Ep. 41: Elk Predation Blues with Paul Wik

This week on the show, Jason comes to you from the field with biologist Paul Wik to talk elk mortality and recruitment. They discuss the effects of predation and environmental factors in relation to elk recruitment, and what that means for hunting opportunity. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:11):
Welcome back to cutting the distance. Today, I'm in a
cabin about twenty seven kilometers from a satan in the
Blue Mountains of Washington, helping try to wrestle newborn elk
calves in an effort to put callers on them, ear tagum,
and let fish and wildlife monitor them to see how
they're doing. I'm here with Poulwick, who has been here
for the last twenty years and currently serves as a
district Wildlife biologist. He completed his undergrad at Central Washington

(00:34):
and received his masters from the University of Idaho. After
completion of his masters, he went on to work at
the DNR as the Northeast Regional bio prior to working
here in the Blues. The Blues, for those of you
that don't know, at one time could have been said
the rival any elk cutting anywhere in the world, And
I would say that's based on both trophy potential and opportunity.
But in just the last i would say ten short years,

(00:57):
a unit seemed to have taken a little downward turn,
and two years ago they had only a thirteen percent
survival rate of their calves. So I'm here to talk
with Paul to see what he thinks is going on,
and to talk about any other factors that the elker
facing that could improve or affect their survivability, and how
maybe we're going to get those herds back or if
we have to accept the fact they may never get

(01:19):
back to where they're at, but how we're gonna to
repair those So welcome to.

Speaker 2 (01:22):
The show, Paul, thank you for having me.

Speaker 1 (01:28):
We're here. I got here this morning. We went out
and looked for calves a little bit. Found one that
you've already wrangled up, had an ear take in it
had a collar on it. But you're in the thicket
calving season. How's it going so far?

Speaker 2 (01:38):
It's going well. Right now, we've been out here for
about three weeks. We've caught twenty seven calves in the
area we're currently in. We also have two other groups
working in the Dayton and two Cannon areas that are
catching calves. Our goal is to have one hundred and
twenty five by the end of next week. And although
the numbers I just gave you aren't gonna say we're
gonna get there, but we have a hell copter showing

(02:00):
up in two days that is gonna catch calves and
the reason we use a helicopter is they're much more effective,
but they're not very effective at finding the zero to
three day old calves which are still in a hiding pace.
So that's why we're on the ground trying to catch
the really young ones to not miss any sources of
mortality that would be important.

Speaker 1 (02:21):
Okay, yeah, and we're gonna get into it here in
a little bit exactly what capturing calves looks like, because
to me, it's all brand new too. So I was
asking you questions like how do I glass form? Where
should they be? You know, because this is the time
of the year, most elk hunters aren't thinking about elk
or they're not necessary out in the wood unless they're spring
bear hunting or picking mushrooms or doing some other stuff.

(02:42):
But even then, like I'm not glassing. So we're gonna
jump into that a little bit more. But we're gonna
start this cutting the Distance episode like we do every episode.
We're gonna start with some listener questions, and once again,
if you have questions of your own for me or
my guests, feel free to email them to us at
CTD at Phelps game Calls dot com or send us
a social a message on social and we'll do our

(03:03):
best to get them on the show. So the first
one comes from Alan Roberts. What predator reaks the most
havoc on elk?

Speaker 2 (03:12):
So, for calves, which we have the most data right now,
it's cougars, at least in the Blue Mountains. We're finding
that cougars are taking sixty two percent of the mortalities
occurring from the calves that we're marking, which really dwarfs
any other predator on the landscape.

Speaker 1 (03:32):
Do you feel that and I know we talked about
this before, We've had a couple hour long conversations on this,
do you feel that that changes with matui el ca?
And I know you don't have data, but give me
your opinion or maybe what you can speculate is is
the cougar the predominant predator on maturialk or does it
balance out a little bit with bears or wolves or
anything else in the area.

Speaker 2 (03:50):
So bears really aren't very effective on adult elk. Cougars
make up a majority of the predators on the landscape,
so they should make up a majority of the predation
that's occurring on adult elk. Can kind of go back
to some previous work we did when I was originally
started in the Blues and three, we were marking adult
bulls and some adult cows, but mostly adult balls and

(04:12):
cougar's made up a majority of the source of mortality
for predation on those animals. That was pre wolf, so
we didn't have wolf data at that time. There were
not wolves in the Blue Mountains at least in numbers
that were meaningful in any way. A couple of dispersers
coming from Idaho and Oregon at that time. Right now

(04:33):
there are six wolf packs in the Blue Mountains. What
effect they might be having on adult elk we don't
have a good answer for. So they probably are having
more of an effect than when we did the study,
which makes sense.

Speaker 1 (04:47):
Yeah, yeah, I mean the one thing I know, and
I'm not a biologist, is I know what They're not
having a positive effect on the elk population. That's one
thing we could probably confidently say is it's not helping
the elk by any means. But it sounds like from
the data from the science cougars are the predator that
at least has the biggest effect on caves, and from
old data it had the most effect negative effect on

(05:10):
mature balls or adult balls.

Speaker 2 (05:13):
Yes, And there are places in the West that wolves
are not keeping the population in check, and there's places
that they are, and it's hard to predict what where
those places are and what the circumstances are that why
that happens. I mean, there's places in western Montana with
wolves that the population still they're still having a hard
time keeping the population in check. In the Blues with

(05:35):
poor recruitment, additional mortality is probably not going to help
us get to where we want to.

Speaker 1 (05:41):
Be, for sure. So amongst your colleagues in the West,
and hopefull I don't put you on the spot here.
Are there units aside from the Blues where there are shifts?
Is it terrain? Is it vegetation? Is there are there
places where bears will have more of an effect or
maybe cougar aren't so much and wolves are heavier. Like

(06:01):
you know, you always hear about the fame Lolo area
in Idaho. Do you have much insight to if the
cougar's being the apex predator at least as far as
Elk are concerned. Is that a Blues thing or is
it typical amongst all western Elk areas?

Speaker 2 (06:17):
Or do you, It's really hard for me to expand
outside of the Blues, but that does include Northeast Oregon
because the Blue Mountains, approximately ninety percent of the Blue
Mountains are an Oregon and Oregon's done some similar work
with calves in the early two thousands. They've done a
lot of elk research and they found very similar numbers
for cougar predation in Northeast Oregon as they have in

(06:39):
southeast Washington. So it's hard for me to say how
we compare to Central Idaho, you know, kind of the Rockies.
We're kind of on the edge of the Rockies here.
We're kind of a unique our own ecosystem in some
our ecoregion in some respects. So there are different factors
that are going to affect the other herds as you
go further west from you know, the elevation, the level,

(07:00):
the distance they migrate, the habitat that they have available,
and climate and fire history all play a pretty big, important,
important contributing factors to this.

Speaker 1 (07:10):
Gotcha, Yeah, thanks for that one. The next question we've
got comes from Cody Stein. It was carrying capacity and
how do biologists or departments know how do they determine
that and then what factors are included in that in
your opinion, Like, how do you is it? You know
when we talked about this a little bit when you
know it's the same things we talk about, but pose

(07:33):
a question a little bit different there.

Speaker 2 (07:35):
So carrying capacity is one of the most difficult things
to measure. Pretty much you know it when you've gotten
there because the population starts performing very poorly. Calves don't survive,
pregnancy rates drop, winter mortality goes up. But to know
what that number is ahead of time is pretty been

(07:58):
almost impossible to measure for these herds because it's also
a moving target. Carrying capacity one year with a lot
of say summer precipitation, a wet spring, lots of forage
on the landscape is going to be very different in
a drought year, where the percentage forage might be thirty
forty percent less. So they all have a lot less

(08:19):
available to them. So it's a question that we've actually
gotten for the Blues, are we near or at carrying capacity?
And if we look at the density of elk on
the sides of the landscape they're in, we're at a
pretty low density for elk at this point in time,
So I don't think we are. We actually manage more
towards what we call social carrying capacity in the Blues,

(08:40):
and that's because of the interface we have with agriculture,
and if we have too many elk, they're getting into
the peas, the winter wheat, the summer wheat, and we
know that it's socially unacceptable and causes financial hardship for
the farmers that are in the foothills of the Blues.
So we try to manage to keep the elk at
a level that reduces that which in our mind keeps

(09:02):
us well below the carrying capacity as well.

Speaker 1 (09:05):
That makes sense. So in the Blues, there was a
time frame where there was no hunting, correct as we
tried to rebuild these populations.

Speaker 2 (09:13):
Only there's always been hunting in the Blues. There's been
one game management unit of the Lick Creek unit where
we weren't issuing branch bulltags for a period of time,
but there was still the spike only season. There still
was cow tags at times when the population was doing well.

Speaker 1 (09:28):
Even during like the late nineties early two thousands, there
was always hunting, just very reduced.

Speaker 2 (09:32):
Yes, there's always been hunting in the Blues. We've never.
I think it was since like nineteen thirties. I think
they were brought back in the nineteen twenties from Yellowstone,
but on a train brought to Dayton, brought to Pomeroy,
and from what I've been told from some of the locals,
within five years we were having egg damage.

Speaker 1 (09:50):
I I was just kind of I was digging it.
I didn't know if that was like a unique way
to maybe study carrying capacity. Why there were so few
tags given? Were we able to watch those hurt umbers
because there was I mean we we've talked about it back,
but probably twenty ten to fourteen maybe you might be
able to envelope those dates better. But the Blues were
maybe an all time high or or a level where

(10:13):
the elk hunting seemed to be good. You know, you
always based off what elk hunting looks like and the
opportunity mature bowls, you know, all these things kind of
add into these little factors, and it seemed to be
and you know, maybe two thousand and five twenty fifteen
was like the high. Did we get to a point
where you thought we were close to carrying capacity? Or
has had always been off of that a little bit?

Speaker 2 (10:31):
No, and the reason I'd say that is two thousand
and fifteen was roughly our recent high and elk numbers
that for modern data, uh, And that's kind of a
relative term because we've been doing elk population estimates through
aerial survey since nineteen ninety six and the highest counts
we got were roughly around twenty fifteen. And we also

(10:53):
had some of the higher calf ratios during that time,
and if we were approaching carrying capacity, we should have
seen our calf ratios really declining if we were anywhere
near carrying capacity.

Speaker 1 (11:02):
So it's a good indicator just how many calves are
being born and of age, because that has to do
with nutrition that's available, and those things will start to
affect you know, just like our last podcast with Brock,
we we get into you know, you know, the cow's
ability to go into estrus after she you know, had
a successful calf, and then you're rolling it in. So
that all makes sense and plays right into you wouldn't

(11:25):
see those calf successes that high if if you were
close to carrying capacity.

Speaker 2 (11:30):
Yeah, at no point in the last twenty years have
we seen any of the indicators that would indicate carrying
capacities even being approached.

Speaker 1 (11:38):
Okay, yeah, thanks, thanks for the answer, and once again
you have your own question for me or my guests.
Feel free to email those to us at CTD at
Phelps game Calls dot com, or send us a message
on social and we'll do our best to get them
on here. So now we're gonna jump into my discussion

(12:02):
with you. One of the reasons i'm here. I was
fortunate to have a Blues tag last year. I love
the Blues. I've been able to elk hunt here three
or four times now. You know, it seems to be
a real treat when you do get to come here.
You know, my tag was as early as last year.
My wife drew, I believe in twenty thirteen, so I've
got to I believe I was here like at the
high point and then got to hunt the same unit

(12:24):
and see a little bit of contrast. You know, still
able to get it done. But there's just something growing
up in Washington, like you always dream of hunting the Blues,
hunting it one time. I figured if I can hunt
it one time before I die, I'll be happy. But
I'm very interested in the Blues. You know, we kind
of kicked this off with some uh, you know, I'd
even heard numbers of worse than the thirteen percent survival
immortality above ninety percent. The blues from a hunter's perspective

(12:49):
or perspective seems to be deteriorating. And so I got
a hold of you and just wanted to come talk
to you. And you know what you're seeing, You know,
a guy that's out here with these elk deer sheep,
you know every day, and kind of what your opinions are,
what your professional opinions are, what the research shows. And
I think we can all play armchair biologists from our chairs,
but I think every all the biologists I've got to meet,

(13:12):
you know, gett to hang out with you so far
for just a couple of hours, Like you care about
the olk, You're a hunting yourself, you want to see
it do good. You're not making recommendations that hurt the population.
So I really want to just kind of jump into
that talk with you and then let all the listeners
kind of know what what you're seeing on the ground
and shed some light on that. So we're going to

(13:33):
jump back into what we're what you're doing right now
that that calf study, can you give us a little
background on what kicked off the calf study and where
it's going to go, what the data is going to
be used for, and some of that.

Speaker 2 (13:46):
Yeah, so you're right. You know, two thousand through twenty sixteen,
we had pretty healthy calf ratios. You know, we really
want a minimum of twenty five calves per hundred for
our population just to remain stable. About twenty sixteen, right
after twenty sixteen, the numbers started dropping. The numbers have

(14:08):
been consistently below twenty five since twenty sixteen, which indicates
a problem. Something changed. We didn't know exactly what. We
have some ideas that you know, climate played apart. Through
we had a couple of severe winter events. We've had
some summer droughts that have definitely played a part affecting

(14:29):
the nutrition of the elk and the pregnancy rates, the
ability to nurse and lactate, which is a huge demand
upon elk. So really about twenty sixteen twenty seventeen, we
noticed something changing in the population. We started making some
small changes. We started reducing cow tags where it was appropriate.

(14:49):
We started seeing less bowls on the landscape, so we
started reducing the bull tags to try and let it
balance itself, hoping that it would rebound within two three years,
and it really hasn't had the ability to rebound. So
we're see about two thousand and nineteen twenty twenty, we

(15:11):
started having some internal discussions on what does this mean?
Why is it happening. We did some internal reviews and
had some good discussions internally in the agency, and it
came down to the calf recruitment seemed to be the
limiting factor. So the agency started a calf coloring effort.
In twenty twenty one was our first year of doing that.

(15:33):
We caught one hundred and twenty five calves in twenty
twenty one. In twenty twenty two we were able to
catch one hundred and two. We weren't even able to
catch all one hundred and twenty five. The helicopter couldn't
locate enough calves to keep going at that point, and
it is a bit of a cost prohibitive effort. Their
helicopter capture rates are extremely expensive and it is stressful

(15:55):
on the animals. So we made a call to stop
at that point. And this is the third and what
we think is our final year of doing this uh
to look at calf survival estimates and is there options
for the agency to make management actions that can improve
calf survival?

Speaker 1 (16:15):
So with with that said, make management decisions what in
your opinion, like you is there and we're going to
get into this more. I maybe jumping ahead on my
own my own topics here, but what so I look
at it from like if if maybe causes aren't getting pregnant,
like do you need to have more balls on the
landscape or you know, so some of this like what

(16:36):
can be made based on calf survival? I mean, we
we know what's happening by predators. Does it need to
be different predator seasons or is there anything within what
I would consider like agency decisions, Is there anything that
can be done to actually help that number?

Speaker 2 (16:51):
So there are a number of things that can be done.
I'll start with the A biotic factors, climate, how good
a shape is the range in? You know, are there
things that we can do habitat wise, is there is
the data indicating there might be a habitat factor? Are
we seeing calves starve to death in the winter? Are
we seeing calves starve to death in the summer because

(17:14):
the cows can't get enough nutrition to have enough lactation
ability to feed the calves. If we're seeing predation as
a limiting factor, can we change predator numbers for a
short period of time to try and get the population boosted.
So those are things the agency could consider. Our data
at this point is really pointing towards calves not surviving

(17:37):
because of predation. We're seeing predation be account for seventy
eight percent of the mortalities that are occurring, and that's
the first two year average, and of that, sixty two
of the calves dying or dying from cougars. So it
really points that cougar predation is the leading cause of mortality. Now,

(17:59):
the one thing we can't determined is are they predisposed
for some reason to cougar predation, And you know that's
a really difficult thing to address. Are the calves in
poor condition or are they not. Calves really don't have
much body fat the first couple of months of life,
so we can't look at them like an adult elk,
where if it died in the winter, we can look
at bone marrow or percent body fat and see if

(18:21):
they were not likely going to make it anyway, and
that's why they were predated and that's where wolves, you know,
they tend to take the old and the young and
the susceptible on a lot of a lot of their
kills are animals that wouldn't have made it, not all
by any means. But we can't look at that with
elk calves. So all we can say is sixty two

(18:42):
percent of the calves are dying from cougars at this point.

Speaker 1 (18:46):
Gotcha, So what percentage of calves? I mean you may
have alluded to it. You need twenty five percent? Here
in the blues is the determinate, you know, So what
what percentage of calves do you need to make it
through in order to maintain which you've said twenty five?
I believe it? Correct me if i'm.

Speaker 2 (19:02):
Well, we use a ratio of caves per hundred cows.
So if you have twenty five cows per hundred cows,
break it down fifty to fifty by sexes, so you
have twelve and a half male twelve and a half
female per hundred cows, and average adult cow survival. You know,
good cow survivals ninety percent, So annually across your heart,

(19:23):
you know you can see as low eighty five to
ninety percent is kind of average, So you need to
replace ten to fifteen per hundred, so that gets you
ballpark needing twenty five and that'll maintain maintain your population stable.

Speaker 1 (19:38):
Okay, And then is there a point in which those calves,
I mean you you we talked earlier, and we'll get
into the story of you going up finding the mortality
calf yesterday. But is there a point in which they
have a better chance of surviving because it sounds like
a lot of these calves are very susceptible very early
in life when they you know, the mom beds them down.
They're they're basically cougar bait at that point. But what's

(20:00):
the data show as far as caller tracking that they've
got a good chance at making it.

Speaker 2 (20:05):
So for our data, we're seeing the highest mortality in
the first three to four months. We have not documented
a calf dying after one hundred and fifty days of
being alive in the last two years, so our winner
survival has been one hundred percent. So we really see
that zero to three months is when a majority of
them are dying. It's really consistent. We haven't I mean,

(20:30):
the numbers tape are off pretty quick. If you're losing
the percent we're losing the first three months. But the
first year we were doing this, you know, we were
running sometimes two to three mortalities a day after we
were done capture.

Speaker 1 (20:45):
That's crazy. So yeah, we looked at the charts a
little bit. I think it's crazy. It's a reverse bill
curve and you lose about seventy I don't know what
the data is. You lose the majority of your calves
in those firste hundred twenty hundred fifty days, and after
that the line's straight. You don't lose any more that
are colored.

Speaker 2 (21:01):
Yeah, which is really surprising because there still should be
some sources of mortality occurring. And one possible explanation is
is we've lost so many calves by that time. Hits
are sample sizes pretty small through winter. I think we
had like thirteen calves going into the winter the first year,
and last year we had a problem with callers, so

(21:22):
in September October we lost thirty six collars defenses. So
these are expandable colors with just pleats that have a
couple of stitches in them, so as the calf grows,
it grows with the calf, so we don't cause harm
to them. But if they catch on a stick or
if barberire fence or something like that, they can pull
all the pleats and the collar becomes too big and
just falls off the calf. So we lost a lot

(21:43):
last year.

Speaker 1 (21:44):
Yeah, And another thing to get some of your predation number,
It sounds like you guys are doing something where you're
sending in saliva swabs now on the study. And what
that is, my understanding is so that you guys can
confirm what your visual determining was the cause of death.
Is that there's maybe some saliva that matches up with
the biologists and their confirmation of what killed the calf.

Speaker 2 (22:07):
Yeah, So we still do a full knee cropsy in
the field, which we can go into that here in
a minute if you want. But we're identifying the bite
marks or the attack sites, not the feeding sites, but
the attack sites, and we are swabbing for DNA on
there and sending it to the University of Washington, and
they're identifying the species of animal that bit at those
sites we identified, and they can actually take it down

(22:30):
to the individual animal level. So we're hoping to look
and see the intent kind of is one cougar killing
three or four calves or is it a unique cougar
for every calf and that kind of it definitely comes
back to the behavior of the cougars and the territoriality.
So this distribution of where the calves die.

Speaker 1 (22:51):
That's yeah, that'd be interesting, just if nothing else is
to look at, Like is one cougar killing five calves
on a ridge or is it five different cougars and
you know they're their dominant home range, Like how does
that the social you know, the social all that stuff
that we think we know about cougars, But are there
multiple cougars one area that calving season they maybe disrupt
their home territory or you know, I don't know what

(23:12):
you're going to gather out of that, but it'd be
definitely interesting to see the data on that.

Speaker 2 (23:17):
Yeah, and I've seen the first year, but we definitely
need to overlay it spatially to It was for the
most part, all unique cougars the first year, but if
they're all a certain distance apart, you would expect them
to be unique cougars based on their own territorial behavior.

Speaker 1 (23:31):
Yeah, I mean, because around home, I don't know if
blues is different or the densities higher on cougars, I
obviously compared to where we're out at home. But you know,
we always hear people talk about like twenty five to
fifty square miles for an adult male tom and that
I can't imagine that would work here because it would encompass,
you know, two or three male tom for this entire
area that we're in.

Speaker 2 (23:49):
Yeah, and we did do cougar work here in the Blues,
I think in two thousand and nine through twenty twelve.
And the numbers are probably not correct on the top
of my head, but I thought it was about forty
five to sixty square kilometer for a female and roughly
one hundred and fifty square kilometers for a male.

Speaker 1 (24:04):
Is a sot I have to make a joke on kilometers?
Is it Sultin County the only county in the state
that still uses kilometers?

Speaker 2 (24:11):
Yes, since the nineteen seventies, is what I was told.

Speaker 1 (24:15):
Yeah, that was my joke. On the intro, I was
following it's not mile posts here, it's kilometer posts, and
the cabin's twenty seven kilometers. So I found that a
little funny fact about a Sultin County. So let's get
back to how you would normally, let's say, without the
slava swabs confirming what do you I want to get
too gruesome. But we talked about a little bit like

(24:35):
being able to visually identify what predator you believe has
killed the animals. So if you go through cougars, bears,
and wolves and how you would identify those ones.

Speaker 2 (24:45):
Yeah, I'll start with cougar just because it's the one
we see the most of. You know, when we're walking
in on a scene, you know, we're looking for tracks,
if there's a potential for tracks, we're looking for casing
of the animal. So cougars definitely tend to scrape grass
and brush and stuff and bury their their kill after
they're done with their feeding. Then we're gonna skin the animal,

(25:08):
so we're gonna you know, examine the outside look for bite,
wound scratches, something like that, and then we do skin
the entire carcass. We're ignoring the feeding site for the
most part. We're actually looking for hemorrhaging underneath the skin
that shows the animal was still alive when it was attacked,
so you're gonna see bruising. We use the term grape

(25:30):
jelly in terms of wolves because they bite so hard
that it causes the muscles and the cells to break apart.
So we want to see pre mortem are before death
bleeding as an indicator that the animal was actually killed.
If we can't find that, we can't confirm that the
animal is actually alive and it's not scavenging. So cougars,
you know, we skin it out these Some of these

(25:51):
calves are so small, you know, they're roughly thirty to
fifty pounds at this zero to seven day age. You
can skin it out a lot of times in the
whole to hide up to the sun and you can
see the scratch marks from the four talents down the back.
You can see that that was actually bruising occurred before alive,
but you won't see that from the outside. It's kind

(26:13):
of been a unique thing to see that you can
look at a calf and it looks like you can't
see from the outside that it was actually physically attacked,
but if you skin it out and hold it up
to the sun, you can see the claw marks going
down its back. Inside. Cougars are really quick and effective
at killing these things. We're not seeing a lot of
damage to these things, and then they typically feed around

(26:37):
the paunch their first feeding is near the paunch. We're
getting to these things, so the callers are set. If
that doesn't move for four hours, we get a text
in an email that something's not right. And we've been
getting to these things within twenty four hours a lot
of times the same day, so they haven't had time
to be scavenged yet, and you know, those are the

(26:58):
indicators we're looking for. With cougars, bears tend to attack
on the back of the animal, bite the back of
the neck, the back of the shoulders, and when they
feed on it, they pretty much open it up in
one spot and skin it out extremely cleanly, and they
skin it out until it's inside out. There's a number
of times we find they look like an elk calf

(27:20):
sock puppet turned inside out, so that's a really good
indicator of a bear. Bears also leave a lot of
scat in the area they can cash, but we haven't
seen that nearly as much, and they tend to eat
a lot more of it initially. Wolves we've only had
three wolf kills on calves in two years, and they've
in essence disarticulated the animal and spread it across the hillside.

(27:44):
There's just little pieces left, but they also usually tend
to leave a lot of tracks and sign as well.
We have had one bobcat, a couple of coyotes, but
for the most part, you know, the big three or
what we're seeing more of.

Speaker 1 (27:59):
Yeah, and then so to accomplish this, we talked about
me being you know, I always like to know what
I'm doing in glass night spots. You're going out on
a high ridge, glassing into these pockets that are known
to be nurseries or where cows are going to take
their calves to be comfortable. You're glassing them and then
you wait for that cow to stash the calf and leave,

(28:19):
and then you you're able to just walk in. And
you had mentioned and I'm going to get the term wrong.
I'm not even gonna mention it that some people believe
that the elk calve kind of pre wired for their
heart rate to actually go down to maybe as they
get spooked.

Speaker 2 (28:33):
So yeah, that term is a fright bray of cardia.
And we've definitely noticed it on these you know, zero
to two day old calves. You walk in and they
don't even move for you. They're really quiet, really mellow.
Their breathing is quite slow and it's not going to
last very long. You can stimulate them out of it too,
But the those one day old calves are extremely easy

(28:56):
to handle. We don't have to hobble home, we don't
put a blind fold on them, and we can do
everything except ear tag them without holding them down. We
get weight, sex look for things to help us age them,
such as their insize, their growth of their teeth, the
color and softness of their dew claws and hoofs, and
the umbilical cord attachment point umbilicus, whether it's still bloody

(29:20):
scab dried, and being able to see them walk a
lot of times as a good indicator too. They're pretty
bow legged and bent knees and unstable the first two days.
By day six, day seven, they're starting to run around
the hill pretty fast, far faster than we are able
to catch them.

Speaker 1 (29:39):
Gotchi, I know you had mentioned if we see one
walking pretty well behind its mom, we're not going after
that one because we're not going to catch it.

Speaker 2 (29:45):
So yeah, we've learned a lot in the three years
of doing this, and there's times that we can try.
I mean, mom still will bed them down somewhere and
leave for hours at a time, and if they're in
thick enough brush, we can sneak in and try and
catch them by we definitely miss occasionally.

Speaker 1 (30:01):
And then just to coordinate, you correlate your data with
what we interviewed Brock with We're about a week apart
actually recording these two podcasts, and he had mentioned you
mentioned a week ago we were in our hot point
and he was about a week ago on Thursday. So
to kind of answer our question on latitude and how
you know it should have an effect but doesn't seem
to have much of an effect on ELK. So at
least from southeast Washington down to most of Utah, it

(30:25):
doesn't seem to be much effect at all when that
like peak of Calves is hitting. Which is a little
bit interesting that there's no real change as you move,
you know, down latitude or up latitude, at least within
the data we have from me hunting New Mexico to Washington,
the UT seems to go incide at the same time

(30:46):
in the same dates.

Speaker 2 (30:46):
Yeah, roughly September nineteenth to twenty first, is going to
be your pig of breeding.

Speaker 1 (30:51):
Yep. So one thing I want to jump into. Uh,
we talked a little bit about carrying capacity in the blues,

(31:13):
especially where we're at. I don't think we need to
disclod you know, hide the location. But we're here in
the Lick Creek unit currently, and I know you had
mentioned earlier that the data shows about five hundred plus
or minus. Maybe a little bit of a lack of
mature bowls is really what's limiting the you know what
people would call the big bowl tags, the quality tags.
Where there's a unit, you know, across adjacent to it

(31:35):
that seems to have double the carrying capacity for a
similar you know type unit is there in your research
and you just being in the area. Is there any
good explanation for why adjacent units one will be doing
better than the other have double the elk? Is it
historically always carried more? What are we seeing here on
why maybe one unit is doing so much better than

(31:55):
an adjacent unit.

Speaker 2 (31:58):
That's a tough question to answer. Historically, the Lick Creek
unit had a thousand elk in it. Eight years ago
we had a thousand elk here. We noticed half the
unit start to decline pretty quick around twenty sixteen. We
missed our opportunity to start collaring animals at that time
to figure out why, and there's a good reason. The

(32:19):
agency only has so much money to go around. It's
hard to in expensive you go start capturing elk with
the hope that it was a short term thing. The
Mountain View unit to the south of US has remained
relatively stable at a thousand elk, but they still don't
have good calf survival down there, but the adults seem
to be doing at least we're not losing the adults

(32:41):
or they're remaining relatively stable. It's a much slower decline.
I don't think it's a caring capacity issue. It's a
survival issue. What's causing survival to be higher down there
than here? And I don't have a good answer for
why survival is better down there. The elk here have
actually pretty good winter range, and unfortunately a lot of

(33:03):
our elk in the Lick Creek unit are going to
private land throughout the winter. It's hard to compete with
farmers and winter wheat and canolae even with a nice
healthy bunch grass ecosystem that we have here. The Mountain
View elk, a good percentage of them go to a
feed lot in Oregon and get fed all winter. But
there's still predation happening down there. There's still probably similar

(33:27):
numbers of cougar down there. There's wolves on the landscape
in both places. The winners are probably more severe actually
down in Mountain View. So I don't have a good
answer as to why some units performing differently than others.

Speaker 1 (33:41):
And calf survival you mentioned, it's just the adult survival
of calf, calf recruitment or you know, calf mortalities are
real similar in those two units. You're just able to
hold that higher number due to adult elk making it through.

Speaker 2 (33:54):
Yeah, and it's there is a difference, but it's not
a huge difference. I mean we're still below twenty five
down there. I think a couple of years in a
row the feed lot was with six hundred elk on
it was averaging twelve calves per hundred. Yeah, it's it's
a tough one. You know, we have private land adjacent
where these things are on private land, and you know
they're doing a little bit better. There's probably a different

(34:14):
risk on the landscape in private land where there's a
lot more people available for everything to interact with. So
it's I don't have a good answer. The Dayton unit's
doing really poorly. I mean that's gone from a thousand
elk down to like three hundred and fifty elk and
we had only nine calves per hundred in there this
year when we did our aerial survey.

Speaker 1 (34:35):
And it's yeah, it's just it's tough, you know, what's happening.
And how come. One of the things we talked about
maybe affecting it is you know, climate change, and what
I mean by that is the extreme weather swings. We
may have you know, a bad an extreme winner every
third year, but in between those, you mix in an

(34:55):
extreme drought at the same time. And so while you're
maybe struggling for this CAFF recruitment, which may it may
play into it, we're not being helped at all by
the weather r It's not given us a favor. So
we're trying to comp compound poor CAF survivability in between this,
but then get dished out some crappy winters in some
dry summers.

Speaker 2 (35:16):
Yeah. I mean, in the last eight years, we've had
two severe winners, the winner of sixteen seventeen and eighteen nineteen,
probably one of the worst winters in fifty years that
people recall in the Blue mountains, and there's some metrics
to support that through the National Weather Service. We've also
had the drought of twenty fifteen. We also had a

(35:40):
twenty one drought that was some of those temperatures that
set all time records. It was like one hundred and
twenty two degrees in Clarkston in June. Really affects the
nutrition of the landscape, the available forage. You know, it
affects pregnancy rates of cows. So if you had a
drought in twenty fifteen, in a severe winner of sixteen seventeen,

(36:02):
so if they're bread in the fall of fifteen, they're
born in sixteen, we count them as calves in seventeen
following a bad winter. What was the main effect We
probably will never know, but we do know that those
things all are cumulative effects. And it's not given this
population a break right now.

Speaker 1 (36:20):
Yep. Yeah, it's tough. You need you know, it's to
rebuild this You need all that ideal. You know, you
don't want your cows going in in bad shape and
then your calves having to survive that bad winter. It's
just a bunch of compounding issues that are ultimately not
helping us out. With the oak population.

Speaker 2 (36:36):
Yeah, in our calf study we did, we started in
twenty one in a severe drought. Twenty two was one
of the more wet springs in summers in the Blue Mountains,
and we don't know what twenty three is going to be.
I mean, we did see higher survival in twenty two.
Is it related to the weather? You know? Those are
really tough questions to tease apart.

Speaker 1 (36:55):
Yep, yep, it's tough. So within management and management strategies,
what are the bowl to cow ratios here in the
Blues or does it very tremendously from unit to unit
or is it fairly.

Speaker 2 (37:11):
It does vary unit to unit. Our goal is twenty
to twenty five bulls per hundred cows, and twenty five
bulls per hundred cows is going to give you a
pretty diverse age ratio and some good quality opportunity. Some
of our units are running in the low teens. The
Lick Creek units typically low, you know, the Winnaha typically high,

(37:34):
much tougher place to hunt. We're fairly conservative with tags
in there. We also share it with Oregon for management purposes,
So there is the bowl ratio really is an effect
of our hunting and we can manipulate that to some degree,
assuming that there's normal recruitment.

Speaker 1 (37:51):
And so I have to assume that the Blues is
still being managed for trophy quality. Is that still the intent?
Or are we getting ourselves to a point where we
might actually need to be managing for quantity with some
of the lower numbers, or do you get what I'm saying?
Like direct me there, Like are we managing for quality
still or are we gonna have to get to a
point where, hey, we may just need to manage for

(38:13):
quantity and you know, opportunity at some point.

Speaker 2 (38:16):
We definitely still are managing for a little bit higher
bowl ratio than other units in the state, with the
result being quality, quality, opportunity, quality bowls in terms of
age structure, you know, mature bowls for big antlers. We
still do have the spike only general season, so everybody
gets to hunt. Are we approaching a time to change?

(38:39):
You know? We rerode our ELK Plan three three to
five years ago, went through public process, got you know,
majority support for how we're managing Elk in the Blue Mountains.
If the constituents of Washington want to change, we can,
We can definitely you know, go through that process and
evaluate it and let the majority, you know, rule as

(38:59):
long as we stay within bounds of you know, a
healthy herd biologically, so there's enough cows to be bred.
And you know, I'm a big fan of having some
bulls diye of old age on the landscape. I think
that's healthy for an elk population or any hunted population.
So I don't want to necessarily go down the road
of having average age of three to five year old
in a harvest. But if that's what the hunters want,

(39:21):
we could do that. But there's repercussions for any change
we make.

Speaker 1 (39:25):
And we're gonna that's my last bullet here at the bottom.
We've talked about this, I talked about with brock Is.
As a matter of fact, we probably had a twenty
minute conversation the day on the hill. Is how do
you manage for everybody? And I think it's impossible. We're
going to save that that little bit here for the end,
So back, let's rewind back to predators. I think that's
the main purpose of the calf study. There. There's no

(39:48):
denying apex predators on the ground. You showed me a
little video yesterday where you thought you had got a beacon.
You got a signal from a dead calf that you
had just colored what within the last week. Yes, got
a caller and that you showed me the video and
I thought the same thing. You can see the calf
in the video, and I'll let you take it from there. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (40:08):
So I walked in on this dead calf, and the
dead calf was there. And as I'm getting close and
these callers give you a GPS point, I'm using telemetry
to listen to the calf and I can tell I'm
probably within ten twenty feet of it at this point.
Can't see the calf for sure, but I see this
little tan patch in the shrub and I immediately conclude

(40:31):
that that's the calf laying there under the shrub, and
I go walking up to it. I'm maybe six feet
away at this point, and it starts to move, and
I'm still thinking, elk calf in my mind that I
got a false mortality signal from the collar. I'm wondering
if something's wrong with the calf. And this is all
happening in probably two three seconds, and I'm debating whether
I want to grab the calf to check the collar

(40:53):
fit see if there's something wrong with it when I
realized it was a cougar or that I was done
about four feet from at that point in time, and
it just stood up and slowly walked away through the brush.
And I quickly backed up a few feet and it
walked about twenty feet and laid back down, and the

(41:14):
calf was laying about six feet away, buried under a
bunch of grass.

Speaker 1 (41:17):
It was about that point you probably wish you had
some bear spray, maybe brought just to, you know, something
with you to defend yourself aside from your little pocket knife.

Speaker 2 (41:26):
I wished I had something at that point in time,
but it was it was one of those things where
how cool is this? And also am I in a
bad spot?

Speaker 1 (41:34):
It looked that mature cat. Maybe this is what I
was guessing, maybe a little bigger in the video.

Speaker 2 (41:39):
I was guessing a little bigger, a little bit. I
was guessing it was, you know, a tom that it
might have been over one thirty one forty. But you know,
it is a really difficult thing though. Look at a cat.

Speaker 1 (41:49):
It was just a big It wasn't It wasn't a
juvenile by any means. It was an adult cat, you know, tough,
But I was. It was kind of cool just for
you to capture that and that cat running away, and
it's you know, literally really in such a short time frame.
You you were the ones to put a collar and
an ear tag, and yet within that seven days that
calf's dead by a cougar. And it's just it's happening

(42:10):
that quick. And it kind of goes back to those numbers.
You know that firs one hundred and twenty days is
really really hard on a calf, you know, almost We
do a lot of turkey biology and it's like, you know,
you're lucky your ninety percent chance of dying in that
first year and then the seventy percent chance of dying
in your second year. It's just it's almost, you know,
it's a little eye opening to me. I didn't realize
that calf mortality was maybe so bad. And it may

(42:31):
not be like this in every area, but at least
the Blues has got a cat problem.

Speaker 2 (42:36):
We do have a healthy cougar population in the Blues. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (42:39):
Yeah, So back to my question, I wanted to share
that little story. I forgot about it earlier when we
were talking about the predators on the ground. In your opinion,
can can we as hunters make a difference and put
a dent into those cats. And I I'm not going
to get into baiting or hounds or any of that,
just as hunters with the weapons were given now and

(43:00):
the tactics that we can implore, Like, is there any
way we can make a difference on the predators to
maybe help out.

Speaker 2 (43:07):
I think it's a you have to revert back to
the biology, and you can't ignore the social constraints and
the season structure that Washington currently has cougars. You know,
Washington's currently targeting twelve to sixteen percent is our harvest
guideline of cougars, and that's what the science shows that
they reproduce with an excess of say average of fourteen percent,

(43:30):
So you can harvest fourteen percent a year and the
population will remain stable. To reduce a cougar population, you
actually have to hit the cougars quite hard. You know,
more than thirty percent of the cougars would have to
be harvested a year just to account for the dispersers
on the landscape, the territorial nature of it, and boot

(43:52):
hunters alone, even if we had a year round season
and multiple tags. They're a secret of animal. It's hunters
probably can't kill that many cats a year without the
other tools that you know aren't currently available to us.
Harvesting cats is not a bad thing in any way.
I mean, I have a cougar tag in my pocket,

(44:15):
but we're without political support and commission support, we probably
wouldn't open our season up to that structure without those
people buying into it. We used to have a cougar
season year round season in the Blues for one tag
per person, and we actually killed less cats pre two

(44:36):
thousand and eight when we started adjusting our season structure
than we did once we adjusted it. And there's not
a lot of people that want to kill a bunch
of cats. Taxi Ermy's expensive times, expensive gas is expensive,
and you've got to spend a lot of time.

Speaker 1 (44:52):
Yeah, there's not a lot of proven tactics right to
come out and be successful like gear and elk glass
do this, do that? Cats are you know, maybe cut
a track and start walking it down in your boots.

Speaker 2 (45:02):
And we have people that do that every year successfully.
We have people that call every year and are successful.
Some of the times. They're a very difficult animal. Most
of our harvest is deer, and elk hunters out there
during modern firearm just encountering an animal, and I think
it's incidental take to actually target a cougar. Very challenging, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (45:23):
Very tough, So we can't forget about. In my opinion,
hunters are a predator as well. Belk right, we take them.
We've got spike season over the counter here in all
these blues units. We do have the quality bull tags.
We have some cow tags to In your opinion, our
hunters having a drastic effect on the population or is

(45:44):
it a small enough population that it it doesn't calculate
in I gets if that makes any sense, Like.

Speaker 2 (45:50):
It totally does. In terms of bull as long as
there's enough bulls to breed the cows. And there's been
some work done at Starkey and Northeast Oregon. The breeding
efficiency you know, was still increasing up to age five
for bulls. So you want enough bulls age five plus
to actually efficiently breed your cows so they get bread

(46:11):
and first estis But if you have that on the landscape,
killing surplus bulls on top of that isn't really a
population effect. So where hunters have an effect on the
population is killing cows and in the Blues. You know,
we've historically issued a lot of antlerless elk opportunities when
the population can support it. We're down to zero antlerless

(46:32):
opportunities on public land, and the tags we issue now
are on the egg area, so we're you know, trying
to protect the farmers from damage and still balance the
elk population. But that's kind of outside the core public
land portion of the Blues. So there's some places that
I'm still happy to issue lots of cow tags, and
I say out by Tri Cities, the Burbank area, you know,

(46:54):
it's not an area we want the population to really
grow or establish anymore than it already is. But in
the core Blues, in the public land areas, you know,
we've taken that opportunity away from hunters a couple of
years ago, and if hunters were having an effect, we
should have seen some kind of change in the population.
We haven't seen a change, and that would really indicate

(47:16):
that what we think is happening is, you know, hunters
are not having that population effect.

Speaker 1 (47:21):
Gotch So the reduction in tags is really just a
result of the population as an overall doing poorly. There's
just that age class of bulls are there like missing
segments or missing age classes that we're seeing. Is it?
Is it age class? Like, you know, not necessarily trying
to dig it why there's a reduction in tags. Obviously

(47:43):
I'm in full support of definitely cow, you know, and
then you ultimately bulls, bull tags coming down if you
can't support that quality and that that potential. But is
that I don't want to twist what you said, but
if bulls, if the quality of bulls and the number
of bulls are there to basically regenerate and repopulate, what's

(48:06):
the tag recommendation based on I just did a big
roundabout and I ended up back right to my same place.
But it's trying to get that answer of, you know,
like what dictates that tag number.

Speaker 2 (48:18):
Yeah, So we do what's called an aerial sideability survey.
So we fly in a helicopter typically the first two
weeks of March in the Blues. We fly. The Blues
is broken into thirty seven different survey zones. We fly
a percentage of those survey zones based on what we
determine our how many ELK are in each one, And

(48:40):
that's really based on twenty five thirty years of doing
this at this point, so we have a good idea
where they'll like to be for winter, and that accounts
for elkie don't see based on group size, behavior, snow cover,
and it gives us a population estimate with confidence intervals
that we can say we have this ninety five percent

(49:01):
probability of having this mini elk with a range of this.
With that, I actually have a formula that we calculate
how many bull tags we want to issue. So we
calculate how many bulls we want to take accounting for
the bull ratio the bulls per hundred cows broken out
by GMU, and then that is further broken down by

(49:22):
a percentage of weapon type archers muzzleowders, modern firearm and
runs off an average success rate of three years of
the previous tag holders. So we can calculate how many
tags based on that. So the current reduction that people
are seeing as a result of us counting less bulls
in these units and trying to maintain our you know,
our objective of how many bulls per hundred cows and

(49:46):
what opportunity there is for harvest.

Speaker 1 (49:49):
Gotcha? So I don't know if I missed it in
there as far as manager is are you guys managing
to like a certain amount of like size or is
it age or what are we using to determine like,
you know, because we are managing for trophy, but are
we managing on all right? You've got ten bowls over

(50:09):
three fifty? I don't know if that's the that's a
horrible metric, but I'm throwing it out there. Or we've
got tooth data back on the four bowls that were
killed out of this unit and they're all averaging this.
We need to you know, we like, how do you
come up with the trophy versus the number of tags?

Speaker 2 (50:25):
Part of the trophy is not really considered in how
we're issuing tags. It's almost more towards a bull ratio.
But I don't want to ignore that because we do
collect that in the helicopter. We collect yearling's rag horns,
what we call like three to four year old bulls,
which you know probably are in that that two point
fifty to three hundred range three ten range, and then
what we call adult bulls that are you know, likely

(50:47):
over three hundred. Judging a bull from the helicopter is
not easy. It's really hard, but you can tell when
it's a big bowl versus a small bull. That's pretty
easy to do. But if we run an average of
just twenty to twenty five bulls per hundred cows, you
know there is going to be a percentage of those
in there that are mature. And we can look at
our data to see if that trend from our counts

(51:10):
is declining or increasing, and we're going to issue a
percentage of the bulls in the unit. And if our
bull ratio is high, we issue a higher percentage of
the number of bulls in the unit for harvest, and
if our bull ratio is dropping, we issue a much
smaller percentage of the total counted bulls in the unit
for what the harvest opportunity is. So somewhat a self

(51:31):
correcting model to try and get us to our target.

Speaker 1 (51:34):
Okay, that makes that makes sense. So everything we've talked
about some struggles, you know, historically, what I would I
would even great, great elk cutting, right, it's every we've
talked about this. It's got everything you need. It's got
the genetics, it's got the potential for the food. If
we're not dealing with drought and winter. The blues, I
would say, has the potential. But I almost feel where

(51:55):
at a point where we almost need to accept that
it may not ever get back to where it was
the historic eyes. Maybe maybe not. Maybe you're going to
disagree with me here, but let's roll all this up
here to kind of to close this up. You have
like an ultimate fix for this area, and I know,
being being science driven myself, and there's there's multiple factors, right,

(52:15):
there's this equations probably you know a yard long by
time you lay out all the variables and all the factors.
But but in your opinion, like what are some things
that that would fix or start to fix this area
and kind of turn that corner and either let it
level out or start to improve.

Speaker 2 (52:33):
So there's a lot of things we can't control as managers.
Weather patterns is going to be something that needs to
align for three to five years in a row that
are favorable for elk to reproduce and grow calves. And
that's a huge one. H you know, the habitats in
good condition in the Blue Mountains, we've had numerous landscape

(52:55):
level fires since two thousand and five. A huge percentage
of the Blue mounta says burnt in the last eighteen years,
creating what should be good el habitat. You know, fire
has a you know, a ten to twenty year benefit,
sometimes less depending on the habitat type. If you're talking grasslands,
you're probably talking three to five year benefit. But overall,

(53:16):
we think our habitat's in good shape. What dials can
an agency turn? I mean we can change harvest, We
can change harvest of the carnivores, we can change harvest
of the elk themselves. Those are the few things that
we can actually change when things are not aligning for
a population. Our hands really don't have a lot of opportunities.

(53:38):
And you know, turning some of these dials comes with
social feedback, and the hunters may think one thing and
other groups in the members of the public might think
another thing in terms of what value they want to
place on this, And that's probably where Washington's struggling lately.
So are there dials we can turn the ad but

(54:01):
they all come with some kind of feedback that the
decision makers have to balance.

Speaker 1 (54:06):
Yeah, and the decision makers and then you know the
very opinionated hunters. Right. We talked about this on the
mountain already this morning. Is I'm going to point my
life where I want an opportunity at a mature animal.
I want to go challenge myself. I want to see
if I can outsmart that animal. But I've also got
a thirteen year old son that's starting to hunt. I

(54:28):
don't necessarily want him to have to go out and
challenge himself to kill trophy. I want him to have opportunity.
My old man, you know where he was where I'm at, like, yeah,
he was getting Now maybe he's kind of transitioning out
of that trophy and wanting to go just have opportunity.
And then you take that and dice it up by
archery hunters wanting this season or that many tags versus

(54:48):
muzzloader versus rifle, and they all start bickering about why
their success is better and theirs is worse, and why
they should get more tags because they're less successful, and
you know, and then you hear the rifle hunters argue
about how of the archery hunters actually wound, so we
shouldn't even have any and you know, it just it
turns into this big infighting. Right, nobody can decide whether
you know, I might want trophy, you might want opportunity.

(55:10):
Neither of us are wrong, but we're gonna voice our
opinion differently when we go talk to the rule setters
or the and then like I say, you add it
with different hunters, or there's a mindset of maybe somebody
just wants to put a cow in their freezer because
they eat better, versus Joe over here just wants an
opportunity at any legal bull. He's not interested in a cow,

(55:32):
but he doesn't necessarily care about going and chasing the
biggest bull in the unit. And then there's and it's
just like, I don't know the right answer. Me and
Brock ended our podcast with it. We're gonna end ours
with it, just because I don't think we can all
sit back and be the armchair biologists. Yeah. We I
would say most people on the landscape got good ideas.
They're out there, they're observing. We're all part. We're an

(55:53):
intricate part of this balance, right, and so we're all involved.
But I don't necessarily think that that it's as easy
as saying I'm an archery hunter that want trophy bowls.
This is the way it should be. You know, there
there's so much more. There's the winter range, there's nutrition,
there's there's all of this, and then you throw us
in our opportunity in and what we're after. It just

(56:13):
becomes a very very complex decision. And I don't envy
the biologists the rules setters at all. But the more
I get to hang out with the biologists, the more
I get to talk with you, you know, all of you,
I honestly feel you guys are doing what's right by
the herd and making good decisions. Just what do we

(56:35):
do about this? Like opportunity versus quality? Is it ever?
Is it ever going to be a clear decision from
here on out? Or is it always just going to
be I mean, it seems like you can't make a
decision without being wrong at this point, Like there is
no right decision at this point.

Speaker 2 (56:49):
Change is hard, no doubt about it. I'm in the
same boat as you. I've been working here twenty years,
haven't drawn a branch bull tag yet, sitting on twenty points.
I really would like to pursue an adult ball while
I work here. Is part of my career. But I
also have two teenagers that I want them to be
able to hunt every year at this age when they're
you know, receptive to it, make it part of their lifestyle.

(57:11):
It's hard to have both. It's hard for success rates
to be managed in a way that people are happy.
I mean, if we run two percent success on our
general season spike hunt, when you know one in fifty
people are getting to shoot a spike, Hunters need some
kind of positive feedback occasionally. I mean, not everybody's out
there just for the meat or the kill. But that's

(57:33):
pretty bad success. I can manage a population either the
way we're doing it now. We could go permit only
people don't get a hunt every year. Draw odds in
Washington are not that good. Our current system is not
favorable to drawing tags very often. So it'd be great

(57:57):
if our hunters could get together, not fight over weapon type,
fight for the resource and maybe fights the wrong word here,
but you know, work together to make sure that hunting
remains part of our tradition in Washington, because there are
people that want to take that away, yep. And in
this day and age with the Internet and social media,

(58:20):
those voices are definitely being heard more so the hunters
need to work together to you know, keep working towards
keeping this lifestyle, keeping this recreational opportunity, and coming to
consensus is never going to be easy, but we can
manage this herd in a lot of ways for recreational
opportunity and still stay within the bounds of what's biologically

(58:42):
you know, feasible and correct to keep the system functioning
the way it should be.

Speaker 1 (58:47):
Yep, No, I'm I'm in full agreement. I think we
need to take like you know, you as a biologist,
you've got data, you've got the research. Me as kind
of an engineer who bases everything off of science data calculations.
I think we just need to look at it and
not be selfish. It's easy to figure out success ratios, opportunities,
and I think we should just you know, it may

(59:07):
we may have to take a deep look into ourselves,
make sure we're not being greedy, make sure it's not
all for us. It might be for our kids, it
might be for my dad, might be for my grandpa,
whatever it may be. And I think we need to
find something that worked for everybody. And I think we
just need to look at it and like I say,
I think greed and maybe a little selfishness, and just
look at if we put the elk, the deer, whatever

(59:28):
animal is that we're trying to manage to a point
that's sustainable and provides the opportunity is what should be
at the forefront, and maybe not so much our own
personal wish upon getting a tag or whatever it may be.

Speaker 2 (59:40):
Yeah, well said, Yeah, we'll.

Speaker 1 (59:42):
Close it with that. I really appreciate you inviting me here.
Hopefully we can go wrestle some calves to night, and
really looking forward to that. But I appreciate having you out.
Thank you for being on the podcast. I really, like,
I say, me be in semi numerical driven, science driven.
I love being able to interview biologists because it let
us know exactly what's happening, not just a bunch of
speculation and guessing. So really appreciate you having me here, Paul,

(01:00:05):
and good luck on what seems to be maybe a
little bit of an uphill battle here with the Elk
and the Blues.

Speaker 2 (01:00:12):
Well, thank you and hopefully we can see some positive
change in the next couple of years here.

Speaker 1 (01:00:17):
Yeah, like I said, I was very very fortunate last
year to have a tag. I don't know if you
deserve the credit, but there was. I mean, there are
large mature bulls that are still out here. It takes
a little more work than when my wife had the
tag in twenty thirteen, but the opportunity is still there,
and so no, thank you, thanks for being on and
good luck and everything in the future.

Speaker 2 (01:00:36):
Thank you for having me