Thread: Southland F & G meeting 9 October 2014

Just home now from tonights meeting. Was actually a pleasure to be able to sit around the table and have a meaningful input into our sport rather than joining in another meaningless forum debate (hint, hint, if you want to make a difference get off the keyboard and go stand at next year's election).

Anyway tonight we covered a range of things, these being:

- A record high number of game bird licence sales this year in our region.

- A hunter harvest of some 100,000 plus ducks in Southland for the season.

- Auckland/Waikato having the second highest harvest at 60,000. Surprisingly for me this was 50% higher than CSI (Is there really a shortage of ducks in A/W or is there just too many hunters?).

- An update on the great work our staff have been doing on the mallard research project.

- Discussion over the future funding of the mallard research programme and the need for regions to push for national based funding.

- Possibly reducing next years hunting season length and a desire to work with other South Island regions on consistency of regulations e.g. season length, bag limits, mag capacity.

- Our opposition to the second attempt of the Southland District Council to run part of their 'Around the Mountain Cycle trail' down a small section of the pristine wilderness area that is the upper Oreti River valley.

- 1080 and trout (and the fact no one down this way has found the 'biblical plague' of mice and rodents that was predicted by DOC).

- NZ Council update after their last meeting.