On Thanksgiving weekend, thousands will don their fluorescent orange vests for the last time this season in a final attempt to sneak up on a wary wapiti.Most will head home empty-handed.
Another elk season in Montana is coming to a close. Without some serious help from the weather, there will be a lot of empty freezers this winter.
Through last weekend, the three west-central Montana check stations reported that 16,462 hunters had checked 474 elk. Last year at the same time, a few more hunters had bagged 526 elk.
Blame the lag on Mother Nature.
It's certainly not occurring for a lack of elk. Montana's elk herd is as large as it's been since the state was first settled. Biologists estimate that there are somewhere between 130,000 to 160,000 elk in the state.
Large numbers of critters doesn't always translate into successful hunts.
Warm, dry weather conditions predominated the first three weeks of the season. Colder temperatures and some moisture helped improve hunting conditions last week, but there's still not enough snow in the high country to push elk onto winter ranges where they are typically more vulnerable to hunting pressure.
When the season ends and sportsmen carefully pack away their rifles for another year, Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks officials are hoping many will travel to Bozeman in December to learn about the challenges Montanans face in managing its elk herd in the face of a changing landscape.
The first ever Montana Elk Summit will be held on Dec. 8 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Montana State University's Strand Union Ballroom in Bozeman.
The summit will offer sportsmen a chance to hear from Montana's premier elk biologists and managers, hunters, outfitters, landowners and legislators. The agenda includes discussions on the status of Montana's elk herd, new research results, social trends, recent legislation, and expectations from landowners and hunters.
The objective is to help create a better informed corps of individuals and groups committed to working together to help define the future of elk management in Montana.
“Montanans have always had a passion for elk,” said FWP's Director Jeff Hagener. “Many are asking how will Montana maintain the traditions that elk have come to symbolize as the state continues to change.
“Everyone who has a passion for elk - ranchers, hunters, outfitters, conservationists, business and community leaders, educators and more - will benefit from the knowledge and insight provided by the summit's statewide perspectives,” he said.
Montana's elk herd is one of the great success stories in conservation.
Before Lewis and Clark's epic journey, there were millions of the large ungulates in North America. Market hunting eliminated elk from the plains by the mid-1880s and decimated herd sizes in the mountain areas.
By 1910, elk numbers had dwindled to about 50,000 or less in all of North America. In Montana, the numbers dropped to nearly 3,000 in the entire state outside of Yellowstone National Park.
Citizen conservationists banded together to begin the process of bringing back elk to Montana. New sportsmen groups raised money and awareness for elks' plight. In 1910, the first elk transplant from Yellowstone to the Fleecer Mountains near Butte occurred. Three years later the state established the Sun River Game Preserve - a place where elk were safe from hunters and could graze without competition from domestic livestock.
From those first efforts, Montana's elk took root and grew.
“That conservation approach for elk that began with a relative scarcity created a value for elk that continues to this day,” said Quentin Kujula, FWP's wildlife management bureau chief.
By the 1960s, elk had distributed themselves across the state and Montana hunters were learning to adapt to an ever-changing set of rules and regulations. Hunters could take a bull or a cow in 67 percent of the state inhabited by elk.
When cow numbers began to drop, FWP adapted its management.
In the '70s and '80s, a cow tag was a bit of insurance that offered hunters a chance to harvest an antlerless animal if their early attempts at shooting a bull were unsuccessful. As elk numbers swelled, FWP changed the rules to focus more of the harvest on the antlerless animals.
With elk numbers at record levels in many areas of the state, hunters can shoot either a bull or cow during portions of the season.
The state adopted its most recent update of an elk management plan in 2004. The plan set population objectives for different areas the plan calls elk management units.
While some units around the state at close to or below population objectives, Kujula said on balance the herd size is about 114 percent over the objectives set in the elk plan.
Not everyone thinks more elk is a good thing.
Landowners who depend on their grass crops for a living are often dismayed when large numbers of elk settle on their properties. The state Legislature recently passed a law that requires FWP to manage elk herds at levels set in the elk plan.
That's not as easy as it sounds.
Hunting has traditionally been the primary way the state has used to manage its elk herd.
In years like this when the weather fails to cooperate, hunters don't get the job done. On top of that, there are a growing number of private landowners who either don't allow hunting on their property or lease it to outfitters or the wealthy.
FWP's Bitterroot biologist John Vore has seen elk “refuges” crop up all along the Bitterroot Valley.
“There are large private ranches near Darby, east of Hamilton, by Stevensville that don't allow hunting,” Vore said. “You find them all over the place. The elk know where they are. Š The problem is they don't stay there all year round.”
Neighboring landowners are often affected when elk move after the hunting season.The elk herd in the Bitterroot Valley has tripled in size since the 1980s. Last year, Vore counted about 7,200 during spring monitoring flights. He estimates the herd's number to be close to 8,000.
“These are the good old days for elk,” Vore said.
Liberal seasons that include several weeks open for either sex have helped slow the growth on the herd on the west side of the valley.
With numbers close to the objectives set in the elk plan, Vore expects that next year hunters will be required to obtain a permit to harvest a cow in the hunting districts on the west side of the valley.
The east side is a different story.
There, elk migrate in from the Big Hole Valley when the snow gets deep. Vore has counted close to 4,000 elk in the hunting districts on the Bitterroot side. The objective calls for a herd size closer to 3,000.
Next year hunters will likely get the chance to hunt both cows and bulls on the Big Hole side for the full five-week season. In the Bitterroot, Vore said the last three weeks will probably remain open for either-sex.
“A lot of people don't realize that the numbers in the regulations are tentative,” Vore said. “The tentative regulations are set in February before the spring flights are done.”
The final regulations are set following that information gathering time.
The state always walks a fine line in setting regulations that will both accomplish management objectives while not being too complicated, Vore said.
“If the regulations are too complicated, they become confusing to hunters and can become a nightmare for enforcement,” he said.
Local people work with FWP to establish the objectives in the elk plan for the Bitterroot Valley. The Bitterroot Elk Working Group is made up of a diverse group of interests.
The state faces a variety of challenges in managing its elk herd into the next century.
Amongst the most perplexing for Vore is the number of subdivisions springing up all around the valley.
“You can talk all you want about wolves having an impact on elk, but they don't change habitat,” he said. “Subdivisions change elk habitat forever. Elk need a place to live, and once that's gone, it doesn't leave us any management options.
“There are some places in the northern Bitterroot that are getting chopped up really bad,” he said. “If we don't consider what's happening to habitat and focus our efforts on new regulations or wolves, it's like rearranging the chairs on the Titanic as the ship goes down.
“The biology is very simple. The sociology is what's complicated.”
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