Bird hunters and water fowlers, like all other hunters, need to do a little research before hitting the road. Seasons, bag limits, license requirements and regulations vary greatly state to state. Two other pieces of information important to check before leaving home to hunt out of state are game transport regulations and blaze orange requirements.

Have Beak, Will Travel

When the bird hits the ground, its journey isn’t always over. Before appearing on your dinner plate snuggled up to the wild rice and buttery green beans, game birds travel from field to fridge. Unfortunately, many hunters don’t know or don’t pay attention to regulations covering the transport of game birds and waterfowl. Failure to abide by those regulations is one of the most common wingshooting violations.

Transport regulations exist to help authorities identify the species, sex, and number of birds taken. These regulations can be quite different from your home state. For example, Nebraska law allows pheasant and grouse hunters to remove the entrails and skin from the birds they have taken, but the carcass must remain intact and one leg or the head plumage must stay attached until the hunter and bird reach a residence or commercial storage facility. In Montana, sage grouse, sharptails and mountain grouse must have one fully feathered wing attached. Maryland requires migratory game birds except dove to be transported with either their head or a feathered wing. South Dakota offers three options—head, foot or wing—for pheasant and grouse, but limits the number of game birds that can be frozen together in a package to two.

The best way to make sure you are in compliance is to check the regulations for the states in which you plan to travel. You can access the Departments of Natural Resources / Fish and Game for each of the 50 states plus the Canadian provinces via the Internet. Your best bet is to find out the regs before you go, so you can plan accordingly.

Know Your Blaze Inches

Traveling to another state, be sure to check on the requirements for how many inches of blaze orange you need to be wearing. In Alabama, for example, during deer season, all hunters must wear a vest or cap with at least 144 square inches of solid "hunter orange." In Colorado, unless you’re a bow hunter during bow season, you need 500 square inches of blaze above the waist. Many states, such as New Hampshire and Oregon, strongly recommend hunters wear blaze orange but do not have specific guidelines. For a complete state by state listing as well as the regs in Canada, go to http://www.ihea.com/stateinfo/hunter-orange-req.php.

[These articles first appeared in The Upland Almanac, Spring 2004, Spring 2005.]