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
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, 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 back to where they're at, but how we're gonna to repair those So welcome to.
The show, Paul, thank you for having me.
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?
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 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.
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. 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 best to get them on the show. So the first one comes from Alan Roberts. What predator reaks the most havoc on elk?
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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 mature balls or adult balls.
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 poor recruitment, additional mortality is probably not going to help us get to where we want to.
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 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?
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
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, 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.
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 a question a little bit different there.
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 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 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, 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 us well below the carrying capacity as well.
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.
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.
Even during like the late nineties early two thousands, there was always hunting, just very reduced.
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.
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
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?
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 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.
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 see those calf successes that high if if you were close to carrying capacity.
Yeah, at no point in the last twenty years have we seen any of the indicators that would indicate carrying capacities even being approached.
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 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 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 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, 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 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.
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 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 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.
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 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. 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 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?
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 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?
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 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 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, 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 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 percent of the calves are dying from cougars at this point.
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.
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, 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.
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 the data show as far as caller tracking that they've got a good chance at making it.
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, 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.
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.
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
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 last year.
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.
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
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.
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 you're going to gather out of that, but it'd be
definitely interesting to see the data on that.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Yes, since the nineteen seventies, is what I was told.
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 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.
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, 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 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 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 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
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
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 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. 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.
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, 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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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 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 in the same dates.
Yeah, roughly September nineteenth to twenty first, is going to be your pig of breeding.
Yep. So one thing I want to jump into. Uh, we talked a little bit about carrying capacity in the blues, 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 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 an adjacent unit.
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 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 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 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 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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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 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, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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, 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.
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 quantity and you know, opportunity at some point.
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?
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 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, we could do that. But there's repercussions for any change we make.
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
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.
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 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 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 calf was laying about six feet away, buried under a bunch of grass.
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.
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?
It looked that mature cat. Maybe this is what I was guessing, maybe a little bigger in the video.
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.
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 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 not be like this in every area, but at least the Blues has got a cat problem.
We do have a healthy cougar population in the Blues. Yeah.
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 the tactics that we can implore, Like, is there any way we can make a difference on the predators to maybe help out.
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, 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 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, 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 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.
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.
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.
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 it a small enough population that it it doesn't calculate in I gets if that makes any sense, Like.
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 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 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, 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 that what we think is happening is, you know, hunters are not having that population effect.
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 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 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.
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 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
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 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 what opportunity there is for harvest.
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 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?
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 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 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 correcting model to try and get us to our target.
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 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, 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.
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 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, 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. 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 they all come with some kind of feedback that the decision makers have to balance.
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 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 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. 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, 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 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
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 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.
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.
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 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 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, 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
you know, feasible and correct to keep the system functioning the way it should be.
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 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 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.
Yeah, well said, Yeah, we'll.
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, and good luck on what seems to be maybe a little bit of an uphill battle here with the Elk and the Blues.
Well, thank you and hopefully we can see some positive change in the next couple of years here.
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.
Thank you for having me