Idaho did a study on bull elk mortality about 15-20 years ago before the wolves were brought in an area I used to hunt. The study was done in heavily roaded areas, lightly roaded areas, and difficult access areas. All bulls were radio-collared and located weekly during hunting seasons by air.
In heavy road areas over 60% of the bulls did not make it through hunting season. In lightly roaded areas more survived, but roughly 50 percent of collared bulls wound up dead. In difficult access areas about 30% wound up tagged. If you wanted a chance at a bull older than 2.5 years, the difficult access was where it was at.
Interesting thing from the study was the archery loss was pretty high and not a single elk over the the study died from winter kill or non-human predators (before wolves) The only way bulls in the study died was from bullets or arrows.
That study is about what i'd expect. How about the actual numbers of elk in those three areas? Did they give those numbers?
Sorry haven't checked back on this thread.
I don't remember the number of bulls collared, but it was a pretty decent amount and over the years of the study I saw several collared bulls while hunting and know a couple guys that shot collared bulls.
As you might expect, in easy access areas the game department actually had trouble finding bulls to collar due to the fact that many got shot each year. In those areas, spikes made up the majority of the bulls killed.
When the signal on a collared bull showed that it wasn't moving they would send a guy in on the ground to see what was up. Usually it was a shot and lost affair. I ran into biologists and their crews looking for bulls several times and they had some interesting stories. In one case, two raghorn bulls took up residence fairly close to one of the few roads in the area by spending their time in a little hidey hole for a couple weeks during the mid-point of rifle season. One bull was shot by a hunter and the other raghorn hit the road getting out of Dodge. The raghorn moved 11 miles in one night after their hideout was hit. This was 11 miles in some of the brushiest steep country North-Central ID has to offer and was roadless the entire way.
