Montana harvest surveying

[Hem]

Mandatory outfitter reporting....? mtmuley

This too!

 

[thebestusernamesaretaken]

Many states are using an App to self report and it's fairly quick. Seems like a more efficient and accurate option.

Perhaps the survey data collection is an important part of the employment economy?

 

[K2xKIllEMx]

I know that this is a bit of a dead horse to beat around here but I’m going to.

This morning, May 1, 2021 I received a call from FWP inquiring about elk harvest the previous year.

It has been a month since deer and elk applications were due for the coming up year.

On top of that, I returned my NR Native combo last summer, before Aug 1 for an 80% refund.

If Montana ever wants to get serious about making a real management plan, I believe Montana needs a method to obtain real harvest and license data to meet whatever those management goals will be.

I’m not hoping for perfection but I know that calling someone that did not have an elk tag, about elk hunting, 5 months after the elk season ended is not the best or only way this could be done. It’s probably not the most cost effective either.

I'm originally from Kentucky and they have a good system. After you fill your tag, you just call a hotline and enter the info (species, sex and anter points if applicable, county, and your hunter #) then they give you a confirmation number and that's what you take to the taxidermist/ butcher shop so they know it was a legal kill and the state has all that information. Seemed to work well and made life very easy for the hunter. This year I got a deer in Montana and had no clue what to do or if I had to take it to a check in area or not... they could definitely do a better job and simplify the process.

 

[Wind Gypsy]

It's really inexcusable. Chalk up MN as another that requires harvest reporting. It wasn't a notable burden to check in a deer at a physical check in station (usually a gas station or bait shop) 23 years ago when I could first deer hunt. Now a days it is really damn easy to do it on your cell phone. That goes for turkeys too. If MN can figure it out with on $26-40 deer and turkey tags MT has zero excuse.

Would be a good thing to press them on. The FWP sells out the publics game they should be held accountable to having a simple harvest registration.

 

[Pagosa]

I got a call two weeks ago about elk hunting, it’s crazy. They have taken one of the greatest renewable resources from the 1980’s to early 2000’s and completely messed it up.

 

[np307]

That's pretty crazy to me. Like others have mentioned, NC has a mandatory reporting law. You have to report your harvest before skinning or quartering the animal (unless you are in a remote area [yes, you can find areas here that are so remote you don't have cell service]) or noon of the following day. You also have to punch the date of the kill on the tag before you move the animal from the kill site. You can report the kill via phone or website and you instantly get your certification number that you write on the tag.

We do have some voluntary surveys. The poult survey is a big one that gets done through summer to gauge turkey hatch, but I've been contacted for game land specific surveys or lake/river specific surveys as well.

 

[bigsky2]

There's probably a lot of people like me that don't answer calls from unknown callers anymore because they figure it's just another spam call about their vehicle's warranty....makes FWP's phone survey system even more ineffective.

 

[Sytes]

Want a tag next year? Do your part.

 

[sacountry]

I know that this is a bit of a dead horse to beat around here but I’m going to.

This morning, May 1, 2021 I received a call from FWP inquiring about elk harvest the previous year.

It has been a month since deer and elk applications were due for the coming up year.

On top of that, I returned my NR Native combo last summer, before Aug 1 for an 80% refund.

If Montana ever wants to get serious about making a real management plan, I believe Montana needs a method to obtain real harvest and license data to meet whatever those management goals will be.

I’m not hoping for perfection but I know that calling someone that did not have an elk tag, about elk hunting, 5 months after the elk season ended is not the best or only way this could be done. It’s probably not the most cost effective either.

Sadly, the same point can be made from the flipside of the coin. Last fall I shot my sheep in HD124 on 11/25, just days away from the end of the season. In record time FWP produced the season harvest results for Moose, Sheep, and Goat....I want to say it was done by mid December. Sadly the speed of which the report was done prevented my ram from being recorded in the public results.

If you look at HD124 results (very hard to find on the new FWP website btw)....you'll see that only 5 rams were reported as harvested. I was the 6th. Success rate as we all know is a significant factor of where we put in for limited draw tags. We trust that data to be accurate.

There's always room for improvement.

 

[Nameless Range]

I do not have a problem with elk harvest stats being a sample, knowing that sample size has an inverse relationship with margin of error, and having a goal for margin of error. It is a salient theory of statistics and makes sense.

That said, there are two things that I think mandatory reporting, or just better reporting, could really inform managers better:

1. Less latency between the hunt and the report. When I get a call in April asking me about my elk season as I am driving home from work, I am incredibly broad with my answers. I think I hunted x,y, and z districts. Yeah sure. How many days? Um, lets say 14. How many in each? Um, lets say 10,2, and 2 respectively. I have no idea really, just making sure the sum is correct for my first answer. It's too far removed from the act.

2. Hunting districts are too large, and the populations within them can be distinct enough that knowing how many elk were killed in district X, doesn't tell you about the health of the district as a whole. This could be a function of landownership or distance. But knowing the success rate in a district may not tell you about the success rate on 90% of the accessible parts of the district. Now, I know biologists are often in tune with an area via their work, flights, etc, but a general direction I would like FWP to take would be a more granular approach to management. If instead of reporting on hunting districts, folks reported which 10 digit hydrologic unit (HUC) they were successful in - essentially drainage based - we could be far more effective in our management. This would best be done via web app. I know there would likely be pushback.

10 digit HUCs.

 

[SAJ-99]

I do not have a problem with elk harvest stats being a sample, knowing that sample size has an inverse relationship with margin of error, and having a goal for margin of error. It is a salient theory of statistics and makes sense.

That said, there are two things that I think mandatory reporting, or just better reporting, could really inform managers better:

1. Less latency between the hunt and the report. When I get a call in April asking me about my elk season as I am driving home from work, I am incredibly broad with my answers. I think I hunted x,y, and z districts. Yeah sure. How many days? Um, lets say 14. How many in each? Um, lets say 10,2, and 2 respectively. I have no idea really, just making sure the sum is correct for my first answer. It's too far removed from the act.

2. Hunting districts are too large, and the populations within them can be distinct enough that knowing how many elk were killed in district X, doesn't tell you about the health of the district as a whole. This could be a function of landownership or distance. But knowing the success rate in a district may not tell you about the success rate on 90% of the accessible parts of the district. Now, I know biologists are often in tune with an area via their work, flights, etc, but a general direction I would like FWP to take would be a more granular approach to management. If instead of reporting on hunting districts, folks reported which 10 digit hydrologic unit (HUC) they were successful in - essentially drainage based - we could be far more effective in our management. This would best be done via web app. I know there would likely be pushback.

10 digit HUCs.
View attachment 182394

I broadly agree the system is antiquated and not very accurate, but for elk and deer the reality is accuracy doesn't matter much to anyone but hunters. They have mandatory reporting for some species -sheep, bear, etc - so the system is already there. Hunters want bull/cow ratios, how many days hunted (to show intensity it might take to be successful), breakdown of success by region, etc. Most of that doesn't matter in management of the resource (which we know is mostly a political shit show in MT at this point). Bull/cow might a little, but what matters is successful calving rates, survival to adulthood, predation rates, death by disease, and other variables. A lot of that is a guess so they rely on elk counts and observations. My criticism of that is flights often can't be don't in some years because of weather, so more guessing. None of that changes if they knew EXACTLY how many elk/deer were shot and applied a wounding rate. In principle, that number shouldn't affect the health of the herd. The part I find humorous is that hunters, including me, criticize FWP for using some generic observations in the calc while hunters will often make broad generalizations from anecdotal observations (see and thread on wolves and bears).

The #2 would be great from a hunter's point of view. But in some of those areas, if you can pinpoint a drainage there will be trucks lined up on opening day - or two days before- trying to find a parking space at the trailhead. The downside to precision is we might be able to increase pressure on the resource through technology, thereby shooting ourselves in the foot.

 

[MNJared]

As a Minnesota resident I don’t understand why MT has not already adopted mandatory harvest reporting. There is now super streamlined systems to collect the data with about a 2 minute long automated phone call. What could possibly be more valuable than accurate data to base your management objectives on.

 

[diamond hitch]

If you weren't going to use the data for anything why would you care?

 

[Sytes]

Even more confusing is that I got 3 calls but before April...1 very comprehensive, 1 about deer and elk, and another about elk and late season harvest (um I didn't have any elk tags left). Did I get counted 3 times for harvesting an elk in a permitted unit?

I had three calls beginning this year for harvest info...

The reality... just because someone says they're with FWP doesn't mean they are.

Volunteer cold call participation is ripe with Intel collection by sources other than FWP.

I didn't trust any and declined to share 2020 info. No bueno for data collection.

Mandatory reporting for the ability to gain a tag the next year... a value for criminal investigation, biological data collection, etc.
Though as MtGomer mentioned... dead horse beaten repeatedly.

 

[JLS]

It took me about two minutes and a half a cup of coffee to do my online report for Idaho. Just saying.