Wildlife on the Great Salt Lake

Sold to the Highest Bidder: Trophy Hunting on Utah’s Antelope Island

By Alex Strickland, 8-20-10

	Photo of Antelope Island by Ron Taylor, courtesy of Utah State Parks

To call Antelope Island State Park an island at all is to stretch the term to its limits. Its brown spine rises up out of the bleached salt flats, primordial muck and ankle-deep marshes of the Great Salt Lake, an isolated spot of land for much of the planet’s relatively recent geology. Now Antelope Island has been beached.

Today, the 42-square-mile sandy sea of sun-browned grasses is home to herds of pronghorn antelope, bighorn sheep, bison and migrating birds that congregate on and around the island in staggering numbers. And, for the first time since the island became protected as a state park in 1981, soon it will be home to bighorn-sheep and mule-deer hunters looking to add a few more trophies to their collection.

In a controversial decision earlier this month, the Utah State Parks Board voted 6-2 to allow four hunters--two via a statewide drawing and the two highest bidders at a winter auction--the chance to bag bighorn sheep or mule deer in 2011, despite some strong local opposition.

Barbara Riddle, president of the Davis Area Convention and Visitors Bureau, which pumps tens of thousands of dollars into promoting the park as one of the area’s biggest tourist draws, has been a vocal opponent of the hunt.

“To some, the mule deer and bighorn sheep on Antelope Island may just be animals,” she says, “but to those closely affiliated with Antelope Island State Park, they are a strong tourism draw for hundreds of thousands of local, state, national and international visitors.”

Riddle’s pleas – along with those of others in Davis County – fell on deaf ears not only with the parks board, but with state legislators. Lawmakers voted at the end of the 2010 session on an omnibus bill outlining a hunt on the island. The language, inserted by Kanab Republican Mike Noel, runs counter to what the park’s own management plan lays out specifying a number of “triggers” required to even consider a hunt for population control on the island.

When hunting of mule deer became a big topic in 2001, the Board of Utah State Parks and Recreation conducted statewide public opinion polls via public meetings where they found that more than 50 percent of respondents opposed hunting on Antelope Island, says Utah State Parks spokeswoman Deena Loyola.

And when it came time last year to revise the park’s management plan for the next 10 years, Loyola says a second round of public input found 74 percent of respondents were then opposed to hunting in the park, though a provision was added to the plan to allow for discussion of a hunt if a list of criteria were met. For example: With bighorn sheep, the herd must number 150. As of February of this year, there were 91 bighorn sheep on the island.

But in this day of budget shortfalls, the hunt stands to bring big money directly to Antelope Island State Park when the two tags are auctioned off at the 2011 Western and Hunting Conservation Expo in Salt Lake City. The language passed by the state government specifically calls for up to $200,000 – a number officials and event organizers deem plausible from the auction – to stay with the park.

“We have some conservationists who are willing to spend that kind of money on a donation to the island,” says Byron Bateman, president of the Utah chapter of Sportsmen for Fish & Wildlife, a group that has strongly supported the hunt and will co-sponsor the February expo.

Bateman points to the annual bison hunt on the island and the years of deer hunts that took place prior to the state’s creation of the park as precedent for the 2011 hunt. It’s part of the area’s heritage, he says.

“When Antelope Island was a working ranch they had deer hunts all the time,” says Bateman, noting the land has always been known for producing trophy animals. “The island has the right genes and the right terrain to produce some big deer and sheep.”

Bateman also says that because the island’s sheep herd is used as a brood herd to start or bolster other bighorn populations around the state, the Antelope Island sheep are clearly having no trouble keeping their numbers up.

The hunt will take place on 26,000 of the island’s 28,000 square acres, an area Bateman says is larger than most private hunting ranches in the state, dispelling the notion that hunting on an island doesn’t provide fair chase. Besides, he says, when the Great Salt Lake is low, Antelope Island isn’t an island at all, and animals freely migrate across the flats that appear at the island’s southern end.

“This hunt allows hunters and conservationists to participate in enhancing the quality of the island and, hopefully, bringing in more tourists,” Bateman says. “It’s a win-win.”

But it doesn’t feel like a winning situation for those who take issue with the manner in which the hunt was proposed and don’t appreciate the state legislature sending mandates that run counter to park plans that had been subject to rigorous public input.

Riddle, for one, doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to the proposed Davis County hunt, which she says is “being shrouded as a way to make money for state parks.”

She proposes everything from upping the park’s entrance fee by a dollar or two to having Boy Scouts harvest and sell dropped antlers to help bring in extra funds.

“There are options to find money without killing the island’s natural resources,” she says.

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