Wyoming long range hunting debate

[Pacific_Fork]

Anyone who thinks that hunting with a modern rifle and scope is different at one range than another is just a different level of hypocrite than the guy who thinks that distance is 100 yards more or less.
If they want to limit range, it's going to have to include excluding optics entirely. Which, as a mule deer hunter, I'm entirely in favor of.

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300 yards a buck, bull, pronghorn can VERY easily spot or smell you. Hell even at 4-500. 800+ is where they have almost zero advantage anymore. So your logic is just, well dumb.

 

[mt terry d]

So attack the biologists and not the individual posting their results. Or better yet, you go do your own study and publish the results. Show us exactly how a study should be done. Then go work with every G&F department to implement a foolproof method to accurately track wounding and mortality rates by weapon type and distance.


Otherwise you and your thoughts belong on The View with the other cackling hens.

I was attacking the biologists and the guy from MTFWP.

Sorry if you inferred otherwise.

 

[PathFinder]

300 yards a buck, bull, pronghorn can VERY easily spot or smell you. Hell even at 4-500. 800+ is where they have almost zero advantage anymore. So your logic is just, well dumb.

How bad do you have to screw up to get busted at 400 yards? Even 300?
Last year I had a MZ tag in a unit that also has early rifle tags. There was a group of 8 bucks living in a little corner of a basin, two were shooters. The glassing point where I sat to watch them during the four days I hunted them was 350-600 yards away from where they fed and bedded, depending on exactly where each buck was. It wasn't difficult whatsoever to avoid detection at that distance. With a scoped rifle, that hunt would have been over in five minutes. With the open sighted MZ, it took four days to get a scenario where I could get close enough to one of the big bucks without busting them.
Saying there's no effective difference between scoped and open sighted weapons just because if you jump up and down, waving your hands and screaming they'll notice you at 400 yards is what is stupid.

 

[Stinky Coyote]

I was attacking the biologists and the guy from MTFWP.

Sorry if you inferred otherwise.

Exactly, More of this!

If you’re getting to a point where you have to trade a rifle season for an iron sighted muzzle loading season OF COURSE the wildlife managers would prefer we blame ourselves for the problem...rather than do their job.

Now if, with transparency, they show you they’ve done everything possible in predator and habitat management, including aerial culling, bounties, night hunting games for predators, and still not enough ungulates to sustain a rifle season in a certain unit, THEN you make the change to start changing seasons to reduce harvest so they can recover. But is that what they do? If they showed us all they did we would humbly accept the changes needed to bring that unit back.

I’m not calling out all biologists but they also got bosses, and those bosses have bosses, and there are closet anti’s in the game working to undermine things for a broader agenda and it’s not our agenda.

This infighting sparks those fackers much joy. Focus on them first, not each other.

 

[repins05]

Derailing this post but I find it interesting that people actually believe in and trust wildlife biologist's studies, reports, and numbers.

 

[Pacific_Fork]

How bad do you have to screw up to get busted at 400 yards? Even 300?
Last year I had a MZ tag in a unit that also has early rifle tags. There was a group of 8 bucks living in a little corner of a basin, two were shooters. The glassing point where I sat to watch them during the four days I hunted them was 350-600 yards away from where they fed and bedded, depending on exactly where each buck was. It wasn't difficult whatsoever to avoid detection at that distance. With a scoped rifle, that hunt would have been over in five minutes. With the open sighted MZ, it took four days to get a scenario where I could get close enough to one of the big bucks without busting them.
Saying there's no effective difference between scoped and open sighted weapons just because if you jump up and down, waving your hands and screaming they'll notice you at 400 yards is what is stupid.

Happens every day in the woods. I’ve been busted by cows at 600 yards because I was setting up prone to shoot a bull on open granite that was distracted by all the ladies staring at me. I’ve also shot a bull at 20 yards with a rifle that was clueless I was there. We all have our anecdotes. And it’s beside the point I was making about fair chase and shooting a mile.

And I def didn’t say there’s no “effective difference” so don’t put words on my keyboard.

 

[Tower13]

technology is getting wild, but the reason should not be to appease tree huggers and liberals in hopes of a better image. I would not be opposed to some very stringent laws as I think we are all experiencing the crowds in the west.

When will it all stop? I think it wont and each year a little more will be taken from us that love to hunt.

 

[Tower13]

Derailing this post but I find it interesting that people actually believe in and trust wildlife biologist's studies, reports, and numbers.

I have never been given an honest report just BS all the time

 

[ddowning]

Are you really saying these early and late rifle hunts have high success % because of rifle tech?

Seems these hunts have always had high success just by the nature of the timing. Why do you think migration hunts, rut hunts, etc have always been sought after tags….since, well, forever.

How about we cut all early season and rut hunts when the deer are most vulnerable? Have all mule deer hunts happen Oct. 1 - 14th? I don’t see a problem with that.

I'm slowly reading through this. I live in Iowa, so no mule deer problems. We have whitetails, which are arguably as adaptable as anything except coyotes. We have whitetail problems like EHD, shit tons of pressure from the division of larger farms into 40 acre and smaller hunting acreages, farmers that hate deer more than rats and want them all dead, loss of habitat due to people wanting to live "in the country" but really they want to bring their city living arrangements to the country. They build 10-20 houses 7 ft apart, but they don't have to look at houses for miles, they get to see "nature" out their back window. Every greedy landowner wants to get a piece of the pie. This fractioning of habitat has definitely effected the quality of the herd. Also, farm implements have become so good at getting everything that there is very little winter food available. 20 years ago, deer fed on grain missed by combines through the winter all the way up until spring. Now, the older bucks are starving during the coldest winter spells.

If all of this is having a very noticeable effect on whitetails, I can only imagine the effect it has had on mule deer that are not very adaptive to different habitat and food sources. One thing Iowa has always been pretty good at, their weapons restrictions and season dates. The only weapons we can hunt with during the rut are vertical bows. The only people that get to hunt during the early season are youth and disabled hunters. Muzzleloaders are limited to 7500 tags for residents during October. Gun seasons are short. Only the population control doe hunts are allowed to use long range rifles ( there are some loopholes in the regs like smokeless muzzleloaders). Non-resident tags are limited, and we have mandatory harvest reporting.

Doe kill has a dramatic effect on population. I have been asked to kill as many does as possible in a couple spots. Some fields would have 200+ deer in them on winter afternoons. Now 5-10 deer in them. If you pay attention, you can keep deer at a decent level by shooting a few does every few years if the intent is to keep them low (farmers and auto insurance). If the intent is to keep the habitat at carrying capacity, you need to shoot just the right amount (and it is a lot here), if you want to grow numbers, don't shoot does. The problem in Iowa is that deer numbers are managed by county and the state is mostly private land. Guys that think they are building big buck meccas won't shoot does and they tend to get over populated. Farmers want zero deer, so they invite people to kill them and the only ones that get invited back are the ones that kill a lot of does and treat everything very respectfully.

As has been said, reducing doe harvest will put more deer on the landscape. Making deer harder to kill by limiting hunting when they are most vulnerable will result in more mature bucks. None of this addresses water, wild horses, cheat grass, habitat loss, or developments popping up in migration and wintering areas. I don't have great ideas for solutions for a lot of those problems that are politically palatable, but I think a lot of the big gains are there.