Police to closely monitor waterfowl hunting beginning next week

The waterfowl hunting season starts again next week and the police will carry out an intensive monitoring operation across the country in cooperation with other authorities, said police in a press release.

The hunting season will start at 12 noon on August 20 and will continue till August 25.

Monitoring will place particular emphasis on hunting safety matters, including safe firearm handling and safe shooting directions. In addition, monitoring will highlight key themes locally.

Monitoring will be targeted, among other things, at the ban on the twilight hunting of waterfowl, which allows shooting to begin one hour before sunrise and end one hour after sunset.

In many places, hunters still use bait to hunt waterfowl. At these feeding points, hunters fire a lot of shots and the busiest time is around sunset.

The last shots are often fired almost in darkness against the sky or water, in which case the identification of a game animal is based solely on the silhouette of the animal.

Protected birds may also end up being caught in those conditions, which is why monitoring will be carried out.

However, injured animals may be searched for, killed and appropriated.

The sunrise and sunset times for each hunting area can be found in the Oma riista field app or in the Finnish Meteorological Institute's local weather data. Hunters must check the time of sunrise or sunset in the area before starting to hunt.

The National Police Board will communicate the nationwide results of the monitoring operation by Friday 30 August 2024 at the latest.

According to the Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke), 302,113 hunters paid the game management fee in 2023.

About 186,000 of them went hunting. The mallard is by far our most caught waterfowl, followed by the teal.