THE National Environment and Planning Agency (NEPA) is conducting a game bird management survey to determine the impact of bird-shooting on the total bird population.

Andrea Donaldson, co-ordinator for fauna in the Biodiversity Unit at NEPA, said the aim is to ensure that the shooting does not affect the birds’ nesting period, and that adults are not being killed before their young are old enough to fend for themselves.

“Birds nest twice per year and each bird lays two eggs each time. The feeling is that we were getting adults and the juveniles were left in the nest and so were not able to develop because they did no have their parents around,” she explained.

In addition, NEPA is trying to determine where specific species are found and what the birds are eating.

“This is important because if you are rehabilitating an area where a particular species is then you can plant the kind of trees that will enhance the population,” she says.

The three-year project which started last year, will continue with results collected during this bird season, which opened last month and ends September 23.

Noting that the survey will also determine the age group of the birds that are being killed, she said that last year, hunters were asked to provide the agency with the feathers of birds shot.

“From preliminary results we were able to determine that more than 97 per cent of the birds being shot are juveniles,” Donaldson said.

A sport for many years, especially among the more affluent in the society, birdshooting was regulated by the environmental agency to better manage the bird population that has been reduced due to the loss of habitat and population.

During the season, shooting is only allowed two days per week – Saturdays and Sundays. On Saturday there is a morning shoot, which starts at sunrise and ends at 9:00 am and in the afternoon, shooting starts at 2:30 pm and ends at sunset. The Sunday shoot begins at sunrise and ends at 9:00 am.

Each shooter is allowed 20 birds per shoot and the game birds are the Long-tailed Pea Dove (Paloma), the White-wing and the White Crowned Pigeon (Bald Pate). No bag should have more than 15 Bald Pates.

Shooting is allowed in all areas except those that are designation protected areas – national parks, game sanctuaries, and forest reserves.

“If you shoot on private land you must get permission. For the game sanctuary, there is a 50-metre buffer zone where you need to be 50 metres away from the boundary of the protected area,” Donaldson says.

To hunt, all shooters are required to purchase a hunter’s licence, and all gun licences should have been renewed within the year.

Noting that there has been increased monitoring of the bird-shooting season over the last few years, Donaldson says wardens from the Environmental Warden Service and officers from NEPA have been visiting popular hunting sites in St Catherine, Portland, St Elizabeth, Manchester, St James, Trelawny, St Thomas and Kingston and St Andrew.

The NEPA officers and wardens are authorised to check if all hunters are licensed. They check the bags to see how many birds have been shot and that only game birds are hunted, ensure that hunters are not shooting before or past the time allocated for shooting and that they are not hunting in any protected area.

For any breech, the monitors have the authority to take the offender to a police station, where the person can be charged and taken before the courts.

The offender can be fined a maximum of $100,000 for any offence under the Wild Life Protection Act.