Duck Rescue 2011

Vic­to­ria’s an­nu­al duck shoot­ing sea­son yet again opened with hor­rif­ic in­juries and suf­fer­ing for count­less birds.

This is the 25th year that an­i­mal ac­tivists have been busy on the wet­lands do­ing all they can to res­cue the in­jured and dis­tract the shoot­ers from their dead­ly ‘re­cre­a­tion’. UP­ROAR and ALV or­ganised res­cue teams to help cov­er the Kerang area, a high­ly pop­u­lar shoot­ing spot while the Coali­tion Against Duck Shoot­ing (CADS) or­ganised the main res­cue with 150 ac­tivists at Lake Bu­loke where they were pitt­ed against 2,000 shoot­ers. One of the brave res­cue team mem­bers, Julie Sy­mons was shot in the face by a 14 year old shoot­er who was il­le­gal­ly shoot­ing birds on the wa­ter. She suf­fered fa­cial in­juries, lost teeth and pel­lets embedd­ed in her skin.

10 Up­roar and ALV res­cuers gathered at Mac­do­n­alds Swamp and were pitt­ed against sev­er­al hun­dred shoot­ers. The guns start­ed blaz­ing short­ly af­ter 7am and it was young birds who dropped out of the sky. The ma­jor­i­ty of dead and in­jured birds col­lect­ed by the res­cue team were young ju­ve­niles, some on­ly a cou­ple months old.

The heavy rains and flood­ing in the Kerang area made for a longer breed­ing sea­son and th­ese young birds were lit­er­al­ly caught in the hail of pel­lets. It is un­for­giv­able that the Lib­er­al Gov­ern­ment not on­ly al­lowed a duck sea­son this year but they ex­tend­ed the shoot­ing time to three months. Not on­ly did th­ese young birds have no chance, but many who did sur­vive are now or­phans and un­able to fend for them­selves and will die a slow death from star­va­tion and/or pre­da­tion un­pro­tect­ed by their mothers.

The Po­lice and DSE kept a close guard on the alv/up­roar base­camp and at the end of the morn­ing con­fis­cat­ed all the dead birds we had col­lect­ed. Three bad­ly in­jured birds were brought in by our kayak teams and two of th­ese died short­ly af­ter. One young bird was found dazed sitt­ing on a log amidst all the may­hem and loud shoot­ing. She was brought in and put in a warm dry hos­pi­tal ‘pen’ and then tak­en to a vet. Sad­ly, though she ap­peared alert and sitt­ing ful­ly con­s­cious an ex­am­i­na­tion showed she suf­fered ex­ten­sive in­juries.