By Bruce Ross, Executive Director bross@wisducks.org

This article originally appeared in Wisconsin Waterfowl Association’s March, 2023 Newsletter edition.

Our recent survey of your desires for the next three waterfowl season yielded nearly 600 responses.  Here’s the overall survey results tabulated by our survey instrument.

But if you want to understand what hunters wanted at a more granular level, it required a deeper dive.  So we dove.

That analysis is useful, for example, if you want to know what the folks who shoot primarily in the North Zone think the North Zone structure should be (pretty helpful, right?).  Each one of these positions was adopted to guide the DNR’s own survey.

North Zone Hunters

• 58% prefer an early opening (Saturday nearest 24 Sep)
• 61% prefer no split

South Zone Hunters

• 54% prefer a later opener (i.e., the first Saturday in October)
• A plurality of hunters (44%) prefer a 5-day split over no split (23.5%), or 9 day split (32%)

Open Water Zone Hunters

• Are evenly divided between early and late opener dates
• 60% prefer no split over a 5 day split

Mississippi Hunters

• Prefer by around 90% that the goose season on the river start the same time as the South Zone goose season. (Boy was this a contentious topic at the DNR meeting – with several representatives very concerned that doing so will have an impact on the duck season that starts two weeks later.  This, as well as all the other topics, will be asked again by the DNR in their “public input tool”, so there’s another bite at all of these apples.)

And by the way, over 92% of respondents want us to explore a sandhill crane hunt.  So we will.