Variations in band reporting rate and implications for kill rate in greater snow geese | Variations du taux de retour de bagues et répercussions sur le taux de récolte chez la grande oie des neiges

• Published in: Avian Conservation and Ecology
• Main Authors: Souchay, Guillaume, Gimenez, Olivier, Gauthier, Gilles, Pradel, Roger
• Other Authors: Office National de la Chasse et de la Faune Sauvage, CNERA Avifaune Migratrice, Centre d’Ecologie Fonctionnelle et Evolutive (CEFE), Université Paul-Valéry - Montpellier 3 (UPVM)-Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA)-Centre international d'études supérieures en sciences agronomiques (Montpellier SupAgro)-École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE), Université Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL)-Université Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL)-Université de Montpellier (UM)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD France-Sud )-Institut national d’études supérieures agronomiques de Montpellier (Montpellier SupAgro), Département de biologie and Centre d'études nordiques, Université Laval Québec (ULaval)
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: HAL CCSD 2014
• Subjects: Band recovery; CNRS1; Greater Snow Goos; [Atlantic Flyway; [SDE.BE]Environmental Sciences/Biodiversity and Ecology; Arctic
• Online Access: https://hal.science/hal-01911586; https://doi.org/10.5751/ACE-00628-090101

International audience We assessed spatial and temporal variation in reporting probability of banded Greater Snow Geese (Chen caerulescens atlantica) shot by hunters in eastern North America and evaluated potential residual biases in kill rate estimation. Adult Greater Snow Geese were marked with reward (value: US\10, \20, \30, \50, and \100) and standard bands (\0, control) in the Canadian Arctic from 2003 to 2005. We used a spatially explicit multinomial model based on 200 direct recoveries from 4256 banded geese to estimate reporting rate and harvest rate. We found that reporting rate for standard bands varied over time whereas harvest rate was higher in Canada than in the U.S. The reporting probability increased from 0.40 ± 0.11 in the first year of the study to 0.82 ± 0.14 and 0.84 ± 0.13 the second and third years, respectively. Overall, these reporting rates are higher than two previous estimates for this population, which leads to lower estimates of kill rate. However, the large annual differences in reporting rates found in this study lead to uncertainty in the estimation of kill rate. We suggest that the increase in reporting rate in the last two year of the study may be due to the dissemination of information among hunters regarding the presence of reward bands on birds, resulting in increased reporting rate for all bands. This raises issues about the need to adequately inform the public in such large-scale studies to avoid undesirable temporal trends over the course of the study. \textcopyright 2014 by the author(s).