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What Type of Lean Ducks Do Hunters Kill? Weakest Local Ones Rather Than Migrants

Abstract An earlier study in western France showed that birds shot around protected areas had a lower body mass than birds remaining in nature reserves, but it was impossible at that time to distinguish whether shot birds were leaner because they were exhausted and ignorant migrants, or whether there was simply a body-condition bias making the leaner individuals of the area more likely to be shot. To test these hypotheses, we used body mass at ringing from close to 5,000 teal Anas crecca in the Camargue, southern France. Distinguishing between ‘resident’ birds recaptured alive in the same protected area at least once during the month following ringing, ‘locally shot birds’ hunted in the Camargue and ‘migrants’ hunted out of the Camargue area during the same period, we could not detect any significant difference between the average body mass of ‘residents’ and ‘migrants’, whereas locally shot birds were generally lighter. This suggests that migration is not the reason why hunters generally shoot lean ducks around nature reserves. Conversely, these results support the idea that some mechanisms, maybe linked to competition and dominance relationships between birds in protected areas, make the leaner teal more likely to get killed by hunters. Whatever the mechanism involved, this pattern suggests that carrying capacity was reached in the protected areas, a situation calling for appropriate habitat management.