First time for Montana

[Kurts86]

I just got back from a Montana general deer tag and I can’t say I’d recommend traveling for that hunt. The deer numbers are in bad shape especially on the mule deer side. I hunted hard and bounced around a lot of different areas, badlands, prairies, national forest, blm, etc and the situation was pretty bad across the board from both numbers and quality perspective. I talked to locals, forest service employees, biologists and the feelings around the deer population were universally bad.

The idea you can walk your way away from people in eastern MT isn’t really a thing. It’s heavily roaded and the remaining deer are in the good habitat which has roads. It’s more a find a high spot 1/2 mile or less from the road and burn down the glass finding deer. It is not a Colorado wilderness elk hunt where there is a definite element of brute force miles to success thing. The reality is a lot of those tag holders are just driving around or walking around at random hoping to bump into a buck so you are covering a lot more ground with good glass from a strategic spot.

I hope Montana seriously revises its management strategy for deer but I’m not hopefully either.

 

[muledeerchaser]

I am currently hunting out of Glascow….. The last 3 days I have seen only 5 deer. I have hunted this area before and to be honest it is in bad shape as far as deer populations go. Two hard winters, CWD, Blue Tongue and over harvest has essentially destroyed the hunting. At this point Montana Fish and Game needs to place the whole area under permit only and try to restore the deer population as soon as possible…. I have decided to end my hunt early as I just can not justify taking a deer with the population as low as it appears…

 

[The Guide]

Spend your money how you want to but as an Eastern Montana resident, I couldn't recommend for you to plan a hunt East of Billings. It used to be that every drainage coming off an ag field had a group of 5 to 10 does that called that drainage home. Every night there would be 50+ does feeding in every ag field that sat between a river and the foothills. Now, you are lucky to see 5 does in a field and many fields are just empty. For years you had your choice of 5 or more bucks in a 3 or 4 mile hike through the public lands above ag fields. Now, if you see 1 buck that might be the only one you see for the season. We are in a rebuilding phase and need to be patient while the deer rebuild their populations. That said, the bird hunting has been great the last couple of years due to the amount of grasshoppers that have hatched. I see 50x more pheasant, partridge, grouse, and turkey than I do deer.

Jay