Drunk_Dynasty wrote:Quack wrote:No wolves in NW MN ?
lol
I guess if you consider Bemidji northwest MN. And even if there are “some” wolves in the northwest corner of the state their numbers pale in comparison to Arrowhead.
For the record, I’m 100% for the regulated harvest of wolves and the fact they are still on the ESA in the Great Lakes states is a joke, I just don’t think their to blame for the moose decline.
There are a ton of wolves in NW MN.....in numbers a lot higher in areas the further West and North you go.
I knew an older guy that was perhaps the most by the book guy I've ever met. The type that went to church every Sunday, never would broke any laws, never even drove a mile or two over the speed limit. He was a successful business owner, a huge donor-volunteer-booster-supporter of everything in the community, and extremely respected and liked by everyone...and not just because people literally had nothing they could say bad about him but didn't think much more of him that, but as a someone they sincerely liked due to having a great sense of humor and a ceaseless positive attitude that was contagious.
I more or less knew him as an acquaintance on a league sporting clays team I shot on for a few summers. Every week after concluding the round guys would grill out and have a few beers.....give each other some ribbing for shooting like shit and even more for when they lit it up, which I always found odd.
After a season or two we got to become friends and know each other well enough to speak candidly. He had a gem of a deer camp up by Lancaster....I want to say over a thousand acres....it was a big enough spread to when he told me the figure after asking what he had for deer camp and expecting the usual 40-80-120 acre bit and thinking, "Damn.....Holy Shit is this dude balling a hell of a lot harder than I thought!"
Anyways, one season after we finished our opening round and most likely shot much better than average to coincidentally do a great job of fukcing up our handicaps.....we're grilling and tipping back a few beers off the edge of the parking lot and I asked him how deer hunting had been this past November. I only ever saw him the summer months we shot league and had no communication whatsoever outside of that.
He sits there a moment before looking over and making direct eye contact and dead panning,
"Deer hunting was terrible. I didn't even see more than a few deer the entire season. I saw a lot of wolves instead. I shot seven of them."
NW MN is lousy with wolves. In part due to the more open terrain you see a considerable amount more than the Arrowhead and rest of the range. I've seen the numbers the DNR has for wolf density and I don't know.....it might be more accurate than what field observations strongly indicate---there's way more wolves in the Northwest.
I had another buddy who has a place up on the angle....so most of the deer he shot were more likely to give Rez or Ontario tags on them than 'Sota.
His best year on wolves over the half dozen or so we were buds was thirteen. He usually shot four to eight but that year he had some jokeful reason he thought it'd be hilarious to shoot a banker's dozen.
Unlike the guy hunting Lancaster he kept one....I'm thinking two actually every year out....cherry picking the really nice ones.
Ontario sold Non-Res, Non-Canadian, wolf tags at the time for $250 I want to say....with the only option where you got two???
I might be wrong on that maybe it was just one tag they issued, can't remember for sure. Regardless, he had a lot of buddies he took hunting.......
.....pretty fukcing easy to shoot a MN wolf on the Angle and then hop on your sled and take it across the border to register it on the Ontario side and then ride back in with your totally legal, CITES tag and all, "Canadian" wolf.
This same dude was getting $300 for a bear gall bladder and collected a few dozen a year for several seasons. The chinks were real trendy on dried, ground up, and powderized bear gall bladder for a while as the most popular item of the many weird things they pay top dollar to try and get their dicks extra hard.
How did my buddy pull this one off?
He was friends with the Indians that sold the bear tags on the Angle. The Angle is almost entirely Red Lake Rez acres. We were all degenerate drunks that dabbled in other shit at the time......didn't take us real long getting smashed one night after getting on the subject to figure out that if our Indian buddies selling the tags just told every dude buying one that we'd throw them fifty bucks their way if they'd GPS the coordinates of their gut pile for us and got ahold of us to where we could get to it within a day.....pretty easy way to quickly pile up some bear gall bladders.
I bet some of you are thinking about calling bullshit......because there's no way as US Cititzens we'd ever be able to sell a bunch of bear gall bladders to the Chinese without getting royally butt-raped by the USFWS for attempting such a blatant violation of CITES.....hell, anyone that did what I just described would be viewed as a fairly serious...international-traffickers....a poaching ring......
.....Luckily for us our Indian Drunks in Crime aren't US Citizens. As such, they're not forced to adhere to International Law like CITES the US has agreed to enter and enforce mutually agreed upon anti-trafficking laws pertaining to animal parts.
So they got a hundred, guy providing coordinates to his legally taken bear gut pile got $50, we got the remainder which wasn't too shabby with Chinaman paying $600 at peak market value.