Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Canada Has Clearcutting and Logging affected your Hunting areas?

Yukon254, I'll risk showing my ignorance by questioning some of that study re wolves and road density. First, there is a huge difference in human population using those roads in the Wisconsin etc. study area, winter and summer, than there is in BC back country, as you indicated yourself unless there is a specific mine etc. up that particular road. Their last sentence indicates that itself.

Second, even when not plowed, when snow conditions allow or are equal, it is a lot easier for animals to follow a road than to walk through brush, timber, muskeg etc. and my personal experience is that animals from moose to big predators use roads a considerable amount, far more than random travel would indicate. An exception would be when snow is shallow under forest and deep in the open, on roads.

These comments merely to say that a simplistic "wolves avoid roads" is ignoring significant other factors and has the scent of a skewed study set up to prove a desired result. In the US and within 150 miles of the US border in Canada, roads usually equal people, and of course wolves avoid humans. I don't know a lot about wolves but they sure travel roads a lot where I have hunted them, far more than any humans used those roads.

Re has clearcutting affected my hunting: of course it has. A prime rut area where big mule deer bucks gathered, fought and bred does in old growth timber has all been clear cut. At this point it is growing back, so thick now that nobody hunts it. I will die before it gets prime again, and it will because terrain does not change. A mule deer bedding area on a ridge I discovered 30 years ago when backpack hunting is now at the top edge of a clearcut, within rifle range of a road. Three years ago I stopped to glass it, knowing the best bedding spots, and killed a 3 point buck. It is now grown up too tall in brush to see anything of the ridge. A prime blacktail bed I discovered while picking berries last summer was off limits to me this Fall due to active logging of the old timber within 300 meters. So it goes...