Montana season structure proposal 2.0

[TheJason]

Predicting the reduction of antlerless tags is a bit more difficult due to OTC single region tags and some of the elk areas that do not have caps and NR’s are not restricted to 10% by law.

I strongly suspect you’ll see a marked decline in NR participation in antlerless hunts as they gravitate towards private land only tags.

It’s important to remember they are management tags, allocated to give landowners an opportunity to self address depredation/population issues. Unfortunately, they were used way to liberally for unit wide population issues to include public land.

I suspect it may be a tough battle to force antlerless tags to remain unsold if R hunters don’t pick all of them up.

Now that guys can’t hunt public with many of them, and BMAs have the ability to limit/restrict the use of them, I think their popularity will greatly wane. At any rate, it will certainly decrease the number of NR hunters on public land.

 

[DFS]

I strongly suspect you’ll see a marked decline in NR participation in antlerless hunts as they gravitate towards private land only tags.

It’s important to remember they are management tags, allocated to give landowners an opportunity to self address depredation/population issues. Unfortunately, they were used way to liberally for unit wide population issues to include public land.

I suspect it may be a tough battle to force antlerless tags to remain unsold if R hunters don’t pick all of them up.

Now that guys can’t hunt public with many of them, and BMAs have the ability to limit/restrict the use of them, I think their popularity will greatly wane. At any rate, it will certainly decrease the number of NR hunters on public land.

I believe that was in effect this year? Didn’t seem to change a thing as far as hunter participation goes.

 

[TheJason]

I believe that was in effect this year? Didn’t seem to change a thing as far as hunter participation goes.

Data points of one aren’t very useful.

 

[TheJason]

@DFS if it will satisfy your agenda, feel free to keep track of every opinion I’ve stated that ultimately proves to be false. I will happily admit I was wrong on every account.

Now, back to the thread.

 

[Carnage2011]

I believe that was in effect this year? Didn’t seem to change a thing as far as hunter participation goes.

Any evidence to support this? Or just anecdotal from your small section of a unit?

 

[DFS]

@DFS if it will satisfy your obsession with me, feel free to keep track of every opinion I’ve stated that ultimately proves to be false. I will happily admit I was wrong on every account.

Now, back to the thread.

I have no problem with you. General season statewide tags are a problem especially when you congregate hunters. Private land doe tags was a good move by MOGA and the commission, FWP had nothing to do with it they fought against it. If I had to bet it’s not going to last long. All pertinent points regarding the proposal.

 

[DFS]

Any evidence to support this? Or just anecdotal from your small section of a unit?

I usually hunt a lot of different areas in region 7 I would say this year it would be a smaller subset of region 7. Jason is right, I’m sure the data is going to show less hunters, sure didn’t feel like it.

 

[rogerthat]

My .02 is that the less hunters assumption which was backed up by the game check station season end reports was due to less deer on the landscape. I wouldn’t think the doe tags only valid on private would have had that much effect on hunter pressure/numbers. They are a side show not the main event in my opinion. But really good data would tell the story on that which leads us back to the getting good data portion of this discussion and why I think that’s so important.

 

[Flatbrimmer]

We knew that could face significant opposition from some legislators and from the department and without going into too much detail we definitely received word that our plan would face a head on fight.

A problem is that those licenses are pet carve outs for a few politicians whose family members benefit from the ability to come home to hunt. Until political winds blow strongly enough to convince those decision makers

Who you guys been bumping shoulders with to make these decisions?

Y’all say that we don’t currently go off the science. Yet here we see the whole thing having to appease the politics.. if it were science-based it’d be cut and dry— here’s the numbers; deal with it kinda thing…

 

[cgasner1]

here’s the numbers; deal with it kinda thing…

This pretty much answers your questions. Be it politics science social aspect it’s all about the numbers some just seem to matter more than other to certain people to make a change.

 

[Gerald Martin]

Who you guys been bumping shoulders with to make these decisions?

Y’all say that we don’t currently go off the science. Yet here we see the whole thing having to appease the politics.. if it were science-based it’d be cut and dry— here’s the numbers; deal with it kinda thing…

I offered to become dictator so I could just look at the numbers and deal with it. No one seems to like that idea…

 

[Forkyfinder]

Any ideas what the financial impact on BMA funding would be from this? I assume the math is probably not as simple as it would first appear, as some of these currently are not being charged at full NR fee (which should piss R’s and full fee NR’s off equally).

Charge more for nr and r tags? Seems simple

 

[Forkyfinder]

Who you guys been bumping shoulders with to make these decisions?

Y’all say that we don’t currently go off the science. Yet here we see the whole thing having to appease the politics.. if it were science-based it’d be cut and dry— here’s the numbers; deal with it kinda thing…

The legislature is the only one who can reduce the 17k tags - so there ya go.