Flyways.us

A sample of waterfowl hunters have been asked each year since 1961 to send a wing from each duck and the tail from each goose killed to a central location in each flyway. (Recently hunters were asked to include the primary feather from one wing of each Canada goose.) That location in the Central Flyway is currently the Flint Hills National Wildlife Refuge near Emporia, KS. When the wings and goose feathers arrive at the refuge, they are separated by species and stored in a large freezer.

In February, about 40 biologists and others from state wildlife agencies in the Flyway, the USFWS and universities assemble for three to five days to "read" the wings - that is to determine the age and sex for each duck harvested. Each table of people working on duck wings has a "checker" assigned to it - this is an experienced person who has received special training in the reading of duck wings and whose accuracy has been carefully checked. The checker looks at the "call" made by workers at the table regarding age and sex of every duck wing. This allows workers to continually improve their skills as the wing bee progresses since feed-back is instantaneous. Many copies of Sam Carney's book, Species, Age and Sex Identification of Ducks Using Wing Plumage, can be found open to one page or another throughout the work area.

The sex of geese cannot be determined at the Wing Bee like it can for ducks, but feather wear and other characteristics are used to determine if the goose was a "young of the year" (hatched the previous spring) or an adult. In addition, the length of the central tail feather of Canada geese is obtained to place it in the "large" or "small" category, which provides a pointer to the race of the bird and ultimately to which population it came from. Only in recent years have hunters been asked to include the primary wing feathers tips to allow for more accurate aging of geese.

In the period 1997-2001, an average of 20,000 duck wings and 5,000 goose tails were read by workers at the Central Flyway Wing Bee.

These data are kept together with the information provided by the hunter (i.e., date, time, state and county of kill). Some of this information is entered into a computer using a bar code reader at the Wing Bee allowing its immediate availability to managers. Ultimately, the data is combined with that from other flyways and becomes part of the national, USFWS' Parts Collection Survey database.

The Wing Bee provides the data used to compute the species composition of the duck harvest (e.g., the percent of the total duck harvest that was mallards). That alone would justify the survey. But the data also provides:

• The age and sex of duck species in the harvest, which would be valuable by itself, but, when combined with banding data, allows an estimate of the success of the previous year's reproduction and accurate measure of the relative harvest rate for each age and sex;
• The distribution of the harvest of ducks and geese from a temporal and geographic perspective;
• The assignment of Canada goose harvest to one of the five populations in the Flyway;
• Research opportunities into the prevalence of pesticides and pollutants in the environment;
• Educational and training opportunities, and;