Montana season structure proposal 2.0

There was some talk about regional caps a page or two back. I support those for both residents and non. The actual process for doing this would be much simpler for non residents since there’s sort of a limit on overall tags issued to them. Residents would be much more challenging to figure out at least initially.

Couldn’t we do something similar to WY in this regard. Regions G and H are traditionally more difficult to draw than others from what I understand. Just throwing out numbers here so don’t beat me up on %. But couldn’t you issue 20ish% of non res tags to each of region 6 and 7 and 10-15% to the other regions. Each regions FWP could determine what % of tags in their region go to muley vs. whitetail. You could have up to 3 choices for regions at app time and if you’re set on one region, gain a bonus point for future apps. Just some thoughts I had.

I understand this is pushing the LE issue and to clarify, I’d prefer to avoid that as long as possible like most of you.
 
I’m not the guy to ask @sclancy27 .

I have no professional expertise here; no real quality input besides what I interpret as an average everyday blue collar Montana hunter. As far as caps, I’d pay a lot more to greatly reduce the NR tag allocation but we already heard the gripes about the “law” and all that.. I think that’s the tree you should be barking up. A good pool player takes his hardest shot first. You kill the king the castle will fall, duh. Get rid of the 17,000 deer/elk tags for NR and you don’t have to change much else to see improvement. 🤣🤣🤣


Edit: And keep outfitters/guides on private land only. We all bump em back and forth it’s a win win. Not, *outfitter bumps em onto private and then goes and hunts same private*
 
Counter productive from what perspective, selling the idea to the people or it doesn’t work? FWP sure does like the method on bull elk in some areas. Like I said I’m just catching up here

This is a good synopsis on APRs. One major difference between APRs in deer and say, a brow-tine bull restriction in elk, is with deer, it takes a few years (generally) for a buck to be a 4-pt. With buck survival rates that really narrows down the number of harvestable deer and all the pressure is concentrated on that age class/antler class—generally the one you want to see more of. A BTB restriction pretty much just saves spike (yearling) bulls and the harvest is still fairly spread out across the ‘older’ age classes. I’m not super familiar with BTB restrictions but some older research in the Gravellys showed that they increased the bull:cow ratios (more spikes left after the season) and the age of harvest (fewer spikes in the harvest to lower avg age).
 

This is a good synopsis on APRs. One major difference between APRs in deer and say, a brow-tine bull restriction in elk, is with deer, it takes a few years (generally) for a buck to be a 4-pt. With buck survival rates that really narrows down the number of harvestable deer and all the pressure is concentrated on that age class/antler class—generally the one you want to see more of. A BTB restriction pretty much just saves spike (yearling) bulls and the harvest is still fairly spread out across the ‘older’ age classes. I’m not super familiar with BTB restrictions but some older research in the Gravellys showed that they increased the bull:cow ratios (more spikes left after the season) and the age of harvest (fewer spikes in the harvest to lower avg age).

Apr are also another way to limit overall harvest allowing the agency to continue to issue too many tags... It's a wdfw mainstay.
 

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