Huntable UK waterbird data

Life history characteristics, harvest data, population trends and conservation statuses of huntable waterbirds in the UK.
Wintering bird populations for the UK were obtained from the latest published estimates (Frost et al. 2019). The estimate for mallard was increased by 2.6 million birds to account for the annual release of captive-raised birds for shooting purposes (Madden 2021). We estimated a standard deviation for the population estimates by averaging the Wetland Bird Survey (WeBS; Frost et al. 2021) index for each species for the winters 2012/13 – 2016/17, which corresponded to the period used to estimate duck populations. We treated this mean index as equal to the estimate from Frost et al. (2019) and then calculated population estimates for each year based on their WeBS indices and calculated the standard deviation of these estimates. Population estimates for greylag goose, pink-footed goose, golden plover, snipe and woodcock were based on single years, but the same time frame ...