EYJONAS!
Well-known member
- Joined
- Mar 17, 2017
- Messages
- 6,770
Love following this thread and enjoy hearing everyone's experience on these hunts. I have a question for the sheep guys. Do you enjoy seeing sheep hit the quotas early in the season or do you prefer it to be drawn out? Obviously the longer the season, the better odds you may have to kill a legal ram so I can see why an Unlimited hunter wants to see the season drag on, but looking at it from a conservation/management perspective is it bitter sweet knowing the sheep populations are doing well if two legal rams are harvested early in the season? Is the length of time it takes to fill the quota indicative of how well the sheep are doing in a given unit?
1.I kinda route for other hunters myself, if someone is into the hunt and putting forth the effort to do it then hell ya if they get one that's fantastic. It's a tough adventure to come out successful. Obviously it's fun to keep going and yes chances can increase especially as things get later and later but, it's still no picnic to say the least. Lots of other factors come into play especially in late October, November......
2. The quotas for every Unlimited district are fairly conservative. The sheep population is managed primarily by the Beartooths/Absarokas environment, the harvest of of these has little to no impact on the populations up there. The biologist told me once that he thinks 90 percent or more of the sheep die of old age, we could probably double the quota and it still wouldn't affect the population because we don't take any ewes......
3. No i don't believe the amount of time it takes to fill the quota has any correlation to how the sheep are doing. Some years are tougher than others to find sheep. Dryer ones seem to be the even moreso, the fact is that this is the absolute "needle in a haystack" analogy. The amount of country is unfathomable and nasty and theres just not that many of them.
All this being said I do hope to get in a trip in sometime this season however, I have some friends up there too. I hope they can connect and make it happen. Some of them much more deserving than myself on the unlimited ram....... one day maybe!
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