Many non-resident hunters are threatening not to apply the following year and the outfitters are starting to make their voices heard. The next fall the hunters are complaining, the harvest stats are coming back very low and things are not looking good on the PR front. After-all, the counts could have been flawed, there is no way we could have lost that many big game assets in one year, right? So being ever optimistic the state decides to give the remaining quotas just one more year to see if they might bounce back. The post winter mortality counts come back into the department as an alarming number. Many of the cows and does have aborted their young in order to survive. After the long cold winter is over the elk and deer that did survive go into the spring in tough shape. A concentrated food source stuck in a snow bank that cannot escape…perfect. The predators did extremely well because of the increased snowpack that gathered the herds even tighter than usual, on heavy snow accumulations that created a wolves dream come true scenario. The increased snowpack and cold temps caused far more than the usual winter kill. But, the bad winter was even worse than imagined from a wildlife management perspective. So they do what most Government agencies would do in this situation…nothing! After a few years of turning a blind eye to the situation a bad winter like the winter we had in 20 hit and further accelerated the problem. This would mean a decrease in revenue that would have to be met with either more tags somewhere else or even worse, budget cuts. The state does not react at first with cuts in the tag quotas. The wolves, cougars and grizzly bears start to take a few more elk and moose each year as their unchecked populations grow and expand. The details of the spiral start out very subtle. The wolf situation has caused these three Western states to slide down the jagged slope of diminishing herds, shrinking revenues and bad PR among their customers and financial lifeline…out-of-state hunters. Idaho was the first state to hit the wall with the “Spiral” followed by Montana and now Wyoming has begun to slip into the Spiral’s grip. This in turn creates a downward spiral that cannot easily be avoided, and is often not even noticed until the state hits both a financial and PR rock bottom. I am calling it the “Predator Death Spiral.” The underlying cause of this phenomena is when a wildlife agency attempts to hide or “pad” their big game population estimates when over predation begins to take hold.
We’re continuing to see an alarming trend in Western wildlife management. The Western States management systems are not set up to handle uncontrolled, “Super Predators”.