DOUG WRITES: I honestly can’t believe this is for real! I find it horrific and sickening.The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources said the sandhill crane season will begin Sept. 4 and go through Oct. 10. The hunting area includes portions of Kittson, Roseau, Marshall, Pennington, Red Lake and Polk counties. Hunters are limited to two birds in one day and are subject to a possession limit of four birds.
Because sandhill cranes are migratory birds, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service regulates their harvest. The DNR applied to have a hunting season in northwestern Minnesota because that's where the Midcontinental population of sandhill cranes stay in the late summer and early fall before the lakes freeze up.
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I dare say the hunting licence depends a very great deal on the type of weapon permitted to hunt these birds with; a shotgun capable of killing a goose, loaded with tungsten-matrix ammunition (lead is of course prohibited for use over wetlands, and rightly so), has an outside maximum range of sixty yards.
ReplyDeleteBy contrast, a rifle taking sitting shots is accurate at over a mile, provided that there's an adequate backstop (and water isn't adequate; bullets bounce off it at low angles of attack).
Weapons notwithstanding, I still don't see what sport there would be in hunting big, slow-flying birds like cranes, especially not when the species is endangered and could quite easily be pushed to extinction by scaring them off migratory feeding grounds.
In any case, if it's a truly testing, moving, turning target you want as a shotgun target, then these people can sort you out the most testing flying targets in the world, for very reasonable costs: http://www.gnatshoot.co.uk/
Best of all, since these are remote-controlled aircraft, there is no question of hurting any wildlife in the process (you can tell I'm a target shooter at heart, can't you?)