Mandatory reports were started in the late 1990s and prior to that we did phone surveys to get a sample of hunters and then extrapolated from that to get a larger harvest estimate. We didn’t try to survey all hunters, just a statistically valid sample.
Some hunters questioned the validity of our sampling and estimates and asked the pointed, and fair, question, “why don’t you just ask all of us.”
So the Commission decided to go with mandatory hunter reports, and for a while, we had over 90 percent reporting. Over time, that dwindled, and the Commission considered instituting some kind of penalty for those who didn’t report, and for a while, a person couldn’t buy the next year’s hunting license until they reported. But by then, the data was too late to do any real good. The estimates were adjusted for the previous year with that new information if it changed the overall harvest, but it didn’t do us any good for setting the next year’s hunting seasons, which is done during winter.
Commissioners also discussed having a fine for not reporting, but opted not to for the simple reason we try to be customer friendly, and fining hunters for not reporting could create bad blood and dissatisfaction and might not make the data any better.
We’ve worked hard to publicize why hunter reports are important and why hunters should participate, and we’re starting to see a little progress. We also have some pretty sophisticated tools for building our harvest estimates that include mandatory hunter reports, follow-up phone surveys and adjustments for biases, such as people who harvest are more likely to report than those who don’t.
We feel pretty comfortable that we’re getting accurate estimates, while knowing they’re still estimates, and for what it’s worth, even when we had 90 percent compliance, we still had to spend a lot of time cleaning up the data because we knew some reports were inaccurate.
OK, about waiting periods. The Commission and staff have looked at a lot of different ways to improve drawing odds in controlled hunts, and as usual, we do things a little differently than other states. We try to spread hunters out over those controlled hunts so they have to be selective in what hunts they apply for, and that’s always a work in progress.
Some of the ways we try to improve drawing odds for certain hunts is making hunters choose one species for our once-in-a-lifetime hunts (moose, bighorn sheep and mountain goats), and if you apply for any of those, you’re ineligible to apply for antlered deer, antlered elk or pronghorn hunts in the same year.
We recently added pronghorn to the list of hunts where you have to sit out a year to participate again if you draw a tag to improve those odds a little. We also recently (within the last five years) made hunters wait five days to buy a capped elk zone tag if they applied for a controlled elk hunt. That was more an effort to reduce demand for those capped zones, many of which sold out in minutes or an hour or so (i.e. Sawtooth Zone tags), but it also forced elk hunters to decide which they wanted more: a chance for a controlled hunt, or a better chance for a capped elk zone.
As mentioned earlier, this is still a work in progress, and the Commission is always looking at ways to improve the odds in certain controlled hunts that have extremely low odds. If you’re next question is “why don’t you have a point system?” That’s another discussion, but we still think the fairest system is where everyone has the same chances as everyone else in every drawing.
Back to your original question, why not a longer waiting period? I think the short answer after all this long-winded one is we wouldn’t see a dramatic improvement in drawing odds unless we said after drawing a tag a hunter would have to sit out of all controlled hunt drawings for X number of years, or we would likely just be shifting those hunters to other controlled hunts and lowering those drawing odds.
Finally, in controlled hunts with a high number of applicants and low number of tags, you don’t gain much by making a hunter sit out. For simple math, which is my favorite kind, if you have 100 hunters applying for 10 tags and the successful applicants sit out a year, you still have 90 hunters remaining in the pool, and that’s based on all those hunters returning the next year and no new ones applying (which is unlikely to occur). So you’ve gone from 1 in 10 odds (10 percent) to 1 in 9 odds (11 percent).
The Commission is always open to suggestions, and I’d encourage you to talk to or email your commissioner.