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Show Duck Season To Open for 80 Days: Ends Dec.31 An 80-day duck hunt for 1945 will shortly be proclaimed by the Utah Fish and Game Commission in accordance with regulations recently re-cently announced by the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The season will open Saturday, October 13 and continues through Monday, December 31. The dates are almost identical with the 1944 season, hence may be a disappointment to southern Utah hunters who had hoped for another 10-day extension on the winter end in event of another late freeze. The Utah commission had recommended re-commended a 90-day season. Only major change in the new regulations is returning the daily bag limit on most ducks to 10. Last year, hunters were allowed an extra ex-tra five daily bag of mallards, pintails pin-tails or widgeon to alleviate crop damage, but the desired results were not forthcoming, Leonard explained. ex-plained. "Another reason for the cut," Leonard pointed out, " was the concensus at the international meeting of game commissioners that if the bag limit were to be cut, it should be done this year rather than at a time when a majority ma-jority of veterans will have returned return-ed from overseas." Utahns need not be alarmed a-bout a-bout reports of a 20 million decrease de-crease in the duck population, according ac-cording to the Utah game chief. "Dr. Gabrielson (Wildlife Service chief) admits that ducks have actually ac-tually increased in the Pacific and Central flyways, the major losses being in the Atlantic and Mississippi Mississip-pi lanes," Leonard said. Also, it was pointed out that the 1944 censos may have been high, or the 1945 estimate taken when freakish weather conditions had sent unusual numbers of waterfowl to Havana, Hispanola, Mexico or South America. Director Leonard said that Utah has not yet received its copy of the federal regulations which, govern gov-ern the Utah shoot, but that he expected ex-pected them to contain one other significant change, namely, permitting permit-ting 90-day post-season possession of waterfowl rather than 45 in view of the meat shortage. The 1945 regulations continue general shooting hours, a half hour before sunrise to sunset, Mountain Standard War Time. |