First: There has been a color banner on the front page of the LDWF website for almost 2 months with blue-winged teal and the words "2015 Waterfowl Hunter Survey". It was in the same place you will find colorful banners for the black bear and wildlife action plan today. I don't know how any duckhunter could have missed it.
Second: Of the 95,000 known duck hunters we identified (and I know we missed some), only 25,000 had e-mail addresses. I've bought licenses here for 29 years, but never did it on-line, and my e-mail address is not in the LDWF database.
The vast majority of duck hunters were NOT contacted. That would be a HUGE waste of resources! We selected 2,500 for the random mail-out survey, another 2,500 for the mixed-mode post-card survey, and sent e-mails to about 25,000. The other 65,000 were not contacted. We provided the open web survey on the LDWF website so every interested duck hunter could participate at a fairly low cost to us.
We've got to explore alternative ways of collecting this information that balance the high cost of a mail-out survey where over 80% of your effort is thrown in the trash, and an open web survey that generates biased estimates because the sample is so skewed toward the most dedicated hunters.
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