The Hedgehog
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Fewer, younger, and smaller bucks is the goal.
Bulls for Billionaires - MT EQC Meeting today 1:30 PM
- Thread starter Ben Lamb
- Start date
Sure, maybe look to easements to existing public land. Block management areas that are reserved are for family and friends the areas that are sign in are pounded harder than public. It’s a waste of money. The sooner you realize you will never get to hunt private land the better.
BuzzH
Well-known member
Bingo, Gringo...
Tonight's meeting in Laramie that's exactly what they want. I tried...put up a fight for mule deer bucks.
Was told by the Biologist..."we HAVE to do something"...and 6 bucks per 100 does is all we need.
Pronghorn doing like shit, all buck mule deer older than 2 removed from the landscape, and just for shits and giggles, lets make one of the best LQ areas for elk in the State general.
Welcome to Wyom....I mean Southern Montana.
huntin24/7
Well-known member
But but but, if we kill every buck, then they won’t die from cwd. Maybe we need to issue more bighorn tags too so we get them all before pneumonia does. 
Gerald Martin
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Yep. You’ll never get to hunt private land. Type 1 Block Management…. I did shoot him on a chunk of state land a couple of miles behind that particular private land but I would have never gotten access had it not been for the Block Management program.
Block Management can definitely be improved, but it is a great program.
Nice bull.
SwaggyD
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Great bull!! Killed recently?
Irrelevant
Well-known member
BMA's have treated me well, I can't complain. Certainly better than anything here in WA.
SwaggyD
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I killed a pretty good antelope on BMA a couple years ago. Had another opportunity on a really good one this year but couldn’t get it done.
Gerald Martin
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2017
As a nonresident with no say in the matter... 
...I would like the ability to hunt Montana every year. But I would be happy to limit it to 7 days (preferably of my choosing), in 1 zone, and either bow or rifle. Make those adjustments as they seem to be low hanging fruit to me. On a bigger picture, I want MT to figure out how to get the big herds off private property and on to public without catering to the billionaires. Oh, and give DIY hunters equal footing as Outfitted hunters. Baby steps.
...I would like the ability to hunt Montana every year. But I would be happy to limit it to 7 days (preferably of my choosing), in 1 zone, and either bow or rifle. Make those adjustments as they seem to be low hanging fruit to me. On a bigger picture, I want MT to figure out how to get the big herds off private property and on to public without catering to the billionaires. Oh, and give DIY hunters equal footing as Outfitted hunters. Baby steps.Bull looks good.
D
Deleted member 28227
Guest
IMHO the best private access program out there, maybe there are some other good ones, but I think block management is something that MT should be proud of and continue to support.
Agreed.
And after 30 years, it's time to have an honest look at the program. The suggestion from PERC at EQC to tie the 454 agreements to actual occupied habitat rather than total acreage was a good one.
That can be exported to Type I - in so much that there would need to be some better understanding of what the property you are enrolling actually has on it, and what the habitat conditions are, and expected to be over the next few years, i.e. fallow fields that used to be good grain for upland & pronghorn, etc.
Online registration for Type II is critical.
Type III as a community based management strategy that elevates payments to the max, based on outcomes for management rather than hunter days can help a lot with not only hunter pressure, but bringing reluctant landowners along to be a part of the solution, rather than the problem.
The Wyoming guys won't like me saying this, but the HMA/WIHA program in Wyoming is the best I have found. A while back the PLPW Council asked me to give a presentation on the many different states and their public-private access programs.
Summary of that research - When you look at the acres opened for the small cost incurred, Wyoming is a model many other states should try to emulate.
Sorry for the tangent, but Bulls for Billionaires stems partly from Montana's refusal to look at what works for big game management in other states with similar land ownership and big game animals. In addition to improving Block Management my looking at other states, I think there is a lot to learn from other states.
1. Simplify our licensing system, especially for non-residents
2. Get rid of our Santa Claus-style of other non-resident tag handouts; Come Home to Hunt, Montana Native, Non-resident College Students, etc.
3. Use seasons intended to actually manage rather than worry about what the guy down at the pub will complain about.
4. Use antlerless tags as a tool for management, not some sort of give away program so FWP can say they are trying.
5. When we give away 15% of our limited entry tags to landowners, get something of value in exchange for those tags; access to inaccessible public lands, higher objectives, and some of the other returns other states get for handing out landowner tags. 15% of our tags is 150% more than what is given to non-residents and we get very little, sometimes nothing, in return.
6. Given FWP and the legislature struggle with more than one topic, listing 5 was probably overly ambitious on my part, so we can save items 6-20 for a later discussion.
BuzzH
Well-known member
Item 3:
I would be happy if they managed to make the guy at the pub happy versus the legislature and wealthy absentee landowners.
D
Deleted member 28227
Guest
You met the guy at the pub... ain't nothing gonna make that guy happy
Nameless Range
Well-known member
Theoretically, the purpose of #5 is an acknowledgment that landowners private property is a meaningful contributor, sometimes at a fairly high cost to them, to the public's wildlife. I think that was the original intent anyway. I think it is time to evaluate this, and whether or not it has brought about any good will toward the Montanans to which that wildlife belongs. It's not clear to me that it has.
Agree on all other points.
I feel 15% to landowners is very fair. The handouts can stop after that.
Agree with the original intent of that. Now, it gets marketed in real estate magazines as a way to entice buyers interested in hunting and less about impacts. Additionally, there are many landowners with 640+ acres who have very little, if any, elk impacts, yet they are in the pool and getting some of these tags while maybe the smaller guy who is incurring a lot of impacts is getting nothing.
Like many of our long-standing programs programs and policies, what might have worked in 1982 isn't necessarily an effective tool in 2022. The point I was trying to make and might have failed to make is that we can look at a lot of other states to see what they are getting in return for their landowner tags and we could adopt some of those ideas.
