Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Surprising results from 15 year study by the Idaho Fish and Game.

Interesting.

Would like to see a graph including elk population pre wolf reintroduction. Harvest may be up over the last 15 years, but that doesn't mean elk population overall is as well. Could very well be that the IF&G are simply over selling tags, as they do here in Oregon.

What's the bull to cow ratio? Is F&G achieving that by selling more cow tags (again, as is done in Oregon )?

Further, the study indicates the single greatest indicator of calf success is its size. Mature bulls breed earliest, producing larger calves. A herd that has been on the run from wolves gives birth to lighter calves. Fetal reabsorption is common in both harassed elk as well as cattle.

The whole story is not made clear from the results of this study.

What’s also being left out is that MANY cat hunters have quit hunting them due to predation of wolves on their hunting dogs.

It’s an indirect cause of elk mortality, because it allows cat numbers to flourish. The elk predation being higher by cats comes as no surprise at all. They are apex predators for sure.

Wolves also change the behavior of elk more substantially than cats. More specifically, I’ve seen the presence of wolves drastically reduce the vocalization of elk, as it likely sounds like a dinner bell to a pack. Less likely so with cats in my experience.

Dave

Does ID F&G have any number to show how many cat hunters have left the game?

Or numbers showing cat harvest down?

Geno

On You Tube, Life on the Range, wolf management in Idaho. It is a 5 part series produced by the State of Idaho. I thought it was excellent. Don't know how to post the link.


mike r

https://idrange.org/range-stories/north-idaho/wolf-series/


The wolves have definitely changed elk and moose behavior

Good copy...thanks.

Thanks Ribka,



mike r

Good points everyone, and good discussion. I know of quite a few cat hunters who have given up because of the wolves.

Yes, overall elk harvest in the state is doing well but I think most of it is because the southern Idaho herds are doing so well. There is no question that the northern parts of the state have seen their herds crushed by the wolves and they’re probably never coming back. The St. Joe and Clearwater river herds are a shadow of what they were in the 1980s and 1990s. The Selway elk herds have gone from something like 30,000 in the 1980s down to 1,000 or 2,000 head. The Frank Church’s elk herd may not be 1,000.

Elk in the Pioneer Zone in central Idaho were initially crushed by the wolves but have rebounded nicely, although many of central idaho’s elk herds are surviving by invading farm land for protection from the wolves which is causing a whole bunch of problems.

Yeah, everytime they tried to work on the study, they got another Walmart pop up ad.

It took them 15 years to get the hard data to prove it.

The IDFG is trying to thin out the cows in south central ID. They're issuing more tags and extending the seasons. Bull tags are quite hard to get but we can draw cow tags 4 out of 5 years. I'd rather hunt cows than not get a tag at all. This year they combined some cow hunts, made them OTC, and extended the seasons into Dec. Units 49/50 are 1 hunt with 2500 cow tags and units 45/52 have another 2500 tags. The tags sold out in days.

I have a friend who has been the state trapper here for 20 yrs or more, he is not a college boy, and he claims mountain lions do kill deer for sport. He also claims that about 70% of the lion kills that he investigates, are BUCKS. Considering that the buck/doe ratio here is badly lopsided, that is amazing. Could they actually be seeking out the bucks? Anybody ever heard this from other sources? California stopped all lion hunting about 16 years ago, which marked the decline of the Columbia Blacktail seasonal migration herds.

Lolo zone 16000 elk 1995, 1000 in 2016
Yeah right, is it all them lions killing all them elk.

We were lied to before introduction, during and apparently that has never nor will it ever stop.
Does anyone else recall the wolf proponents telling is that 300 would be a good balance and how happy they would be with that number?
Lyin bastids!


https://www.foundationforwildlifemanagement.org/wolf-facts

If the wolves were not there that many elk would live but you still need to kill the mountain lions.

According to the vid I mentioned the wolves have caused the cattle to be so canine averse that cattle dogs are now losing efficacy in Idaho. I follow the cow guys threads on here and herding cattle w/out a dog would seem to be difficult....and lonely. I like the idea of having wolves on the landscape and enjoy hunting them but if I was an Idaho rancher I would encourage and support hunting them on my property. Unforseen circumstances, our Govt is good at misjudging the future.



mike r

My Indian rancher friends hate grizzlies way worse than wolves.


They hate buffalo too.....



Isn't it Idaho that has a fleet of state guys feeding the elk in the winter time??

Yeah , I don't believe anything they say - data from known liars .

An article I read said that a well trained dog can cost as much as $5000 but it can do the work of 2 cowboys on horses. Cattle that have been harassed by wolves will attack the dogs instead of being herded so the dogs are useless. A rancher in wolf country might have to hire 2 men to replace 1 $5000 dog. That's not a profitable tradeoff.

The wolf huggers goal was to curtail big game hunting and ranching appears they are having much success.

Yeah, Jackson Hole, Ideyho.

Was that 300 for the state?