Good point cajunwannabe. The harvest rate could certainly be from fewer hunters. I could cobble something together from past reports. (I'll have to put some duct tape on my tinfoil hat, now) the USFWS used to keep a long record of these reports available in .pdf format but now it only goes back 3 years. I wish I had downloaded more of the earlier reports.

I'd like to see how many hunters we lost between 1976 and 1991. It makes sense that the first hunters that drop out aren't the ones killing 12-15 ducks per year but the ones killing only 3 or 4. So, it's not a straight-forward linear look at things. Suffice to say, that when we had a similar trailing off of harvest in prior centuries, the MANagement decision makers made and owned the tough choices. That hasn't happened on this side of the year 2000.