Small band help keeping track of mallards

Hawke's Bay Fish and Game staff have been busy over the last three days catching and tagging mallard ducks, and collating information to help form hunting limits and population trends.

From three different sites across Hawke's Bay they will tag up to 1000 ducks, collecting information on the age and sex of each bird.

The annual tagging requires capturing the ducks and attaching coded bands to their legs before releasing them. This provides information from the previous breeding season which will help set duck shooting limits.

Hawke's Bay Fish and Game is three years into a five-year trial of fixed hunting limits of 10 mallard ducks a day per hunter. Information from the tagging will help see if this is a viable limit, rather than changing the limit year to year.

Hawke's Bay Fish and Game regional manager Pete McIntosh said 2014 would be the final year of the limits trial, and to manage the population using less time and resources would be ideal.

"It's pretty much the same every year, so after this five-year trial we'll look at the numbers again and if they need altering," he said. "Obviously we want a sustainable number of ducks."

After two days, the group of four had tagged 378 ducks from the first of three sites.

John Cheyne, a Fish and Game freshwater biodiversity officer, was on hand to help, and had several decades of experience in tagging. Although the population of the ducks varied from region to region, he thought there was a long-term decline due to the loss of wetlands.

"This wet summer in Hawke's Bay has been really good for the likes of mallard ducks. It could be quite different in Southland where it has been quite a dry summer. Generally speaking there's less mallard ducks now than there was 24 years ago when I came to Hawke's Bay."

Fish and Game field officer Tom Winlove said they sometimes caught birds with bands from previous years, providing them with survival information for ducks that tend to stay within a relatively small area.

"They have a general home range of 50km, but they have been known to fly from the North Island to the South Island," he said.

The sex of the birds required inspection, as they had recently moulted, often making males and females indistinguishable, as well as flightless for a three-week period. "At this time of year they can actually all look the same ... the males don't have the big shiny head," Mr Winlove said. "They will do, come winter."

Hunters who shoot a tagged duck in the May-June shooting season can return the tag to Fish and Game to enter a draw for a free hunting licence.