2007 Hunting Season
Too Many Elk, Not Enough Hunter Access to Private Land
By David Nolt, 10-25-07
photo courtesy of Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks
With the Montana elk population 12,000 above what the Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks (MFWP) says it should be, stagnant license sales and an every-increasing amount of private land closed to hunting, MFWP is hoping more hunters will take advantage of over 1,000 Block Management Areas (nearly 8.5 million acres) across the state this season.
The program is a cooperative effort between private landowners and MFWP to open up private land to hunters free of charge. In Region 3—which includes areas surrounding Bozeman, Butte and Helena—private landowners enrolled almost 700,000 acres in the program, creating 85 Block Management Areas (BMA). According to the MFWP, nearly 50 percent of all elk harvests in the state come from Region 3.
Statewide, 23,000 private landowners control nearly 60 million acres of land—around 64 percent of Montana’s 93,156,480 acres. Of course, not all of this land provides hunting, but as more and more land transactions take place across rural parts of the state, access to such land hinges on the hunting sympathies of property owners.
In 2005 MFWP adopted the Montana Elk Management Plan, which sets target population numbers for Montana’s most sought-after big game species. Wildlife biologists working on the plan say there are 124,000 elk in the state, which is about 14 percent above what they would like to see.
The Bozeman Daily Chronicle recently quoted MFWP Head of Communications and Education Ron Aasheim as saying, “We estimate that 35 percent of all Montana elk are on private land that is inaccessible to the general hunter.”
Aasheim and MFWP are citing inaccessible private land and mild winters as the primary causes of the elk surplus. Landowner Sportsman Coordinator Alan Charles says, although the Block Management Program (BMP) has been relatively successful, the lack of hunting access on private land is still a major impediment to keeping elk populations within target numbers.
“The Block Management Program is one tool we have,” Charles explains. “…But it’s not meeting all the needs, clearly, because all the landowners may not want to participate. We need sufficient hunting pressure on the elk to keep them moving around. The elk are gravitating to areas with no pressure.”
Charles says the elk are smart enough to know where they are safe, and he even jokingly speculates some of the older elk are learning to read “No Hunting” signs. The MFWP started the BMP in 1985 to deal with the issue of private land access and considerably revamped the program in 1995. Since then, about 1,250 landowners have participated in the program.
The program also provides incentives to contributing landowners; landowners are eligible to receive compensation of up to $12,000 per year and can also receive hunter management and monitoring assistance, a complimentary hunting license and reimbursement if any livestock are killed or injured by hunters. Taxpayers funded this year’s program to the tune of $6 million, $4.1 million of which goes directly to the landowners with block management contracts. The remaining money is used for hunter management purposes.
Charles says the BMP is very successful in many parts of Region 3, but other areas still have “islands” of little or no hunting pressure, which lessens the impact the BMP will have. Charles says there are other options, such as working with landowners to allow outfitters to lead hunts on their land, but the reality is, many landowners still will not allow any type of hunting on their land.
“In many cases, in all candor, we cannot get key landowners to come to the table,” Charles admits. “We cannot do this without the help of private landowners…Access is more and more the critical issue that will allow us to get to those objectives [of the Montana Elk Management Plan].”
Charles gives the example of someone who owns a second-home in Montana. They likely only spend a limited amount of time at their home and won’t allow hunting because they want to see elk on their property when they are there. Such is the challenge of balancing private property rights with managing wildlife across the changing landscape of the West.
Charles also emphasizes much responsibility also lies on the shoulders of hunters. Respect for private land and also the motivation to hunt beyond the general area surrounding an automobile will earn the respect of landowners and also result in a higher harvest of elk, Charles says.
The Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks will be considering proposals to change season structures and regulations, and the agency is also planning an “elk summit” for December 8, 2007 at the Montana State University student union building.
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All joking aside, consistency in your information, constancy over time in your positions, and objective realism in your perspectives are the things that build credibility. When these things are glaringly absent, your credibility will not be sustained and you'll just be another fool with a cheap PC, a mediocre education, and a trailer park opinion.
I'd honestly like to know what about this very general story is so glaringly inaccurate, unreal and biased. Perhaps you could enlighten me, mike. I'm open to criticism. Can you be more specific for this fool?
We NEED wolves and cats. The elk NEED wolves and cats. Balance, honey. It's all about balance.
Cat
http://theoddneighbor.blogspot.com/
And now this...too many elk and not enough hunters or wolves to keep the stats down. Who is the logical, rational thinking person to believe? The old bitter dudes, or the stats from FWP? I'll take my chances with FWP.
And the subsidies for the ranchers just keep on rolling in, don't they?
I'm not challenging the accuracy of your story. My frustrated comments were aimed at those who are claiming that reintroduced predators are eliminating elk from MT.
From the top, those of us who support wolf reintroduction have been badgered endlessly by an organization of zealot elk hunters led by this fellow R. T. Fanning, Jr. who claims that wolves and other predators are eliminating elk. He and his group refuse to accept data showing that drought and modified behavior are having a greater effect on our ability to find and count elk than they are on the actual overall elk numbers and they have worked with and tried to get the State of MT to fund a team of politically connected WY lawyers to get wolves removed. They do not seem to have a good understanding of the topic, but are very crudely vocal and have attempted to cause all sorts of problems.
My first concern, as voiced above, is that there is no consistent information being touted on elk behavior or populations. Areas with similar patterns of natural predation are claimed to have either increasing or decreasing elk populations on the basis of what seems to be the political axe being honed by whomever is reporting/interpreting the data. Some people want to hunt more elk; so, they either claim elk overpopulation or blame natural predators for their inability to find or skew enough data to point to elk overpopulation.
My second concern goes back a bit. My father and I would attend sessions and listen to arguments about the health of the northern Yellowstone range and the impact of elk and bison back in the 1950s when Starker Leopold would get relentlessly and rudely browbeaten for simply trying to be truthful. At that time, everybody, except the scientists, claimed that the northern range was being catastrophically overgrazed; but, nobody wanted wolves or other predators, except for bears that were to be kept fat and happy at the dumps. Hunters were roughly split into two sets. One set wanted nearly unlimited elk hunting, allegedly to solve the supposed problem with range conditions, but wanted neither a continuation of the massive culling being done by the NPS at the time nor any restrictions on livestock on the winter range outside the park. A second set of hunters included the fancier outfitters and wanted selective culling by the NPS coupled with restrictive hunting to engineer an elk herd with a limited number of tremendous trophy bulls. The rancher delegation used the alleged condition of the northern range as an excuse to advocate culling all but the barest minimum elk herd when what they really wanted was just to hog the maximum forage on the winter range for their own livestock.
Everybody had and still has an axe to grind. Now that the politics have changed again, the concern over the condition of the northern range has evaporated and none of these interest groups remembers how they once supported the obscenely massive culling being done by the NPS. Now the local politics in fashion favor condemning the wolves for a take that amounts to only a fraction of what the NPS culling operations used to take, which is why I complain about a lack of constancy over time in these positions.
Finally, the MFWP can set target populations for elk all it wants, just like the NPS used cull elk populations back to where they wanted them back in the 1950s and 1960s; but, those targets were and still are based on human politics and not on any objective or real perspective about the natural system that is being jacked around. Humans, regardless of their assertions of knowledge, can draw comparisons between one herd in one area and another; but, nobody can't say with any precision that there are too many elk on private lands or too few elk coming out of the park; the elk and their environment decide these things. Wolves and other predators evolved to hunt elk and elk evolved to be "managed" by wolves, not by us. The populations of both wolves and elk will fluctuate around a balance point that they mutually set, in combination with weather and forage and terrain and parasites and disease and a host of other objective and real factors.
As for my perhaps too frustrated attitude about the lineage, character, and qualifications of some of the people in this debate, it results from over fifty years of watching the action and seeing the same kinds of people twist their positions to match the political flavor of the day and their own momentary whims and desires.
I am one of those crusty old ranchers. I live with cattle, elk, pronghorn, wolves, lions, and at least one bear that I know about. I do not have anything against shooting an individual predator that seems to be bent on causing a problem and teaching bad behavior to his relatives; but, I also haven't ever had to shoot very many and don't believe in either traps or poisons. At the same time, I generally am not eager to have hunters on my property because, despite their claims to be ethical sportsmen, they often, very often, do not understand how to behave and not trash the place.
There is little doubt that elk learn where the least predators are, and that is likely to be ranches, compliments of FWS control. Remember predators need to be controlled too. The fact that ranchers also ahve irrigated land much of the time means the habitat is really good too.
Now I want to end with this quote form George Weurther in another thread on this site:
"In Montana, as in most of the West, animal agriculture is the single largest factor in species decline.
In Montana, as in most of the West, animal agriculture is the single largest factor in species decline."
This is a direct contradiction to what you are posting.
When you think about it, if any stranger asked you if they could bring a bunch of their armed friends over to your back yard for some unsupervised gun play, you probably wouldn't just hand them your key. Granting hunting access is a big deal for a property owner.
Apologies to the many very ethical hunters out there. You know who you are and I'll bet most of you don't have any problems getting invited to go hunting on someone's land.
That's the best summary of the truths, falsehoods, prejudices, and political expedients surrounding the rancorous debate about wolves, elk, predators, prey, hunters, grass, and land that I've read in a good while. You would do us a favor if you put it into an article for New West, so that it wouldn't be just the regular commenting crowd that reads it.
On the subject of traps, that bad time of year is coming around again and there are now three state-wide organizations taking a position against trapping whether for fur, fun or "management," one each in Nevada (http://trailsafe.org/), Montana (http://footloosemontana.org) and most recently in Oregon (http://trapfreeoregon.org).
I believe if you look a bit deeper you will find that hunters, anglers, and sportspeople that buy a MT Conservation License are the ones that fund this program, not taxpayers.
Great comments everybody.
Even if there are 6000 elk left at the time we have only 8 packs of wolves, that will be 75 to 125 wolves each eating 2 elk per month. Average that at 200 per month and tell me how long the elk can last when the calf count has been in the teens, instead of the average 40-60 needed to keep a herd thriving.
On top of the elk eaten by the wolves there are 600 grizzlies at least and probably thuosands of black bears that are eating too. I doubt the blacks can take down a healthy elk easily, but a griz sure can. Throw in a few lions. Then top it off with a really bad winter which is overdue, and that can take out thousands of elk....if thousands are left.
As you can see from the table I'm posting, the elk are nearing historic lows, and there is nothing to give them any relief. If the elk are gone or scarce, I hardly thing the wolves will stay inside of the aprk, they will head for cattle and get killed.
Now you explain to me how you think that many wolves can continue in Yellowstone long term.
http://www.forwolves.org/ralph/yellowstone_elk_counts.htm
The number of grizzlies were artificially decreased in the 60s when the NPS biologists decided to close all of the dumps simultaneously and then a lot of griz had to be killed for getting into human conflicts. They finally got them down to less than 200. they have been doing everything possible to get the numbers back up and are getting there simultaneously with the wolf introduction.
You are not paying attention to all of the news releases if you think the wolf numbers are staying steady. The Yellowstone count is 175, up from 139 this year. The overall count is 1575, up from 1300+ last year. You also are missing the news releases that admit approximately 40% of winter elk kills are calves. I am aware of the study showing the bears were getting the majority of calves, but they only released the information for the first few weeks of life, not the entire life.
While I imagine some mega packs could take down buffalo, I doubt that will ever be a major part of their diet, they are too big and mean, the whole bunch will attack a predator unlike other prey species. I believe they will leave the park and head for ranches.
No I do not believe there are too many elk overall. Individual ranchers may be inundated with them though.
I'm sure there will be a battle to prevent delisting wolves, no matter if there are 3000, if 5x the required number is not enough, there is no reason to beleive they will be satisfied with 10 times.
Before you cuss the ranchers for any intolerance, think about how much hay you are willing to buy for how many elk. I believe it is around $100/ton, that should last each elk for a couple months.
http://www.fws.gov/mountain-prairie/species/mammals/wolf/weeklyrpt07/wk09272007.htm
State Year #Wolves Packs breeding pairs cattle killed sheep dogs other Wolves
MT 2006 316 60 21 32 4 4 2 53
MT 2007 394 71 37 48 19 1 1 50
ID 2006 673 69 40 29 205 4 0 45
ID 2007 788 75 41 36 150 7 0 40
WY 2006 311 40 25 123 38 0 1 44
WY 2007 362 33 27 28 16 2 0 45
Total 2006 1300 172 86 184 247 8 3 142
Total 2007 1545 179 105 111 185 10 1 134
It was interesting that you, of all people, provided the URL for Ralph's elk population data.
What needs to be put right out on the table for the general readership to recognize is that the elk population numbers for much of the 1950s and 1960s are substantially similar to today's population numbers and those numbers from the 1950s and 1960s actually represent the rough target maximum population limits that the NPS set and maintained through an aggressive lethal culling program in those days. By the early 1960s, the NPS was slaughtering hundreds and thousands of elk each year, not on their own initiative, but to appease the continuous and crudely vocal complaints from cattle ranchers and sheepherders about the supposed overgrazed condition of the northern Yellowstone range. Those who were complaining might have even included members of your own family at the time. It seems ironic that today, fifty years later, you are complaining about wolves keeping the Yellowstone elk population down at the level that members of your family probably insisted on back then.
I guess that I might sound like a broken record; but, I just can't give much credence to the "hair-on-fire" ranting of some people. Those interest groups just aren't consistent enough to earn any credibility.
Did you know that after bringing in buffalo to help restock Yellowstone in 1902, they were very concerned about the herd getting too big in 1920 when the numbers got up to about a thousand {re: Chittenden}? Since day one almost, the people with authority in Yellowstone have been "improving" it, and I suspect will continue to do so. The solution to what they felt was overgrazing by the 50s and 60s was to kill the elk, again that was a NPS decision, not rancher. The difference between low numbers then and now is they could stop killing and let the herd build back up. Now the slaughter continues. We have wolf pack killing wolf pack, grizzly bears fighting to the death, an increase in bear attacks, IMHO that is due to a lack of sufficient prey left, and there is no end to the killing in sight.
Larry, I have no idea what you mean by no green below 6 feet off the ground. I have trouble following what you are trying to say, guess I'm getting old and tired tonight or something. If the park can support more elk, why did they bring in wolves to kill them off?
I guess you haven't studied the history of the park too much, the Washburn expedition was the first exploration of the park by white men in 1871. The only whites prior to that were trappers going thru occasionally. They did make that trip during September primarily so the elk would have been bunched up for the rut.
No one is complaining about hunter imposing on ranchers except when they go in without permission onto private land and shoot cows instead of what they were supposed to shoot.
The wolves are a different situation, they are uncontrollable, there are far more than was originally stated, about 500% more. The worst part is the failure of the government and the enviros to keep their word that they would be delisted where there were 300 for 3 years as long as we kept at least that many. I do not know if they will ever be delisted, and the numbers increase outside of the park by about 20% per year despite the number killed by FWS. Whether you want to admit it or not, there are a lot of folks who hate ranchers and want them gone, and the wolves are their best shot. I am at a loss to understand that. We all need to eat, and as I have pointed out every cow feeds at least two families the protein they need for a year.
The Gardiner Late Hunt was a big money maker for Montana F&G;. That money goes into habitat etc for wildlife. The 2800 licenses that were the most given are now 100 and maybe they will end altogether.
The fact remains the predators are killing each other and leaving Yellowstone to try to find food. There is no way now to stop that destruction except watch it. There are at a minimum of two grizzly battles leading to the death of 2 females this year, in addition oen pack of wolves was taken out by another the other day in Hayden Valley. There may have been pups survive, but the alpha pair are gone.
Couple these things with a real increase in bear/human conflicts, and wolves moving in closer and closer to towns. A mangy wolf was killed last week near a subdivision in Cody. Cody and Powell are the biggest metropolitan centers in the Big Horn basin. Once more FWS had to kiil a bunch of wolves that had been preying on livestock between the two towns (20 miles).
the biggest problem with the wolves is that they cannot be controlled.
By the way as far as CWD, it has increased it's area since the wolves were brought in, it was found in the NE part of the state this year. Plus they have their own diseases they are bringing in.
I have posted the very easily found numbers ad nauseum, 14 wolves were killed by the US Army over 32 years, then after they had a predator control specialist, they manged to kill another 122 over the next 14 years, 80 of which were pups. I'll leave it up to your imagination what kind of pups since they were worth money, and no DNA. That is a total of 136 wolves in 42 years, there are more than that today at one time.
There is absolutley no difference between the manipulation done in the early 1900s and the manipulation now, except it is going in the opposite direction. It is partly man trying to prove himself superior to nature and partly well paid positions "saving" a species. It is manipulation nonetheless.
I read plenty Marion, I don't just read what suits my preconceived notions about wolves. I'm speaking from the perspective of a biologist. All of us, including you, advocate for what we believe in; it just happens to be very different points of view.
The things you need to remember, the lake trout occur naturally in Lewis and Heart Lake inside of the park and 2 Ocean lake over the divide outside. It would be pretty simple for birds to transfer eggs from one to another. Wouldn't that be natural?
Historically we know wolves never lived in Yellowstone in any numbers even remotely approaching what are there now.
The point is, what is the difference in the manipulation being done today to improve the park and what was done 150 years ago?