By Jessica Domel
Multimedia Reporter
The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD) gave the public a brief preview of potential changes to hunting regulations for the 2023-24 seasons.
The first proposed change presented to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission in early November was the statewide closure of the Light Goose Conservation Order.
A conservation order is not a hunting season. It is a special management action needed to control certain wildlife populations when traditional management programs are unsuccessful in preventing an overabundance of the population.
The Light Goose Conservation Order was a special amendment to the Migratory Bird Treaty Act that allows U.S. Fish and Wildlife to authorize states to allow additional hunting opportunities.
It was enacted because in the 1980s and ’90s, there were concerns that increasing populations of snow geese in staging and breeding areas in Manitoba were going to cause an ecological collapse.
“At the time, it was thought if we could improve hunter success, we could actually decrease populations of light geese. That was the ultimate goal,” Shaun Oldenburger, TPWD small game program director, said.
In 1980, there were about 1.2 million light geese on the Texas coast. In the late 1990s, the conservation order was enacted. Then, in the early 2000s, there were about 500,000 light geese in Texas as geese chose other locations to winter.
“(Light geese) populations used to be low. We used to have high productivity. Now, we have high populations with extremely low productivity,” Oldenburger said. “What we thought would control the populations has completely changed based on these population models. We’ve seen pretty much a crash in reproduction in the last 10 or 15 years in the Canadian arctic and subarctic.”
Oldenburger said looking back, scientists grossly underestimated the snow goose population because it was difficult to inventory them at the time. He said experts also probably underestimated the carrying capacity of the area in Manitoba that caused concerns in the ’80s.
“That’s just a small snapshot of one location. That is not occurring across a large area in the Canadian arctic by any means,” Oldenburger said.
The conservation order didn’t reduce adult light goose survival, which was its intent, so it could help control the population. Instead, adult light goose survival increased.
The number of young geese in the population has declined.
“We thought we could control adult survival because we thought we just had a few million geese, and we had a lot of hunters. As it turns out, we had a lot more geese, and we weren’t taking that large a percentage,” Oldenburger said. “Really, the conservation order is not accomplishing the management objective it was set out to.”
The proposed closure to the conservation order will be presented to the commission for their consideration in January.
The commission could also consider the removal of Harvest Information Program (HIP) from point-of-sale license locations for migratory game bird hunters.
Migratory game bird hunters are required to become HIP certified before hunting. Each year, U.S. Fish and Wildlife selects some hunters from the HIP list for a survey to estimate harvest.
Oldenburger said some people are being HIP certified when buying a hunting license although they’re not hunting migratory game birds, which is skewing numbers.
There also appears to be a discrepancy between answers hunters will give when answering HIP questions at point-of-sale locations and online.
If the commission adopts the proposed change, migratory game bird hunters would have to go online, call a 1-800 number or possibly text in details after purchasing their hunting license for the year to become HIP certified.
“We’re talking about those things right now. We don’t have a very clear path right now,” Oldenburger said. “There are some options in play. This is something we’re proposing to do in the next hunting season or in a couple of hunting seasons.”
The goal, Oldenburger said, is to ensure the department has high-quality data to estimate the harvest accurately.
“The reason for that is we have a number of species management strategies when it comes to Fish and Wildlife Service in how seasons are set, and that depends on harvest data,” Oldenburger said. “For instance, how many mourning doves we estimate we shoot here in Texas matters to hunting seasons in Minnesota and Montana because it all goes into the harvest strategy to estimate the number of mourning doves that are going to be in next year’s population.”
The next Parks and Wildlife Commission hearing is set for Jan. 25-26, 2023.
Now, we have high populations with extremely low productivity,”
So what? The purpose of the CO was to reduce the population.
The population hasn’t been reduced and TP&W wants to eliminate a hunting opportunity for Texans while hunters in Oklahoma, Arkansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Mississippi, Kansas, North and South Dakota, and Canada will continue to hunt Snow geese in the spring.
Maybe TP&W should focus on providing MORE opportunities for hunters instead of eliminating them.
Snow geese are hard enough to hunt ,let us use e callers in regular season ,they have all ready dropped the limit to 10 per day in regular season,now they want to get ride of the Co season,what it sounds like is they are slowly shutting us down from hunting altogether. Instead what they should do is figure out how to get us out hunting more after all we pay for the land. Let us use it
Making the HIP certification even more cumbersome than at the time of licensing for the once or twice a year dove hunters will probably result in even more hunters being unaware it’s still necessary and more fines being imposed. Sounds like we have non hunters running the hunting oversight agencies to me with all these changes.