Ep. 768: Foundations - The Tangled Web that is Big Game Management

probably everyone else everywhere else's the weather. Politics are another issue that transcends locality and either bonds us or drives us to irrationally despise each other. Money issues are a big one for obvious reasons. Then there's game management, or more specifically, whatever branch of government is responsible for managing wild game and hunting opportunities in your state. It's like a national pastime to complain about the DNR, the game

and fish or the division of wildlife. Sometimes those complaints are totally justified, other times they aren't. That's what this episode is partially about, but it's also is just kind of about understanding how to work with whatever parameters those agencies set in front of you. There is a lake located about an hour and some change north of me that is called Malas. It's pretty well known. You might

have even heard of it yourself. In French, Malacs means thousand lakes, although I guess I don't know why they call it that. I also know that one of my wife's older relatives calls French people cheese eating surrender monkeys, which is pretty offensive but also speaks to opinions he seemed to develop as a young man in the military. Malax in Ojibwe means grand lake, which makes more sense than the French meeting. The maximum depth of Malax is forty two feet, which is pretty shallow for a lake

that covers over one hundred and thirty thousand acres. It's basically a great, big bowl that is absolutely full of big fish. While it's primarily known as a walleye lake, the muskies and malaks get huge, so do the small mouth. In fact, a few years ago, bass held their angler the year tournament there, and the winner, a fella who I fished against when we were both in high school and who has a mustache that makes Mark Kenyon look like a little girl, won it with over seventy five

pounds for three days. That's a five pound plus average for three days on smallmouth in a tournament against the best anglers in the world. I fish Malax on a not very regular basis, and it's honestly something special every time I do. Though I'm not a walleye guy, but I usually catch a couple of good ones, like twenty five to twenty nine inch type fish every time I

go there, even though I'm never just targeting walleyes. What's crazy about this is that the story of the walleyes and malax is one that has caused more than a few fist fights in the local bars. Walleye fishermen tend to be meat fishermen, because really, why else would you choose to fish the most boring way possible for the most boring fish out there unless it's best quality was

found in its filets. When walleye fishermen can't keep their catch, it tends to sour the whole experience for them, and I get that. I wouldn't be super happy if the dn R said, hey, buddy, you can go hunt deer, but you can't eat them. Maybe that's a poor example, but the walleye situation gets way weirder. Due to the lake being subject to treaties with the Native America PRIs, the non tribal fishermen get to fish only as a

privilege that can be taken away by the state. Tribal members are granted a right to fish by the federal government. In this right, they are allowed to net walleyes, which often happens during the spawn when the fish moves shallow now to muddy the waters more. There are allocations set for the year that take into account netting take and traditional angler take. They also factor in the success of spawning through various year classes, probably a whole host of

other things. All of this comes together each year when the state decides what the catch and keep limit is for non tribal fishermen. This year, for example, it's all catch and release until mid August, and then I think they can only keep one fish of a certain size. Essentially, if you like eating walleyes, you're better off fishing somewhere else. As you can imagine, this pisses a lot of anglers off. What makes it worse is that the bite has been so good the the last couple of years, I mean

stupid good. So people naturally assume that the lake is overfilled with walleyes and they can't understand why they can't keep a few for the fish fry. That makes sense, right, But then you learn that the forage base for the walleyes, the young perch and tulabies, for example, they're not doing so hot according to extensive surveys. Now what does this mean, Well, the walleyes are hungry and their food options are more

limited than they have been in the past. This means they are more likely to eat whatever we present them on the end of our line, because well they have to, because they're hungry. So you take a situation that seems simple, and you find out they're mitigating factors to change things. And then you find out they're mitigating factors to those mitigating factors. And if you're honest, game and fish management is a constant process of shooting at a moving target.

So then all of a sudden you kind of realize that these things aren't so simple. But we like simple explanations, though, especially ones that allow us to rage a bit. Take wolves, for another example. It's easy to blame wolves for there not being any elk in the mountain range you hunt, and you could very well be right about that. It might simply be the prevalence of wolves where they weren't a little bit ago that has changed your hunting for

the worse. Now. I hear this a lot when I talk to Minnesota and Wisconsin hunters, and listen before I say what I'm gonna say, I just want to cover my ass. I don't care about wolves a whole lot. I wouldn't hunt them myself because I'm not interested. But I have zero problems with them being managed in any way necessary, including hunting and trapping. And I also think reintroducing them to places like Colorado is just kind of dumb. We aren't running out of wolves in the Great Lakes

region or Alaska or Canada. We don't need to put them in places just because it's an option to do so. I also don't think wolves are the sole reason for the deer population issues in certain places. For example, where I hunt Wisconsin, the easiest way to bond with the locals. Know, besides drinking beer for breakfast and discussing the finer points of the Green Bay Packers, offense is to talk about how the wolves killed all the deer, you know, never mind the bad winter we had last year that was

just not easy on the animals. And yes, I realized that bad winners allow the wolves to do their thing really efficiently, but I also know that bad winners there without the wolves would still kill a lot of the deer. Not to mention the fact that our area is almost essentially unlimited analyst tags, which if you want to knock the deer herd down, you make a lot of tags available to shoot the breeders. This stuff is rarely simple. It often sucks. It's also often not really what we think.

It's easy to believe the Game and Fish Department wants all the deer dead if you disagree with their management decisions, but you'd also have to acknowledge that they are cutting their own throat revenue wise, which doesn't make much sense. It's also true that we as hunters view this whole thing through the lens of wanting lots of animals on the landscape, so we can have a good time in

the woods. We forget sometimes that we aren't the only stakeholders that game managers need to consider in their decisions. I got a dose of this last year when my daughter and I drew Wisconsin bear tags. After spending a lot of time and money setting bear bait sites up and keeping them refreshed, a neighboring farmer complained about crop damage,

and the DNR sent someone out to trap. They took fourteen bears there the first week, which was the week before the opener, and they kept trapping through much of the season. To say that pissed me off would be like saying Steve and Clay have a small, totally normal romance going on. It wouldn't even cover one percent of

the truth. My daughter and I we played the points game, We put in our time and effort to set up for a hunt, and then the DNR decided a different stakeholder was more important than us, and we literally had all of our legal bears trapped out and moved twenty five miles away. Too bad, so sad. That was their strategy to deal with bears knocking down cornstocks, and because of it, my daughter's hunt turned to total shit. That happens.

It's part of the game. There are a lot of management decisions made every year that will benefit one party and enrage another. That's not likely to change. And while we should be involved in any way we can, you know't have to fight for what we think is right. It's also the truth that we just have to deal with those decisions as they come our way. The thing about this stuff is that most of it is totally

out of your control. But what is in your control is being informed on not only the decision being made, but why they are being made. Then deal with them how you have to in order to get the most out of your time afield. Now, let's take that walleye example on Malax one more time. If your number one priority is eighteen inch fish to eat, you got to go somewhere else. That sucks, But unless you want to get on the wrong side of the law, it's your

only option. If you want to catch the biggest walleye of your life, often on a swim bait like three feet of water, then heading to the big lake on a calm day might be the best decision you've ever made. For a more close to home example, let's say you hunt in the heart of the wolf range, and you always have you have a reason to complain that the big dogs in the big woods are eating your big bucks and little bucks and dozen fawns. The first thing you can do is figure out how big of an

impact they are actually having on your local deer. This goes beyond saying, well, I only see a couple of deer off my stand every rifle season when I used to see a dozen. Listen, we aren't entitled to the hunts we want. We just get what we get. The effort we put in is generally commensurate to the results, kind of like most things in life. So maybe the wolves did remove most of your deer from your woods. But go out figure that out first. Figure it out

now by scouting. Don't wait until gun season to go to your ladder stand that's been up since two thousand and eight and let mother nature confirm your suspicions. Figure it out now, maybe you'll realize there are some other factors at play. Maybe a clear cut a mile or two away is drawing your deer because it's full of better cover and better food. Maybe the high ridge you like to sit on is kind of a game desert,

But the swamp below you. That's where it's at. Before declaring all of the deer are gone, it's best to do a little detective work, That's all I'm saying. And then you know, what if you're right. What if the DNR did import hybrid wolves that are three times the size of a regular wolf, and you know it can kill multiple deer in one night without breathing hard, and whole packs of them were dropped off right by your hunting camp in the middle of the night by covert

agents and black helicopters, then it's time to change. You can't go back in time and keep those wolves out. You can only figure out what you're working with now and then react accordingly. Maybe ten miles down the road is a zone on public land that the wolves just don't use much. And sure it's not the hunt where you walk out the back door of the shack and take the ATV two hundred yards down the trail to a familiar spot, but it'll get you closer to a different,

better hunt. Maybe the game managers for your state or your unit decide that the deer are too thick and they issue a ton of tags, a move you wholeheartedly disagree with because you're not seeing the numbers you used to see. They might be right, or you might be right, or you both might be kind of right, or both kind of wrong. On your one hundred acres, maybe the deer aren't there as much because you hunt the piss out of it, and the deer have better places to

go where they get bothered. Less, you experience fewer deer sightings and assume it's the DNR's fault and worse, they're telling you to shoot more. But the zone or unit or county or region they are managing is a lot bigger than your hundred acres, and maybe you're just in a poor area. They don't manage the property because that

would be a lost cause and totally impossible. So it's kind of just up to you to manage for your land and understand that even if they say you can shoot fifty dollars a year and not dent the herd, you know better for your little corner of the world, so you don't, and over time, your level of deer starts to get a bit closer to what they say is out there. This stuff is muddy, my friends, And while we often assign malicious intent, to people who hold

different opinions. In US, malice in game management is probably extremely rare. It's probably extremely rare in ballot box game management too, where the general public votes on something. Although well, I'm positive there's a different level of vindicativeness that creeps into that world, especially when it involves cute animals or predators. That's another story, and it's a stark reality for hunters living in certain states like Colorado that probably won't end

well for us. Over time. Game management plays into our lives in a lot of ways. Sure, it might not have a huge impact on you if your goal is to just shoot a decent bucket a door two each year because a lot of whitetail states. Now, that's not something that's going to be affected a whole lot by normal management decisions. If you plan to travel to hunt

might be a different story. It's often the case where we take many of our preconceived notions with us from our home hunting situation and try to apply them to over the road hunts, which tends to not work out very well, or at least sometimes it doesn't. You can see this with Western critters fairly easily. Like say you loved antelopehunt, you want to go to Wyoming. Forget the points issue in the waiting game to draw a tag for a second, and just consider that Wyoming is generally

known for having a pile of antelope. You think, well, I'll always be able to hunt speed goats there. Then a wild winter hits and suddenly the population is fifty percent of what it was in great swaths of the state you know where they had tons of antelope just a few months prior. Guess who isn't going to be able to easily get a tag there for a few years or maybe longer. In that case, the priority will be to coddle the herd, to get it to rebound,

and to offer the locals the better part of the tags. First, they're a prudent management decision that is largely or entirely for the resource is keeping you out and could be viewed as a big negative. But it's not so simple. None of this stuff is simple, but it does impact our hunting decisions. So I guess my takeaway from all this it's just, you know, pay attention not only to the decisions that game managers make that affect your hunts, but also to try to learn why those decisions are

being made. It's not always the case, but it is often the case. The decisions made that we disagree with the most are the ones that are made to help the resource. They aren't nefarious, They are just one of the few options. Game agencies have to try to keep the deer herd or the elk or the walleyes or whatever at a sustainable level. And the more you learn about this stuff, the easier it is to stomach things when there is a change for the worse in the

management plan. It's not all negative, though, because when big decisions are made and you feel like they weren't made to your wishes, you have the option to figure something else out. It's kind of like getting laid off from your job. Sometimes that's a truly horrible situation that can really alter the course of your life for the worse,

and that really really sucks. But sometimes it forces us to reinvent ourselves or seek out a situation where we won't suddenly be on the chopping block, and that can be a very good thing. That's growth, even if the catalyst for it is a really shitty event. In the interest of hunting and more importantly, absolutely loving to hunt, you just can't divorce your passion from the decisions made by the agency's tasked with managing the animals. They're intertwined.

That's not going to change. The best way to handle this is to learn about it, learn from it, and expect it to change your life for the better or the worse, and then just roll with it and make the most of it. Sound good? Good? How does this sound? Next week, I'm going to talk about something that I've been thinking about a lot, how do you avoid us?

And why this is something we should all think about a lot more than we probably do, especially in the off season when we're starting to build a plan for this coming hunting season. That's it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson and this has been though wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by First Light as always, and I truly mean this. Thank you so much for listening and for all your support. If you

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