Management of Water Bird Shooting by Voluntary Agreements in Denmark

Game shooting is free in national territorial waters to any Danish citizen with a valid hunting license. In areas of importance for migrating water birds this has led to a high level of disturbance. Therefore, a number of locations free of shooting and other activities disturbing the water birds were implemented in Denmark in the period 1993-2001. The problem of water bird disturbances has a number of similarities with the 'tragedy of the commons', which is well known from resource economics, particularly the open access to use the resource. In this paper we apply the 'tragedy of the commons' framework to describe the management aspects of water bird shooting and we report from an empirical survey on the use of voluntary agreements among hunters for co-ordinating the shooting in local areas. Based on a questionnaire survey, we show that voluntary agreement among hunters has improved the local shooting in a number of cases. In combination with results from controlled experiments of the interaction between shooting frequency and disturbance of water birds, this indicates that preservation of water birds can be compatible with self-regulated shooting where disturbance is kept at a low intensity. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.