Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Alaska New Unit 23 caribou regs.

Mind you, this is MY (minority!) OPINION up here. Feel free to disagree.

New regs won't affect much of anything, except perhaps negatively from a biological viewpoint. IMO, they got it almost exactly bass-ackwards, instead enshrining questionable native mindset into regulations. Annoys the hell out of me tho. And admittedly puts a slight crimp on my preferred hunting practices, as the caribou don't cross the ice here in Kotzebue until early November. Sport hunting by non-locals/non-residents is unaffected, as are those Kotz residents with boats willing to run several hundred river miles for a half dozen caribou before freeze-up. I'd do it too, if I had the water-craft for it ......

NWACH is in decline. Has been for some years. The "Management Group", composed of local users from all the villages, proposed majority opinion local practice and the State Game Board rubber stamped it - for political reasons of course. Feel good, but totally ineffectual regulation if "preserving the herd" is the goal, or even achievable by human regulation. Might even be detrimental to some degree. Habitat, weather, insects, predators, and the fact that the herd was likely over-populated at its peak a few years ago are the causes of decline, not the "minority" and mostly non-existant hunting practices being "regulated".

Good thing I was asleep at the switch and missed the local meeting, or my mouth would have gotten me in dutch.....

Bulls - the least valuable reproductive animals in a herd (one mature bull will breed many cows) are now off limits from Oct 14 into February. October is rut, and responsible hunters don't shoot bulls once rut gets well established. I won't shoot a large bull after October 1, or a small bull after the first week or so. The chances of getting a stinker (I never have) - especially on the largest, most mature, actively rutting big bulls is too great, and all bulls lose whatever fat they have, and get a little chewy. I've killed a number of young bulls and even one large one (before I knew better) in early October, and the flavor was fine, tho steak meat was sometimes- not always -chewy... (stewed, burgered, or crock-potted is always tender). Mid October is when the rivers freeze over and the river rats can no longer run down swimming caribou in high speed boats and shoot them in the head from a few feet with .22 RF and up. Hence the October 14 date, I think.

Meat is again fine beginning in early November, but fat-less, and fat-less animals are not wanted or targetted by most locals. Personally, I don't eat the fat.... and prefer to take bulls at that time over the cows which are now pregnant - making them the MOST valuable herd members.

Calves are the second least valuable, in that there is little "investment" in them, 80% will not survive to be yearlings anyway, and 50% are bulls. See above. Calves too are now off the platter. If a female calf survives to 15 months, she is now nearly the most valuable animal with potentially 10-15 years of calf producing ahead of her. Experienced , young, adult cows who have successfully raised at least one calf are at the top of the heap, the younger the better for their reproductive value. If they aren't shot....

Cows retain their fat well into the winter, and are THE targeted animal by villagers all through the fall and early winter. Kill one, and one has killed two, perhaps three, and all future calves she may have had but only one will be used - the dead cow. The fetus is killed, and if she has a calf with her yet, the chances this calf will survive go way down without the protection and teaching of the mother for that first year. Calves often hang around alone for days or weeks in the area they lost their mother, thus being more subject to predation and harsh weather exposure. They don't know the migration route. They may still be nursing in November, even tho they are also on solid food. (I have found milk in cow udders into November). They MIGHT survive if they join up with other adult animals.
If I kill a cow and a calf shows up, I prefer to take the calf also, if legal. And have. Yeah, I'm a baby killer.....

The idea, of course, is to take a calf-less cow, but it doesn't always work out that way, especially in a large group. That calf may be off playing, or mixed in with others. And by the way, taking a cow accompanied by a calf is not off the table - so...... one sure way of being positive one is taking a legal cow is to shoot one with a calf.

Telling a cow from a young bull can be difficult in that fall time-frame, as both are about same-sized, antlered (caribou are the only antlered female deer in the world, IIRC). To be positive, one often needs to see the vulva patch or lack there-of (ass-shooting anyone?) or the penis sheath. Hard to do on swimming caribou, or those being run down by high speed snow machine (euphemistically called in the regs - another local custom enshrined in law - "positioning") , or at long range without spotting-scope observation (rare, by locals). I could be wrong- not having done either of the first two myself, but I'm guessing there will be a number of young bulls mistakenly shot, then left abandoned.

The new regs cannot be effectively enforced, due to a lack of LE boots on the ground and politics. And I'm betting few hunters who butcher their kill in the field will leave proof of sex attached, as required. Or be called on it if stopped. Depending on ...... well, you know.

As long as I am on a rant here, many locals are largely blaming guided and non-guided transported "sport-hunting" up on the Squirrel River and elsewhere for any changes in migration routes. They will tell you that those "thousands" (200 to 500, actual annual figures over the last decade, or so) of "sports" are responsible . NR "Sports" (the bulk of the Cabela's Army) are restricted to 2 animals per season - and most take only bulls, by - for lack of a better term - "herd-non-exciting- spot and stalk methods. I perhaps erroneously have it in mind that "Sports" take 400-500 animals annually. Residents are - or have been- allowed 5 per day on non-Federal Lands, and 15/day on Fed lands. The 5 day state regs are still a go for 2015/2016. Feds are unlikely to change anything also.

Those Fall high-speed boat races, and all-winter snow machine pursuits have nothing to do with it changing migration routes occasionally.....

Caribou are dumb as sticks, but even they will eventually intuit bad things happen if they go over that way....

Now I feel better.....

What's the herd size sitting at now?

Its not unsual for the subsitance portion of things like this to be so loud, because they don't worry about their future at all, they only worry about the present.

not that its any of my business but if you can't legally get enough to live off of, maybe ya gotta work more and hunt less. I know that wont' sit well with folks, but I have never had the chance to try to live off mother nature and have no rules or regs...

Generally speaking down here, a herd of whitetails will correct itself if a mistake is made, in about 5 years AS LONG AS ITS ADMITTED IT WAS A MISTAKE. THere in is the catch...

I went from almost no deer, to plenty deer in about 10 years... enough so that I can take 2-3 off 100 acres without any effect at all to the herd. Prior to that hte harvest was skewed, and I had never shot a deer here, there were not enough of them...

240K?

NR bag limit is now 1 bull, down from 2 any-sex.

hunting boo wit rifle is.......fish in a barrel, stop that that, and it would weed out plenty mite/could fix the NR part, I deal with insurance, the amount of letters returned due to "temporary away" ( nov till next year/ fall guides/etc)...will have u pizzed off 24/7

You got that schitt right. Very few have a concept of "future" and prepare for such. Even ones that are supposedly "educated"......well, they have degrees anyway........ have little concept of the future.

240k? Dang! Wasn't that herd up to 450k? If so, almost half the herd is gone.

Been losing in double digit % for about 5 years now.

Since I got here..... just call me Typhoid Larry. I was here for the last big crash in mid 70's too. Officially it was a "mystery" - 250k to 60k in 2 years. But there was no mystery about it, just politics and cover-up.

Wait 'til you see what I can do to SC in a year or so......

I remember one time ol strangerinstrangeland over on AOD posted a video of him and some other fellas they were in the boat and Bou were crossing the river and they had Winchester 94/22 and one guy shoot his 5 hadn the gun off to another guy he shoot his 5 and so on and so on. Later pictures were posted and had to have been at least 20-25 caribou on the river bank. It was something else but if this has been going on for several yrs no wonder the caribou are crashing how many other natives in the villages are doing the same thing sitting on the rivers waiting for the caribou to cross and ambush as they cross the river.

They were likely up in the Fed park/preserve, probably on the Kobuk River. 15/day on Fed lands. Legal. It's a common practice everywhere in GMU 23. As I intimated earlier, the decline isn't due too much to actually killing the animals. I'm certain in my own mind at least some of the decline is due to snow machine harassment during the winter, leading to spontaneous abortion and/or cows in poor shape by calving time. This was absolutely the first-most cause of the mid-70's crash, along with a helluva lot of wanton waste of animals shot and left. (Read Jim Greiner's article "tomorrow Came Too Soon" from about 1976 give or take a year). No recruitment means a declining herd. Currently the WACH has an aging cow population with low recruitment, for whatever reasons - a couple ice-storm winters not helping any.

Unlike moose (I hear) caribou float so are readily retrievable from water. I shot a 'bou in a lake down on the Kenai Peninsula once and towed him on foot for about a half mile along the shore-line to the closest point to the trail before dressing him out. Easiest "pack" I've ever had! The next 8 miles wasn't as easy, even with a good trail, but after I got to the top of the ridge (the next half mile from the lake) it was all downhill from there!

The boat-shooting method is preferred as migration starts crossing the rivers. I'd do it too if I had the resources. I'm just a little more honest about potential consequences. (Denial isn't only found in Egypt.) Onion Portage on the Kobuk has been used this way for centuries. No one wants to pack game if they can drive (or in times past, paddle) to it. I've heard of some interesting times involving cross-fires by boats competing over the same animals....

Some do wait until the animal climbs out on the bank before shooting, but few will shoot an animal more than 100 yards off the river. Especially at the beginning of the migration do they let animals cross unmolested.

It's a big no-no (in principle, at least) to gun anything in the first group or first few groups to come through. Tends to send the following animals elsewhere, but once a scent-trail is established, the more laggard ones tend to just keep coming along the same routes as the pathfinders, even if some fear hormones have subsequently been added by shot/hunted animals.

Another local custom is head-shooting. They sneer at body shots as "wasting too much meat". That's all right as long as stuff doesn't run off with broken jaws, etc. Me, I'll "waste" a couple pounds of rib meat to positively secure the rest of the animal, tho I'm a big fan myself of head/CNS shots when I can positively make one. Most "blood-shot" is in the membranes, etc between the muscle masses anyway, and can be trimmed out with a little messy effort.

Part of this attitude comes from the practice of using small caliber, high velocity bullets in their favored weapons - mostly .22 CF, and .243.

Interesting article on Fish and game website.

http://www.adfg.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=wildlifenews.view_article&articles_id=678

Do they really think reducing NR bull harvest by (maybe) 300 animals in a herd of @240K will make a difference? That's the only reduction that I see at this time with the new regs. Assuming also there is nothing hinky going on like wanton waste of mistaken kills. As I said it is ineffectual, feel-good regulation. Of course, it might reduce the NR hunters some as well,the bag limit being reduced to 1 bull, which is probably the main goal.

The rest of the harvest will realistically probably stay about the same, except some few of us will be killing cows for meat after Nov 1, instead of bulls. And no one will be killing calves. Directly. I'm not sure how this part will play out... could go either way, as few people were deliberately killing calves before. It's a pride thing. But many do regularly kill cows with calves, and this may increase if they use the presence of a calf to insure they get a legal cow kill.

Targeting the breeding cows makes absolutely no sense to me. Running 'em all winter long doesn't either.

We'll see how the summer census goes. Had a good winter this year, no ice storms or warming spells followed by freezing to ice over forage, so maybe that will help.

MOOSE

Found something else as I was organizing stuff before leaving for the summer, (on moose) that is dead wrong. F&G pamphlet claims rut does not affect the flavor of moose meat - all that stink is in the hair they claim, so avoiding hair to meat contamination will insure good eating. What a pile of bull-crap. But they run subsistence bull season through October up here, based on that erroneous opinion. "Sport" season rightfully ends on Sept 20.

There is a good reason why most moose seasons throughout the state end on Sept 20. That's about as far as it can be pushed before the chances start going up on getting a stinker. The bull I killed Nov 2 this year had NO hide stink, but the blood pooled inside his body had some, as does all the meat. He was head-shot, so much of the blood was trapped in the meat, which is mildly tangy. I don't mind it, but my wife won't eat it until it is "treated". See below.

I should have waited another couple weeks...or shot a cow - they are legal after Nov 1 if calf-less..



The rolling in the rut-pits urine stink is in the hide. The rut stink is in the blood. And I have had the near-rut kills to teach me (September 29 and Nov 1).... also a couple 2 or 3 year old no-where-near-rut-early-season bulls that were a bit tangy - and not from hair to meat contamination, since they hadn't been into the as yet non-existent rut-pits. My theory on these tangy young bulls well before rut is they were going thru the moose equivalent of puberty and their hormones were running wild. Much like human boys can get stinky BO at that time....

Best method I've found to date to treat tangy moose (I've yet to get a tangy caribou) is to soak small pieces of meat (stew or burger) in fairly strong salty water for at least an hour to draw the blood out, then in fresh water for about the same time to draw some of the salt out. Change water a couple times, at least on the fresh end. Probably won't need to add much salt, if any, to the finished dish. And the tang disappears. Mostly or completely. Doesn't work so well with steaks, and not at all with roasts. I like stews and burger dishes!!!

The Eskimos claim hanging the moose meat for a couple weeks makes tang disappear also - only an option with a heated space when it's well below freezing. Doesn't work at all on stink caribou they claim. Haven't personally tested either.

Best to shoot non-rut good stuff to start....

All animals are different, but with deer, the way to get any weird rut taste out is on ice, cooler with drain open, keep adding ice, don't cut meat for 7 to 10 days down here.

Its amazing, meat turns kind of light pink or gray almost, and you drain lots of bloody water at first, I wont' do my deer any other way, even if not in rut and even if I"ve head shot em and bled em right after that.

I don't see that being an easy way to do anything up your way though. We do try to age the moose some before cutting if the weather allows though.

If I can work it, I'm trying for an early August bull this year. But I have to get back to Kotz for the RM880 permit. Then I'm good for something until March...

Might have to buy another small freezer for rotation, early season. Bought 2 coolers today.

Cheap ones.

Wife keeps giving our meat away - with the damned coolers! I personally "donate" in cardboard boxes.

The upside of that is that I get to keep shooting (or at least hunting) stuff....

As wives go, she ain't so bad.

My son doubled (accidentally- with a 150 Interlock/ 280) last August 1 or so. One or both of those critters had a fair amount of gnarly going already and they were hung in the shade within an hour - skinned/quartered. The bigger bull was a young 2 year old (by the tag; the 11 year old was about the size of a yearling. Everything was solidly velvet and soft. Go figure. The only thing that happens to change gnarly caribou/reindeer after they are dead is they get worse. The only way to improve the condition is to keep them alive for at least a couple months after rut. Most dogs won't eat rutty bull.

Sounds like we are mixing moose and caribou here, maybe. Never had a knarly 'bou bull after Nov 1 (or in early Oct), but my Nov 2 moose bull was a bit tangy as was the 2010 Sept 29 bull moose. Edible, barely, but not prime. The latter one was less knarly.

Kill and learn.... even at our advanced ages. Well, mine, anyway. I'd never pushed the envelope before these two. Now I know, and fug what the regs allow. I ain't gong there again.

Killed a biggish bull moose on the Kenai some years back on Sept 11. He was in full rut - even if no one else was - swollen neck, pink tongue, nothing in his belly, came in hard to bull call. Deformed antler on one side (I'd passed him up by mistake 4 years before, as a probable 3 year old with one long spike on one side - long story, previously related here ).

Prime eating. But he hadn't been fighting yet.

Them things keep one guessing....

I can understand where F&G might suggest that the 'staank' on a moose is an external deal. I've killed 2 or 3 or 4 in the fall that were scarily quite rank on the outside, with bellies full of 'water' and nothing else. But none of those dudes, whether young or old, have been a problem in the least. That isn't to say that I haven't "benefited" from the "generousity" of some who have shared their kills which did stink, but air has always made them edible at least.

Well, we all go - or should go - on personal experience as appropriate.

It ain't "edible" moose that's my goal.... 4 "edible" out of 20 (16 "good" to "prime" ) killed is 4 too many. And two of those were young bulls, before rut. That's a lot of "edible" meat to choke down, even over 4 decades.....

One of the best eating bulls I have killed was on Sept 11. He would have gone nearly 60 inches had one side of his antlers not been deformed. He was neck-swollen, pink-tongued, empty bellied, and came in hard to my call. He was ready, if no one else was...

Interesting thing was that I had mistakenly passed him up 4 years before and a quarter mile away when he had a goodly paddle and two brow tines on one side, and about 18 inches of spike (making him legal to shoot) on the bad side, which I didn't see until he turned and stepped into the brush.

Friggin moose just keep me guessing... but I'll comfortably shoot any big bull caribou before Oct 1 or after Nov 1. And have. They were all "good" and up....

haven't had a problem with moose killed from the 20th to the 25th, my fave time to hunt actually

did get a tough one a few years ago, hellish tough, even the backstraps.....sheesh. oh well nothing a grinder can't take care of.

only ever had 1 moose that was non edible and I or my party didn't kill it. it had a rough life, a dunking in water and then out in hot sun for too long, and then more hot son, when the flight service kicked out of their cooler for stinking everything up.

pity that, a lot of good protein that went to dog food.


may be time to kill a caribou, been a long time for me, got sick of eating it years back, never felt that way about moose, but 3x a day eating same thing can have that effect upon you

I just ran out of caribou meat in the freezer. Looking forward to hunting my Nelchina bou tag this year. Hopefully get another one at the end of August.