Outdoor Insights: Is Minnesota’s proposed three-duck bag option another step in ‘dumbing down’ duck hunting?

The Minnesota DNR surprised state outdoors sharpies last week with its pitch to the hunting public for a three-duck, any-bird option for the 2027 season.

The agency is asking citizens to comment on the idea by Aug. 17, and the proposal has generated ample debate already.

Outdoor News interviewed Nate Huck, the DNR’s migratory gamebird consultant on the topic last week, and we posted the conversation to the Outdoor News channel on YouTube. Watch the full interview below.

Snippets from the interview garnered ample feedback, most of it reasonably productive, on social media over the weekend.

The existing six-bird bag limit with conditional sex and species limits – like two hen mallards, three wood ducks, two canvasbacks, etc. – would remain available, but when hunters buy their licenses in 2027, they could select the three-bird Tier 2 “splash duck” option.

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Those who choose that proposed license could ignore sex and species constraints, pick up their first three ducks that hit the water, and go home. Yes, those three ducks could be three hen mallards, or three canvasbacks, or whatever.

Outdoor News has written about this concept before, and it’s existed in Nebraska and South Dakota since 2021. The feds and the DNR have positioned the three-duck, any-bird concept as a recruitment tool. Waterfowl hunter numbers have declined significantly within the past 30 years, partially – the agencies believe – because the complexity of identifying the many species of ducks poses a barrier to new or inexperienced hunters.

Data that Huck shared from Nebraska and South Dakota clearly shows that younger hunters like the idea. The largest age bracket of people selecting the three-duck bag limit was 18- to 25-year-olds (14% in Nebraska and 17% in S.D.) in both states.

Second was 36 to 40 in Nebraska (9%) and youth in South Dakota (14%). Youth made up 7% in Nebraska. And despite concerns that hunters will slam hen mallards, the data doesn’t support that.

In 903 bags of so-called Tier 2 (three-duck bag) analyzed, two contained three hen mallards – both were in South Dakota in 2023; zero contained three redheads; three contained three canvasbacks (all in Nebraska in 2024); 10 contained three scaup (three in 2022, four in 2023, and three in 2024 – all in South Dakota).

Three-duck bag limit hunters in Nebraska hunted 4.17 days and harvested 2.3 birds on average. And in South Dakota they hunted 3.82 days and harvested 4.48 birds. Total Tier 2 hunter participants ranged up to a high of 4,093 in Nebraska and 2,164 in S.D., both in 2023.

The DNR and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service believe the three-bird bag does not pose any biological concerns, and the data – at least from Nebraska and S.D. – seems to back that up.

But ever since this splash duck concept appeared six years ago, I can’t shake the feeling that it’s another step in dumbing down hunting.

Pardon this 50-something for a “back in my day” rant, but I came of age in a strong waterfowling culture in the Mississippi River valley near Winona. We took pride in learning our birds, and many species funneled south between the bluffs every autumn.

Shouldn’t a responsible waterfowler know the difference between a canvasback and a mallard before leaving the boat landing? It sounds like we’re saying that duck hunting requires too much skill, so in an effort to reduce friction for recruitment, we’ll just make it easier.

Will the guy who doesn’t know one duck from another pass on a cormorant or a swan or a grebe that flies over?

Not every waterfowler in the marsh now is an expert on duck ID, but does recruiting a new legion of hunters who exit the marsh with their “brown ducks” help the sport long-term?

However you feel about the topic, chime in at www.mndnr.gov/waterfowl. And watch our interview with Huck above or listen on this weekend’s Outdoor News Radio podcast.