I thought the draw tags were good for public and any private you can gain access too. Are they only good for public land? Or because the private is unlimited that finding access will be next to impossible?
Draw tags are good on private with permission. In the past, pronghorn tags put you on a ranch and permission was granted automatically, now it’s like a deer tag and you have to acquire that permission yourself. There will be those occasional landowners that allow hunting or trespass through to landlocked private free of charge, but they will be few and far between, and the better the better the pronghorn on their land or the land they control access to, the less likely it is that you’re going to get to hunt it. Leasing to outfitters will be an issue as well. Basically access to private for a non-resident DIY hunter is going to be difficult. I’ve been run off of public by lying landowners in NM, and I’ve been invited to hunt private by benevolent landowners that I’d never met before in NM. Those benevolent landowners let a lot of people other than me hunt though.
Don’t plan to get on private land with a public tag, and if you do, it might be a great piece that no one else thinks they can hunt, but it will more than likely be a piece that everyone in the county is allowed to hunt and due to the new OTC tags will have more pressure than any other public or private. You can forget about access to the big ranches those hunts used to be conducted on.
The reason it’s going to be hard to know where to go is that all of the data is for hunts that were conducted over huge areas that have have now been split into four or five smaller areas. The harvest data, satisfaction ratings and B&C data do not show what new hunt they correlate to, or whether they were tied to public or private land. It’s entirely possible that one ranch was getting 100% harvest rates and the occasional B&C buck, while another ranch within the same hunt had 30% harvest rates and terrible satisfaction, but because the hunt code the data was for included multiple ranches it simply shows an 80% harvest rate and high satisfaction. It’s also possible that every ranch had great harvest and satisfaction, but in one unit, much of it occurred on public and will continue to be accessible, but in the other unit much of it was on private that will no longer be accessible. The data from past years does not show that information. Two of the units recommended by the GoHunt strategy article are horrendous from a land access standpoint and my mind is blown that they made that list. Having hunted one of them for deer I can tell you that it would be very difficult to catch a pronghorn on public there. I was considering using it as my third choice because being so devoid of public land I thought it might have good draw odds for one year and being familiar with the unit I might do better than on a similarly poor unit I was unfamiliar with, then it popped up on GoHunt as a recommendation. If that mention ruins the odds of drawing, then it isn’t worth my third choice, and having been there I can tell you that it dang sure isn’t worth being my first or second choice! I can definitely see how both of those units would be good units if you had access to all of the public and private land on a huge ranch, but being limited to public that’s another story.
Now a very real option would be to investigate what it costs to get on good private land over there. You could forget about draw odds and possibly get a great hunt for less than the ten years of applications it might take you to draw. $65 license, $9 stamps, $13 application fee times ten years is $870. If you could get on a good ranch for less than that and hunt this year I’d call it a smokin deal. It might be less than that or it might be five times that. I really have no idea. Because I apply for deer, elk, pronghorn, and javelina the license fee is really of very little consequence to me.
It looks like there could be some ranch wide agreements similar to some of the elk tags, so some of those ranches may remain accessible to draw hunters, but they are listed in the regs. With all of the changes there will probably be fewer people in the draw this year. A few years down the line it will be easier to figure out where the good hunts are and where the good draw odds are, but the odds overall will probably be down once that uncertainty is gone.
NM is considering a price increase, so there may be a few years of improved draw odds.
