Crowd voices opinion on new hunting proposals

SUPERIOR – The public was welcomed to present their concerns on new hunting regulations to representatives of Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks at a special meeting Thursday morning.

The meeting room of the Mineral County Commissioners was almost completely filled. Vickie Edwards, wildlife biologist for Mineral County, opened the meeting with a recap of the proposed regulations and the problems, which caused FWP to make the changes.

The main problem was the populations of game animals in many of the hunting districts not meeting the healthy levels established by FWP. When these levels are too high, the number of hunting tags are increased to take the numbers down. Conversely, if the numbers are too low, the number of tags are decreased, or eliminated all together, to give the populations time to recover.

After the update on FWP’s findings, Edwards opened the floor to comments from the community.

One of the first issues raised was whether excess turkey populations could be relocated to areas with lower numbers so more hunting opportunities would become available. According to Edwards, this has been done by FWP before and it has happened naturally in Mineral County. She said it would be difficult to find anywhere to move the turkeys to because their numbers are already so wide spread.

“Folks actually don’t want turkeys outside of Mineral County,” said Edwards with a laugh. “Even the Ravalli County biologist is [saying], ‘oh my gosh, we’ve got turkey game damage issues’…So, where to find a place to move them would be challenging.”

Edwards added surveys had shown the turkeys had begun to relocate themselves and expand their range. Because of this, there are no proposals to make changes to the turkey populations. After this was discussed, the conversation moved to the existing proposals offered by FWP.

The first proposal Edwards mentioned was to have hunters with a B license for antlerless elk be unable to harvest a bull with their general license in the district. According to Edwards, this would only work in one hunting district and the hunter could still get a bull elk in a separate district.

A B license is a special tag, which allows the harvest of an extra elk on top of anything granted by a general license.

Laurie Johnston, county commissioner for the central region, expressed a desire to see it go back to a standard license. She said she did not know why someone needed to shoot two elk in the first place, especially when the goal of FWP was to increase the herd numbers.

“It just doesn’t make sense,” said Johnston. “I mean we’re trying to build the elk herds up. I don’t think you need to shoot two elk [for] one person. You’re just putting that much more pressure on the bulls.”

Johnston was worried the B licenses would kill too many elk in an area and hunters would never see them. There were also concerns of raising false hopes in young hunters who may never tag an elk.

Edwards agreed and recalled how similar things were mentioned at a previous meeting. She said, unlike here, Eastern Montana had a surplus of elk and the extra hunting allowances made more sense. This topic led to the discussion of some local concerns on where hunters could go to harvest elk.

Edwards said it is important hunters respect private property lines. She said landowners had the right to grant or deny access to their land. She stressed the importance of good community relations between the hunters and landowners in areas herds frequented.

It was proposed for a list to be made of the hunters who have B licenses to be available to landowners who have elk frequent their land. Edwards said she would only include names and numbers, with no more personal information. This would let people get help quickly and give the landowner someone they can call in the future.

“That’s something we’ll definitely do for 2014, for those landowners to have that list of people in their pockets,” said Edwards.

The subject of game damage quickly followed these conversations. This led to talk of depredation of domestic animals and livestock by predators.

There were some questions of how FWP plans to manage the wolf populations this year. Liz Bradley, a wolf specialist with FWP, said it was a statewide issue and fairly complicated.

“Obviously it’s different here than it’s going to be in Madison County or somewhere else in the state,” said Bradley. “We have to look at each place individually.”

Bradley said she was not surprised by the lack of success from wolf hunters in the county. The area’s thick forests make it difficult to see wolves and harder still to get a good shot at one.

Two proposals were suggested by the gathered community members on how to deal with wolves. One was to have a year round wolf season. This would put heavy pressure on wolf populations and keep their numbers from growing. The second was to change the rules to allow for ‘shoot on sight’ hunting.

It was unknown whether these proposals would help the wolf harvests. According to Bradley, there were special permits for wolf season and the hunting of other predator species. She said the permits had problems because of the movements of wolf packs, which kept FWP from meeting their harvest quota.

“[We got] 21 last year,” said Bradley. “I believe 11 of those were in Mineral County, kind of localized around that [hunting district] 202-203 area.”

Edwards stressed the changes outlined in the proposals were mostly temporary. She said in the next meeting, in two years, FWP would look at the populations again and decide if more changes were needed.

The deadline for public comments about the proposals to be submitted was Friday, January 24 at 5 p.m. More information on hunting regulations and upcoming proposals can be found online at fwp.mt.gov.