National Migratory Bird Harvest Survey
Frequently Asked Questions

If you cannot find an answer to your question, please contact us about the survey.

No! As of the 2023-24 hunting season, an account is no longer needed for taking the survey. You can access your survey just by entering your invitation code each time you visit the site. No other information is needed. Please do not share your code with anyone, and keep the email or paper invitation with the code so that you can use it throughout the hunting season. If you lose it, contact us and we will send it to you via email.

We estimate hunter activity and harvest of migratory birds at the state level, by sampling from lists of HIP-registered hunters provided by each state. Therefore, even though many hunters may hunt in more than one state during a season, we can only include the hunting information from the state in which the hunter was selected for a survey. If you did register to hunt in more than one state, you could be selected for multiple surveys. If so, you will receive separate invitations for each one, and when you enter your invitation code you will see more than one survey card on your dashboard.

We assume the hunting activity and harvest you report is done by one person. We use this information to estimate the total hunting activity and harvest in a state based on the number of hunters registered for HIP in that state. If you report all the hunting information from a group hunt, this will inflate our estimates of hunter activity and harvest. We can only use the information from the person selected for the survey.

No.The National Migratory Bird Harvest Survey does not currently estimate harvest from conservation or nuisance seasons.

We select hunters for this survey based on their answers to the HIP hunting questions about their hunting activity the previous year. This allows us to estimate hunting activity and harvest with greater precision. Therefore, if you are selected, it is important that you tell us about your hunting activity and harvest, rather than someone else's.

Birds killed as a result of hunting include those not retrieved. When a bird is knocked down and the hunter can’t retrieve it, it may die of its wounds, be killed by a predator, or recover. But, most knocked-down birds probably don’t recover. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if a bird was hit, much less if it died. A bird reacting to a near miss may look wounded or it may appear to absorb a hit and keep flying. We ask that you provide us with your best estimate of the number of birds downed and lost.

If you are unable to remember the specific days you hunted or the birds killed on each day, you can choose to enter Season Totals on the survey page instead of logging your daily hunts.

You can either send us a request for your code using our Contact Us form, or by email to fwsharvestsurvey@fws.gov. We will send you your invitation code via email .

No. We sample specific hunters based on their answers to the HIP hunting questions. Only those hunters contacted with an invitation may participate in the survey, to ensure that the harvest estimates are unbiased and precise.