Opportunities Aplenty for Islanders

Regulatory changes added 29 days to Prince Edward Island’s duck season

One day can make all the difference for a duck hunter. Especially if that day is an autumn Sunday on Canada’s Prince Edward Island.

Leif Taylor, a 57-year-old hard-working carpenter and native Islander, enjoyed the 2024-2025 waterfowl hunting season immensely—even more than most years. For the first season in Taylor’s lifetime of hunting ducks and geese, he was legally allowed to don his favorite camouflage and tote a shotgun into the field and marsh on Sundays.

Last spring, PEI legislators reversed the province’s longstanding, outdated law that prohibited Sunday hunting, a change that significantly increases opportunities for all hunters on the Island.

“Hunting was about the only thing you couldn’t do on Prince Edward Island on a Sunday. You could fish, you could shop and do just about anything else,” Taylor said. “We fought long and hard to get this through and it finally came to fruition, which is awesome for us.”

Taylor, who has served as the volunteer chairman of the PEI Delta Waterfowl Chapter in Summerside since 2021, was a key advocate in the process for seven-day hunting on the Island. He was one of 15 supporters present when Bill 58 was read in the General Assembly. The Bill passed in April, just in time to be enacted for the 2024-2025 season.

“In PEI, most of the land is privately owned. You’ve got a farmer who has 200 acres, and you’re telling him, ‘Don’t hunt your own land on a Sunday because we don’t approve of it.’ It didn’t make any sense,” said Brian McRae, Delta’s director of government affairs for Canada. “Some people are just afraid of change. People oppose change, but once it happens, it becomes the new normal.”

In addition to the repeal of Sunday hunting bans, Delta Waterfowl had been working with government officials throughout the Maritime provinces—Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and PEI—to enact the full 107 days of duck hunting allowed by Canadian Wildlife Service frameworks.

For PEI duck hunters, the 2023 duck season spanned Oct. 1 to Dec. 31, a total of 78 days with no Sundays. Last season, PEI duck hunters enjoyed a continuously open season of 107 days from Oct. 1 to Jan. 15, an increase of 29 days.

“To add 29 days like we did last year for PEI is an incredible policy win,” McRae said. “We’ve been advocating for it for a long time. For families and kids, the opportunity to get out hunting on weekends is so important. The only days many of them can go hunting are on the weekends. When you tie in everything else from jobs to extra-curricular sports, if you only have one day to hunt, the time gets eaten up pretty quickly. Sunday hunting or seven-day hunting is critically important.”

Taylor, like many PEI waterfowl hunters, happily took full advantage of the extra days.

“We got out quite a few Sundays last season,” he said. “People like me—I’m a carpenter and work Monday through Friday—so Saturday was my only day to go (before the change). It worked out great for us. The opportunity to go on Sunday was there for us. It’s nice to have that option.”

Taylor’s 90-year-old father, Blaine, still actively hunts waterfowl and other game. Leif was able to enjoy two hunts with his dad last season. He also spent more time in the blind with his 21-year-old son, Noah.

All three generations of the Taylor family enjoyed hunting the Island’s abundant populations of black ducks, mallards, and Canada geese. Gadwalls and wigeon occasionally visited the decoy spread, Leif Taylor reported.

“We had a good season with more opportunity,” he said. “In the past five years, there seems to be more birds in our area. The duck population is really booming here.”

Taylor attributes the recent uptick in duck numbers to changes in agricultural practices.

“Corn has become a fairly big crop on PEI, so there’s more feed for the birds,” he said. “There are more birds and they stay here longer. The black duck population has really boomed over the years. It’s an area people come to shoot black ducks.”

Moderate winter weather in recent years has encouraged PEI’s resident waterfowl to stay longer to take advantage of the waste grain.

“The weather has changed a bit,” Taylor said. “Before, it would freeze up by mid-November and that would be the end of it. But now, our season was extended. Not only do we have Sunday hunting, but our duck season was extended to Jan. 15. It used to close on Dec. 31. We also have a really good opportunity here to hunt sea ducks—eiders, longtails, scoters—along the coast in the late season.”

PEI, which is Canada’s only province consisting entirely of an island, spans 5,686 square kilometers (2,185 square miles) in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The 13-km-long (8 mi) Confederation Bridge connects PEI to the mainland of New Brunswick.

With a growing population of 179,000, PEI remains mostly rural. Taylor said the hunting culture remains strong, despite a shrinking number of waterfowl hunters in recent decades.

According to CWS records, 1,225 PEI residents purchased migratory bird hunting permits in 2023. The number of migratory bird hunters on PEI peaked in 1978, when 6,370 Islanders pursued waterfowl. The decline in hunters on PEI follows Canada’s national trends. In 2023, a total of 128,945 Canadian residents hunted waterfowl. As in PEI, Canada resident migratory bird hunters topped out at 505,681 in 1978.

“We have a large number of hunters,” Taylor said. “Even though our numbers have declined substantially over the years on the Island and across Canada, there’s still a core group of us.”

While the number of migratory bird permits sold was not yet available for the 2024 season, Taylor said hunting on Sundays was popular on PEI.

“Hunters were sensitive to staying away from places where Sunday hunting might have caused conflict, choosing to hunt remote places,” he said.

John Clements, Delta senior regional director for the Canadian Team and a PEI resident, said the increased hunting opportunity was 100% positive.

“There was not one complaint registered with law enforcement,” Clements said. “Zero issues. People hunted right until Jan. 15 with zero complaints.”

Certainly, increased opportunities to hunt ducks on PEI could help retain existing hunters and encourage new people to join our ranks.

“For families and working people with traditional Monday to Friday jobs, it essentially doubles the days in which people can go hunting,” said Jim Fisher, vice president of Canadian policy for Delta Waterfowl. “I know one of the frustrations is if you worked Friday, you had no time to scout Friday night. So, you’d go hunting blind (without scouting) on Saturday morning. You’d have Saturday afternoon to scout, but why bother because you couldn’t hunt Sunday? If you can only hunt one day of the weekend vs. making a whole weekend out of it, I would guess it would have implications for recruiting and retaining waterfowl hunters.”

In surveys looking at waterfowl hunting participation throughout North America, a lack of “time to hunt” consistently rises to the top as the reason to quit hunting ducks and geese.

“That’s the No. 1 reason we hear,” Fisher said.

Delta Waterfowl has consistently advocated for increased hunting opportunities, noting the importance of a strong base of hunters as a key to waterfowl and wetland conservation across the continent.

Delta has been instrumental in removing Sunday hunting bans across Canada. New Brunswick, Newfoundland/Labrador, PEI, and several more municipalities in Ontario have recently changed laws and now allow Sunday/seven-day hunting for waterfowl.

In 2024, six Ontario municipalities removed Sunday bans, bringing the total to 196 municipalities in southern Ontario (south of the French River) that have now approved gun hunting every day of the week. Delta is working to remove all remaining Sunday hunting bans in Canada, including Nova Scotia, where Sunday gun hunting is restricted to just two Sundays a year during the fall big-game season.

“We’re hopeful Nova Scotia will change to allow seven-day hunting soon throughout all of the province’s hunting seasons,” McRae said.

PEI duck hunters are still savoring the 2024-2025 season while looking forward to another extended opportunity to make more memories in the seasons ahead.

“I never thought I’d live long enough to hunt on Sundays in PEI, but now I go hunting every Sunday just because I can,” Clements said. —Paul Wait