Montana Mule Deer Mismanagement

[mtmuley]

Post 3400. This is the one that fixes it all.

This is a forever thread. mtmuley

 

[DFS]

Post 3400. This is the one that fixes it all.

 

[Nick87]

I also believe that we should have mandatory reporting. However, I do not believe that it's the silver bullet that most people on Hunttalk think it will be. The same people that aren't honest on phone surveys, won't be honest for a mandatory report.

Totally true, how many people percentage wise do you think lie about it?

 

[Forkyfinder]

And R3

R3 makes people buy otc cow tags that basically require paid access?

More like - the people making decisions got their intended result. Complete commodification of cow elk.

 

[brockel]

Totally true, how many people percentage wise do you think lie about it?

It wouldn’t even have to be specific to get them more data than they have now. You could break it down to which region you hunted

“How many days did you hunt”

“What region did you spend most of your time”

“Where you successful”

Fwp favorite question “did you see any wolves”

“Did you see any Washington hunters being idiots”


You know the usual questions from the cold calling except everyone would be answering

 

[sclancy27]

R3 makes people buy otc cow tags that basically require paid access?

More like - the people making decisions got their intended result. Complete commodification of cow elk.

R3, R4, R5 OTC (and unlimited) cow tags all have the same rules.

 

[Nick87]

It wouldn’t even have to be specific to get them more data than they have now. You could break it down to which region you hunted

“How many days did you hunt”

“What region did you spend most of your time”

“Where you successful”

Fwp favorite question “did you see any wolves”

“Did you see any Washington hunters being idiots”


You know the usual questions from the cold calling except everyone would be answering

Exactly even if 20% of them bullshit it youre still getting 80% accurate from ALL hunters. Hell of a lot better than what you got. Never understood how some states manage so well like wyoming while collecting such little data tbh. (I say little data when compared to the midwest, we give them a lot of info takes literally 60 seconds or less).

 

[sclancy27]

Exactly even if 20% of them bullshit it youre still getting 80% accurate from ALL hunters. Hell of a lot better than what you got. Never understood how some states manage so well like wyoming while collecting such little data tbh. (I say little data when compared to the midwest, we give them a lot of info takes literally 60 seconds or less).

It helps when WY has ~50% the tags as MT

 

[Nick87]

It helps when WY has ~50% the tags as MT

I get that but they still do a great job, not just a great job compared to MT.

 

[MTelkHuntress]

Don’t quote me on this, but I believe one of the bios for R2 said something about having public events related to it in September.

September 23rd is what I put in my calendar when she said that.
There was also a little discussion on harvest reporting at this event. It sounds like the department might roll out a way to voluntarily report your harvest. I'm not sure what this accomplishes as I think that it might skew numbers. Baby steps? One biologist pointed out how mandatory harvest reporting will change how they interpret all of their data and its going to take a lot of work to figure out how to integrate that into their systems. I wanted to ask what that looks like but ran out of time. I never really thought about that before or rather what goes into all those data points.

 

[antlerradar]

I personally think the flights/population estimates are fairly worthless. Whenever there is a low count, we get an email saying "numbers of adult bucks observed was lower than the long-term average, but I suspect that was due to poor flight survey conditions" or something similar. It's never "we F*cked up and need to limit some harvest." I know it's to show trends, but it seems like the trend only matters when it allows more "opportunity."

When the trend area on the Custer went from some of the thickest timber in all of Eastern MT to black sticks overnight in 2000, I asked how this was going to effect the data from the flight surveys. Not going to effect it at all was the answer. It was amazing how good the population estimates looked after the fire.