Hunter Harvest Information

By DAVID RAINER

At the February Alabama Conservation Advisory Board, one topic raised at the meeting had to do with the timely publication of Alabama’s hunter harvest information.

Barnett Lawley, Commissioner of the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, hopes to do just that by asking hunters to go online to http://www.outdooralabama.com/hunting/HarvestData/ and fill out the form.

“This is a way for us to move into the modern era of collecting information electronically,” Lawley said. “We’re asking for information on the bucks harvested, which they already have to fill out on their hunting license. We ask about the number of points on the bucks, and we want to know about the does harvested, as well. We also want to know what county they were harvested in. We also want to know how many days they hunted during the season.

“This information will be compiled electronically and we can generate any report we want. We can look at the number of does and bucks harvested per county. We can find out which counties have the most hunting activity in the state. This will just give us a great deal more flexibility, more than just a survey.”

Lawley said the current survey that is mailed to randomly selected hunters was first used in 1963. The survey was sent to 10,847 hunters drawn from the pool of 260,378 hunters with Alabama licenses. The survey covers license holders only and does not include those who are not required to buy a license – hunters under the age of 16 or 65 and older, as well as those who hunt on their own property. Acknowledged in the 2006-2007 survey is the importance of those hunters who are not required to buy licenses. According to the latest U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service data – the 2006 National Survey of Fishing, Hunting and Wildlife-Associated Recreation – a total of 391,000 hunted in Alabama that year, which indicates a large number of hunters not required to have licenses participate in Alabama’s hunting seasons.
Also, Lawley said the mail-in survey’s paper trail is cumbersome and can’t be compiled quickly, like the new electronic survey can.

“This new survey will give us the ability to see if we need to implement new management tools, such as the buck limit we instituted this year,” he said. “This is one of the requests from the wildlife biology committee we formed to look at the buck limit and other issues. They (committee members) wanted some way to get data faster. To be able to do that, it’s very important for Alabama’s hunters to transfer their harvest data to this online sheet at outdooralabama.com.”

The most recent mail-in hunting survey, which covers the 2006-2007 seasons, is an extensive survey that covers all huntable game, not just deer and turkey – the species covered in the online survey.

Data from the 2006-2007 mail-in survey indicated a trend that Lawley considers a little troublesome – a reduction in doe harvest and an increase in buck harvest. According to the survey, during the 2005-2006 seasons, hunters took 233,000 does and 208,000 bucks. The 2006-2007 survey indicated that buck harvest increased to 215,100, while doe harvest decreased to 221,800.

“The online survey will give us useable data that we can tweak as we go,” Lawley said. “Things change. That’s why we started with the buck limit. That was an obvious situation. We wanted to protect the quality of deer in Alabama. We wanted to have more bucks at an older age group that would develop into dominant breeding bucks. The feedback I’ve received about the three-buck limit has all been positive. I’d had people stop me in the grocery store and thank me.

“Data is vital for sound management of our resources. I know that proper management is also very important to Alabama hunters.”

Those hunters who didn’t have any luck this past year are also important to the survey.

“Even if they killed no deer, that’s just as important,” Lawley said. “That gives us the number of hunting days and success ratios. That’s the kind of information we can use in so many different ways. We can do it electronically in ways that are impossible to do with the paper survey. Any factual data that we can get will help us.”

The online form (http://www.outdooralabama.com/hunting/HarvestData/) provides spaces for the following information: date of harvest, number of antler points, county where harvested, total number of does harvested and estimated number of days spent hunting in the 2007-08 season. Turkey harvest information on the online form should be completed after turkey season closes April 30.

###