Montana Archery Success Rates

[Barty1970]

Leaving aside the accuracy or otherwise of the MT stats, how do you calculate archery success? Divide the number of bowkills by number of hunters or what?

For example in 2016 HD102, if there were 46 Non Res hunters, three elk were killed in total, of which three were taken with a bow, dividing 3 by 46 = 0.0652 x 100 = 6.52%

Or is it not that simple?
Many thanks in advance for any assistance

 

[ChrisS]

Yep, Michigan does something similar. I've listened to biologists from states that have mandatory check in say that it's actually one of the least accurate procedures for estimating harvest. Compliance rates vary wildly from year to year. If you get 40 percent compliance one year and 12 percent the next, it really does you no good and that's what these states are dealing with. With the survey they can set a fixed sample size and estimate harvest with a pretty high confidence interval just by plugging in the number of licenses purchased.

NY is a mandatory check-in state. They set some biologists and interns out at some of the bigger processors the week after opening day. The biologists record ages and other stats and collect a few heads for CWD testing. They also compare the numbers they see there with what gets reported for the unit and it's usually about 45% actually call their animal in. So they use that to estimate the total take and extrapolate some other info from there.

Statistics are pretty useful. But, I'm sure the math majors here have done some studies showing that they're not accurate.

If I'm not mistaken, in MT there's some significant political pressure regarding the elk objectives, so year-to-year numbers from fwp probably don't influence too much. Most politicians only care about two numbers: donation amounts and vote totals.