Abstract
Manipulating hunting season length is often used as a population management tool but the effects of these changes on total harvest have rarely been studied. We modelled relative changes in national annual bag size as a function of relative change in hunting season length in 63 cases involving 28 species in Denmark (1957–2007). The duration of the hunting season, initially lasting 30–365 days, was modified to 39–204% of the former length. The undifferentiated effect of season length change on bag size change (all 63 cases) was not statistically significant (b = 0.16, 95%CI: ‐0.04–0.36), with a 10% (95%CI: ‐3–22%) predicted decrease in bag size upon a 50% reduction of season length. However, the functional relationship between the relative change in bag size and the change in season length differed between sedentary and non‐sedentary species and interacted with the motivation behind changing season length (population management/ethical/other). In non‐sedentary species, changes in bag size correlated positively with changes in season length (overall response: b = 0.54, 95%CI: 0.14–0.95): reducing the hunting season to 50% of its initial length would on average result in a 31% reduction (95% CI: 9–48%) of total bag size. This overall effect interacted with the motivation for season length changes, being strongest for ‘other reasons’ (mainly harmonization of hunting periods for related species) but was absent when seasons were changed for reasons of ‘population management’. In sedentary species, changes in season length had no effect on bag size. Our results suggest that manipulating hunting seasons of duration ≥ 1 month by less than 50% is generally inefficient as a means of predictably changing harvest rates. This may be because recreational hunters either invest a fixed effort or aim for a specific yield within a given season, neither strategy being affected by changes in hunting seasons.
Highlights
BioOne sees sustainable scholarly publishing as an inherently collaborative enterprise connecting authors, nonprofit publishers, academic institutions, research libraries, and research funders in the common goal of maximizing access to critical research
In non-sedentary species, changes in bag size correlated positively with changes in season length: reducing the hunting season to 50% of its initial length would on average result in a 31% reduction of total bag size
The geographical scale and the number of hunters involved is so large that the focus of the analyses presented here are the emergent patterns of regulatory changes rather than capturing the specific, behavioural mechanisms that may make hunters kill more or less game as a result of national hunting season regulations
Summary
BioOne sees sustainable scholarly publishing as an inherently collaborative enterprise connecting authors, nonprofit publishers, academic institutions, research libraries, and research funders in the common goal of maximizing access to critical research. Hunters may aim to achieve a fixed total hunting bag or invest a constant effort (e.g. three one-day hunting trips per season) per season This may be motivated by satisfying a recreational need or because hunters with exclusive hunting rights to a delimited area do not wish to overharvest their ‘private’ stock. Either way, such hunters would be more likely to adjust their daily effort in response to variation in the season length to achieve their desired harvest level, so long as a sufficient ‘time buffer’ remains within the season to enable them to do so. EV-1 or fixed effort (Joensen 1974, Peterson 2001) their hunting effort to some extent may be influenced by the number of days available (Schwabe et al 2001)
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