Svalbardryper og jaktstatistikk

How to know how many animals are out there in the wild? (Another question is if we want to know that, but at least for the species people hunt and eat it is usually relevant information.) It is often pretty expensive to send people to actually count animals, and much cheaper to count how many animals were hunted. But... can hunting statistics really tell us what happens?

The number of animals shot depends also (and a lot!) on how many hunters were out, how long they were out, how good hunters they are and all such things. Like, do you walk in the woods with a shotgun to fill up your freezer with grouse as quickly as possible - or do you take shotgun along to have an alibi to be alone in the nature?

We tried to get an idea how well the hunting statistics and counts by researchers correspond to each other for Svalbard ptarmigan. Both types of data tell about similar ups and downs in the population size. BUT: the hunting data shows a long-term decrease in ptarmigan numbers - and the research data does not. Why? We think that there are two alternative explanations: either there has been a hunting culture change which we haven't been able to measure. Or, the explanation is that the data actually look at different things. The researchers count ptarmigans that have reproductive territory (a place to nest). Not all ptarmigans have. There is not sooo many good territories available in between the glaciers on Svalbard! So it may be that as a whole the ptarmigan numbers are going down - but all good nesting places are still occupied. There is just fewer birds hanging around and waiting to get the opportunity to take over a territory.

It seems like we need to first figure out what happens with the hunters to really know what is going on. But it is also clear that hunting data could very well tell catch things that would go unnoticed by the current research data. Some more adjustments in what kind of info the hunters report, and voila, the hunting data will become very valuable!