Send in other hunter's Wings to USF&WS?

Eric Patterson

Moderator
Staff member
Friends

Some of you may find the below dialog interesting and or informative about the HIP and Wing Surveys.

Brad

A friend is sending his wings in this year for the F&WS survey. He hasn't been out yet but told me to save my wings and he'd include them in his package to provide more data to the USF&WS. The forms include a field "hunter's name". Do you want wings only from the designated volunteer or does wing data from other hunters have value? I was under the impression from past postings of yours the wing survey data helps estimate hunter harvest and refines estimates beyond course HIP data by getting accurate data from a small subset of hunters who keep specific records of their harvest. Are additional wings that only represent partial harvest data from other hunters wanted or have any value?

I can post this on the site if you wish to respond there to educate the public. Thanks.

Eric


Brad's Response

Eric

Please don't send your wings. There a number of misconceptions about our harvest surveys. First HIP questions just provide the sample frame for stratifying hunters into a few categories for actual sampling. Hunters will be drawn on the basis of number of birds they harvest, state the get HIP certified in and species group hunted. No sense in asking California duck hunters to participate in a woodcock harvest survey is there? And in order to estimate rail harvest we may need to sample everyone who has ever hunted rails. That samples of hunters will be asked to fill out a hunting diary, filling in some basic information about how many birds they shot and state of harvest. The parts collection survey is a sample of hunters who are asked to send in wings to determine species, age and gender of their harvest. We can't ask every hunter to send every wing. Essentially the parts collection information is combined with the diary records from other hunters to estimate the total harvest of birds by species! age and sex for the entire state. The state estimates are used to generate flyway totals. So along each step of the way the responses we get from hunters are supposed to be representative of the successfu hunters. You can get more info here http://www.fws.gov/hip/. There is more info on the actual surveys here. http://www.fws.gov/...ds/hunting.html#MBHS. I know that this response is going to generate more questions so I'll try to keep up with answers.
 
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