more good seasons are needed to recover population loss inflicted from periods of severe drought.
• “Game” species are at just 25% of their long-term average numbers.

Recreational hunting can have negative direct and indirect impacts on threatened and non-game species.

• Plains-wanderers, a critically endangered species, can occasionally be killed during the quail hunting season as they look superficially similar and are found in the same habitat.
• With wetlands in better condition than previous years, conditions are ripe for breeding. This also means greater risk, with higher aggregations of threatened wetlands birds and non-game species.
• Notable threatened or non-game species at risk include: Australasian Bittern, Australian Painted Snipe, Brolga, Great and Intermediate Egrets, Hardheads, Australasian Shovelers, Blue-billed, Freckled, and Musk Ducks. Many of these taxa are often found in mixed flocks of game species.
• Migratory shorebirds feed in wetlands, with adults fuelling up for their departure for the northern hemisphere in late March/early April, but with many birds too young to participate in breeding remaining in Australia throughout the year.
• Even if these birds are not directly shot, the disturbance to them in their habitat can have drastic and detrimental effects.