re: wait... how can this be duck hunter numbers declining......

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..... they have no idea how many of those 74K lifetime license holders(i'm one) are duck hunting. More accurate to use HIP numbers, i would guess.

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Exactly right, Mung! We have no idea how many duck hunters there are in Louisiana because of our license structure. Lifetime, Sportsman Paradise, and Senior license holders do NOT buy state duck licenses (stamps) but we know a large portion of them are duck hunters. We also KNOW that federal estimates from HIP have shown a decline of nearly 60,000 active duck hunters in Louisiana since 2013 despite flat sales of "duck" licenses AND a very small decline shown in LDWF's Big and Small Game Harvest Survey, which is sent to a random sample of 6% of license buyers each year.

As an example: In 2015 we did the Louisiana Waterfowl Hunter Opinion Survey, and we needed to get a random sample from all waterfowl hunters in LA. To do that we:
1) Looked at all the HIP registrations and took those who bought a "duck" license (resident duck, LA Native duck, Military duck, etc.).
2) Of the remaining we looked at the HIP registration questions and took those who reported killing at least 1 duck or goose the year before.

We KNOW that isn't all of them, because 1) many retail outlets don't ask the HIP registration questions, so we can't tell duck hunters from woodcock hunters from dove hunters, and 2) the HIP coding doesn't allow us to distinguish a guy who didn't hunt ducks from a guy who hunted ducks but didn't kill any. But even with those clear limitations, we still had 95,000 known duck hunters in 2015.

Don't get me wrong ..... we are very concerned about declining number of duck hunters nationwide (as evidenced by declining federal duck stamp sales) AND the aging of the existing hunter population with poor recruitment of young hunters. But at least in the southern Mississippi Flyway, that decline is not very strong, and we are hampered by the lack of a reliable estimate of hunter numbers. My colleagues in both AR and MS have recently shown that license sales FAR exceed the hunter estimates coming from HIP. There is no way in hell we have lost 60,000 duck hunters in LA since 2013 as federal estimates show. That is probably a big reason why the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies recently appointed a HIP Working Group (on which I'm representing the MS Flyway) to examine these discrepancies and recommend changes to the HIP process to improve cost-effectiveness and the quality of the estimates ..... starting with getting HIP registration out of the hands of retailers.

Sorry for being long-winded, but the NOLA.com article left a lot of details regarding hunter numbers in Louisiana un-said.