New Waterfowl Season Setting Process and Timing for 2016-17 Beginning in 2016-17, season dates and bag limits for ducks, geese and other migratory game birds (doves, snipe, etc.) will be available months earlier than in past years, thanks to a new regulation process adopted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS). Under the new process, proposed hunting season frameworks for a given year will be developed in the fall of the previous year. Those frameworks will be finalized a few months later, thereby enabling the state agencies to select and publish their season dates in late winter or spring for the upcoming fall seasons.
waterfowl. In the U.S., each flyway has a Flyway Council, consisting of representatives from state wildlife agencies. Tennessee is one of 14 states in the Mississippi Flyway. Each year, the four Flyway Councils recommend regulations to the USFWS for waterfowl and other migratory game bird hunting seasons. State and Canadian provincial biologists who make up Flyway Technical Committees advise Councils of species and population status, harvest, and hunter-participation data during the development of the Council recommendations.
For the past few decades, regulations have been established using two separate processes: early season (e.g. mourning doves, snipe, September Canada goose) and late season (e.g. regular duck and goose seasons). The timing of these processes has allowed the use of current year breeding population surveys and harvest estimates to aid in establishing fall hunting seasons, but states have had to wait until at least August to publish their seasons. Beginning in 2016, the early and late processes will be combined into a single process that will use previous year’s breeding population surveys and harvest estimates to establish migratory bird hunting seasons much earlier. “For example, fall 2016-17 hunting seasons will be set during the fall of 2015 and be based on spring 2015 waterfowl breeding survey data,” says Joe Benedict, TWRA’s State Waterfowl Coordinator. “As a result, hunters will have more time to plan vacations and hunting trips since regulations will be finalized several months before the seasons begin.”
The USFWS’s Migratory Bird Program evaluates Council recommendations, considers species status and biology, the cumulative effects of regulations and existing regulatory policy and makes recommendations to the USFWS’s Service Regulations Committee (SRC).
Assessments indicate that impacts of these changes on season length and bag limits will be negligible.
How Waterfowl Seasons Are Set
Migratory game bird management is a cooperative effort of state and federal governments of the U.S. and Canada. For waterfowl management, North America is divided into four flyways (Atlantic, Mississippi, Central, and Pacific) based on historical abundance and migration routes of
2015-2016 Waterfowl Hunting Guide
The SRC considers both the Council and USFWS’s Migratory Bird Program recommendations and then forwards its recommendations for annual regulations to the Director of the USFWS. Once preliminary regulatory proposals are approved, they are published in the Federal Register for public comment. After the comment period, final regulations are developed, which are then signed by the Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Fish, Wildlife, and Parks and the resulting migratory bird hunting seasons are opened. In Tennessee, the final federal regulations are evaluated by TWRA waterfowl staff and recommendations for Tennessee seasons are drafted in the form of a Proclamation and presented to the Tennessee Fish and Wildlife Commission for approval. Beginning with the 2016-17 migratory game bird seasons, the Proclamation will likely be presented annually at the January and February Commission meetings. For more information on waterfowl seasons, hunting and management, visit the TWRA web site. For more information on the Federal waterfowl season setting process visit: http://www.fws.gov/birds/policies-andregulations/regulations/how-regulations-are-set-the-process.php.
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