Home Forums Hunting & Shooting General Big Game Colorado Bear and Mtn Lion Study

I do not think it's a coincidence at all.

Look at the decline in Upland Birds since the 70's. Has anyone noticed the significant increase in hawks and owls in the last 30-40 years?

There are a lot of factors involved in the decline of mule deer (and upland birds), but, our PC university biology departments do not want to vocalize the effect predators have on prey. Instead, they will say 'habitat change/destruction' or building houses, or 'climate change' is responsible. Anything but predators.

Of course, no one but me will bring up the fact that Texas, where M Lions are treated as vermin, has not had any significant mule deer decline.

After 4 yrs of drought we did experience a slight fall in deer numbers in west Texas.

Essentially all our muley hunting is on private land where deer numbers are probably 10x higher than in the Big Bend where no hunting is allowed resulting in uncontrolled lion numbers, to the point that ranchers adjoining the park have problems keeping deer.

So, wouldnt you think that mule deer numbers would drastically increase in areas of mule deer habitat with no hunting pressure?

It's my understanding that back when hound hunters could bait and run bear in the Spring, we generally were able to take out around 600 bear a year. Seems that would surely help the fawn survival rate as well as the exploded bear population, but hey that wouldn't work because it makes to much common sense. Seems that keeping PETA members from squalling holds precedence over selling 600 more bear tags, reducing fawn mortality, and reducing the number of problem bears in the state that the DOW have to dispatch themselves.

The spring bear season was replaced with a September bear season--of course there is no hound or bait hunting. But if I remember my figures correctly, we are killing as many or more bears with the September season as the spring season was.

And it REALLY pizzed off the sponsors of the ballot initiative of the spring bear hunting ban when the September season was started a few years later..........

Casey

So why not bring back the Spring season and kill twice the number of bear, sell twice the number of tags, make a bunch of hound hunters happy and put the finishing touches on really pissing off PETA. I've talked to a number of people that think, at least on the western slope, that 3 times the number of bear tags should be issued, just to keep their numbers in check, and these people range from ranchers to wardens.

Here in California, the voters decided against hunting mountain lions. In the first 20 years I hunted in Northern California I didn't see any signs of mountain lions. However in the last 20 years I've seen all kinds of signs.

These threads always remind me of the late Paul Errington's observation: "I regard the outstanding source of error in appraisals of predator-prey relationships as confusion of the fact of predation with the effect of predation."

As I understand it, to roll back a ballot initiative requires another ballot initiative. To get one a) on the ballot and b) passed requires organization and funding. So the bear hunters would have to be as organized and as well-funded as the out-of-state interests that got the prior ballot initiative passed.

I don't see that happening.

I don't see it happening either.

At the same time we lost spring bear hunting, we lost leg-hold trapping of predators.

I was with the Colorado Bowhunters Association at the time, and was talking to a DOW employee about the upcoming vote. He told me we are going to lose the vote, and when I asked why he was so negative, he told me that less than 30% of the licensed hunters in Colorado were even registered to vote...

Let me repeat that- less than 30% of the licensed hunters in Colorado were even registered to vote.

The ballot initiative that banned spring bear hunting passed with 80% voting yes. In a democracy, that's as close as we will ever see to a unanimous vote. It also means that a lot of hunters in Colorado voted FOR the ban. Sport hunting groups were entirely unprepared for the ballot initiative and the CPW is prohibited from advocating any position--they can only state facts. That was especially true back then when the state legislature had a hard on for the CPW.

The initiative prohibited hunting for bears from Jan 1-Aug 31, and prohibited hunting with hounds and baiting for bears. I was surprised by how many people I knew who didn't approve of hunting with hounds or bait.

The argument was hunting during the spring when the cubs were little was endangering the cubs, and that sows with cubs were being killed. On average, out of approximately 400 bears killed each spring, 8 lactating sows were killed, and the CPW estimated half of those had the cubs already die in the den.

The interesting part is we are now killing MORE lactating sows in the September season.........It's because with the spot and stalk methods, the cubs (which are now 3-4 months older) may not be as close to the sow or even be seen in brush. Whereas with hounds or bait in the spring, usually those cubs are in the tree with the sow or close by the sow over bait. And the in the case of hounds, the last thing any responsible houndsman wants is his dogs tangling with a momma bear. She's liable, if not likely, to come out of the tree and fight the dogs until somebody is dead. So most hound hunters avoided sows accompanied by cubs when possible.

Casey

You know a lot more about this than you are sharing with us.
C'mon man share your thoughts.

Don't forget other factors -

- Drought has already been mentioned.
- You have a disproportional mule deer population in the Gunnison valley - possibly hammered by winter kill depending on whom you talk to.
- Encroachment by whitetail everywhere in eastern Colorado. This makes the overall numbers look different (worse for mule deer).
- Colorado has not followed the lead of some other states with constructing over/under passes for safe wildlife passage.
- Personally I don't buy into the 'loss of habitat' argument at this time because the economy has been so poor.
- I (kinda) buy into the predator argument just from personal observation. For 20 years I have been monitoring trail cams and recently I see more bears and lions than ever before.
- CWD? Seems like the spread is too slow.

I never understood this part of the ballot initiative.
It was already illegal to kill momma bear.
Bear tits are prolly no more invisible than those of ... lets say a dog.

I think the year after the spring bear vote there was another vote on something to do with hog farming. Your local Starbucks barista got an equal say on how those hog farms should be run. To me it signaled that the Colorado ballot initiatives were out of control.

I'm one of those who would not go out of my way to hunt bear, but I carry the concurrent bear tag every year during my elk season.
I never held a bear tag prior to that ballot initiative.

In California you cannot shoot a sow if she has Cubs that weigh 50 pounds or less. So you have to shoot the Cubs then weigh them and if they weigh more than 50 pounds then you can shoot the sow. That's how I explained it to my girlfriend once.

She came back with "well if you kill the Cubs then the sow doesn't have clubs anymore."