After reading Madduck.org now for several months, and learning of all the controversies involved in the setting of your season lengths and bag limits, it made me appreciate the system we use here in New Zealand.

My country is about the same size as California, with a population that recently reached four million. It is made up of two main islands, the North Island and the South Island, with the main population based in the North Island.

Game-bird hunting (and also sports fisheries for trout and salmon) are managed here by Fish and Game Councils. Council members are elected to regional councils by license buyers. Elections are held every three years. Any license holder can stand for council.

There are 12 Fish and Game councils (six in each island) and a New Zealand council made up of one member from each of the 12 regions, plus staff. The government takes no part in managing fish and game in this country, except that the license fees, season lengths and bag limits have to be approved by the Minister of Conservation.

I am a council member for the Nelson/Marlborough region, situated at the top of the South Island. Our council is made up of a manager, two field offices, a secretary and twelve elected members, meetings are held every two months. Besides setting bag limits and season lengths for both game birds and fish for our region, we also have on-going battles involving pollution, developers, water for irrigation, wetland degradation and so on, basically the same problems that you seem to have. We do all of this on license holders’ money -- nothing else. No government money is involved, even though trout fishing down here brings in around $80 million NZ a year from overseas anglers.

Overseas hunters and anglers pay the same as we do for a license. We are not allowed, yet, to charge a higher fee. Why? Because the Government claims it is discriminatory. Believe it!!

Our game-bird season starts, for the whole country, on the first Saturday in May, but before that each region sets its bag limit and season length, which is printed in a booklet that each hunter receives when he buys his license. Limits and season length are set from population data. Field staffers conduct aerial counts of molting ducks and broods.

This year in my region the duck-season runs for three months, May to end of July, with a bag limit of 15 ducks per day. We do not have the variety of species that you have in the United States. Our most prolific duck is the mallard, followed by the native grey duck and shoveler duck, also a native. In addition to the duck limit, we can take each day 10 paradise shelduck, another native species that is nearly as big as a snow goose. Ten black swan daily are also allowed, plus a native rail species called a pukeko and there is a limit of ten on them too.

The Canada goose is the last of our waterfowl birds that can be hunted here. The season for Canada geese goes through from May until beginning of November and opens again beginning of February the following year. There is no limit on the number of geese you can shoot daily (or nightly as they can be hunted 24 hours a day). Canadas are great hunting, but the high country cockies (farmers) hate them because the birds feed on the paddocks (fields) they keep for winter feed for their sheep and cattle. So as a control measure Fish and Game has few restraints on hunting them.

All the other regions in New Zealand set their season lengths and limits in a similar way, although there are differences in bag limits and season lengths for some regions. There is a region in the South Island that has a bag limit of fifty ducks a day!!

The price of the license is the same for the whole of the country and is valid in any region, so you can hunt in any part of the country on one license, no matter where it was purchased.

Interestingly, I cannot remember a major dispute about season or bag limits and I have been involved in the process since 1972. Now and again, some hunters that think the season is too long because they shoot the odd female mallard that has eggs inside. The waterfowl season was only open for six weeks until the 1980s, when the population of mallards exploded for some strange reason.

Duck hunting has a fairly good following in New Zealand, although license numbers have dropped over the years. Access is perceived by some to be a problem, and anti-firearm and anti-hunting sentiment has had some impact also. Most of our citizens now live in towns and cities to the detriment of the rural scene as most of the "townies" have forgotten what it was like here just thirty years ago.

Hunting here is basically similar to the states, although we do not have duck clubs because there are plenty of public hunting areas. Hunting is mostly done out of blinds or mia-mias (a Maori word for hide) over decoys. A blustery damp day is favored and most hunting is done on public lands such as lagoons, lakes, estuaries, etc. Some riverbeds also provide great hunting.

Shooting times are from 6:30 a.m. until 6:30 p.m. for the first month of the season, then it drops back half an hour. A lot of hunters shoot so many birds opening weekend that they often do not go again until maybe the last weekend.

A friend of mine down in Southland and six others shot 455 mallards in three days at the beginning of this season--- and they plucked them all. The limit was 25 for the first two days and 15 birds for rest of season. It really comes down to how many birds do you really need?!!

A lot of hunters have access to private farm stock ponds and dams. These are usually hunted in evenings. Pond feeding or baiting is perfectly legal, which will not go down too well with some of you, I guess. But I can assure you that after a couple of shoots on a fed pond the ducks, mainly mallard, very soon wise up and wail until after dark to arrive, and even then, most land on the ground and walk in.

There is no limit on the number of decoys you can put out. Unfortunately, those damned "wonder duck" things (spinning-wing decoys) are appearing here now. More's the pity!

There is a cattle station (ranch) in the high country about three hours drive from where I live. It is 450,000 acres big and carries roughly 10,000 head of cattle on it. We (Fish and Game) have been holding organized goose hunts up there now since 1981. We have three hunts a year and around 200 hunters take part each time. To date I would reckon we have taken about 30,000 birds off of it.

The history of this hunt is an interesting story. We started out in the spring going round the nesting colonies and injecting with formalin all the eggs except one, to limit the hatch as a control measure. That was not too successful so then we started rounding them up at molting time, banding several hundred birds and killing the rest, maybe 600 to 700 birds by hitting them on the head with a hard rubber hammer, a bitch of a job that we all hated like hell. Thousands were also shot from helicopters. The birds just sat on the water and let it happen, another bitch of a job, but it had to be done. There were just too many of them up there. In several other sites in the South Island, the same scenario was carried out. I am happy to report that we now have their numbers at a stable, sustainable level and most of the cockies are pretty happy with the result. Again, I guess some of your readers will be somewhat unhappy when they read this and I'll probably get a "bit of stick" about it.

Finally, for our duck hunters the most popular gundog has to the Labrador, but of course all the other breeds are represented too, with the exception of the Chesapeake Bay retriever. I have never seen one being used here.

So basically, that's how we do things down here. Our birds are not migratory so we do not have that problem. The government leaves us alone to get on with managing our flocks and long may it stay that way too, after reading about the agencies that have a say about what and when you can hunt game birds in your states.