Not about who is the best, there is always someone better, Your neighbor Mr Philips has a better Mule deer antler collection than me. It is that found the antlers I did in an OTC unit with an OCT season in ID and you have to have LE in MT to find anything big. Likely the two places were less than fifty miles apart.
And, I'd bet that the November Elk season will be an overcrowded mess with significantly more folks concentrating solely on public land Elk HUNTING. I feel the potential negative effects to Elk hunting will far out weigh any potential benefits to the Mule deer under this proposal.
I will pm you
I see it as it may at the 50,000 foot level view disperse statistical crowding across the entire state as a whole over the period of duration in that it essentially adds two more weeks of hunting opportunity. From my experience, outside of the final week of the month and the youth hunt there is not much going on in terms of deer/hunting hunting pressure in October to the point its impact is nil. The proposal as I understand it will give folks the opportunity as they see fit to focus on mule deer in October, and will introduce another "Opening Day". Antelope opener comes to mind and then in November, we repeat the Opener process again with everybody headed to hunt elk in another part of the state. I think its been established that the shoulder hunts on either end of the traditional season have not generated the level of interest nor fulfilled their intended purpose as hoped so eliminating them is a mute point. Although far from perfect and painting with a wide brush the current hunting pressure is dispersed by having to choose between hunting deer mostly in the eastern half (from canada to wyoming) or hunting elk in the southwest/central portions of the state during the duration of that particular hunt outing. One cannot be in two parts of the state at the same time. The separation between a species specific hunt across the state as opposed species specific season does reduce hunter over crowding in positive way. I still think the negative impacts to Elk hunting out weigh the potential benefits to mule deer. Even the potential to further irritate private land owners and the further loss of access is of concern. It will add 2, possibly 4 weeks of disruption to their operation, as I said the month of October can be pretty quite for those guys bringing cattle home. Mule deer rifle season while cattle are still on forest service leases. (Might be worth further discussion). If landowners dont like the new public season structure so be it. They'll be able to evaluate other options such a leasing to an outfitter or a other groups. There is too much at stake here for the public to entertain a new October mule deer only season. I'd prefer to see LE deer management. IF not then how about LE for rifle antlered elk.
