Moose Hunt---Proof Of DNR Incompetence?

[maplelakeduckslayer]

Didn't the DNR release a study blaming black bears wiping out the young to take heat off wolves years ago?

[Fish Felon]

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.

[hobbydog]

I am from the NW corner and spend a fair amount of time there. Brain worm was the prime culprit. If wolves were a big part then yotes and fox would not have been super abundant in the 70s through the 90s. The 70s was when the deer populations really took off. Wolves moved in after the moose were gone. Coyotes and fox took a big hit. They moved in about the same time the elk moved back in from Manitoba. If the wolves are so bad there, why are the elk doing so good. I have to honestly confess that despite hearing them from my deer stand, seeing their tracks I have never seen one up there. Never captured one on my trail camera. But is a span of 10 years in the 90s I came across 3 moose walking in circles. But it was not one thing, parasites, cars, trains and changing landscape all played a part. Yeah, wolves maybe closed the deal. They maybe moved in to finish of the ones walking in circles.

When it comes to wolves, bar talk rules. They see them all over there place and all they see on their trail cams is wolves. It's the sole reason they can't shoot a deer....well I guess the DNR ranks right up there as a prime excuse as well. Are there wolves there, sure there are. But not in the numbers people think. Everyone thinks that having a season will make a big difference. If it is anything like the few seasons they did have, the number of wolves taken was not enough to have an impact. One wolf out of a pack here and one there won't hurt a pack and maybe even strengthen it. There are still a few moose around if you know where to look.

[Fish Felon]

[get-n-birdy]

Look at the studies of collared moose.

Don't deny there's other factors, but stress from wolves isn't a huge plus for calf recruitment.

Reduced logging and fire suppression isn't a great thing either, for forest health or critters in general.

North Dakotas moose herd is interesting.

The dnr in general tries, but mostly fails. Either from lack of funding or wasteful spending. But more than likely ineptitude.

[Fish Felon]

North Dakotas moose herd is interesting.

Doesn't it seem like something that you'd want to study and find out what conditions exist there that are causing the moose population to grow and expand that aren't present in Minnesota? Doesn't it seem like that could potentially be very important information?

What I view as another one of the DNR's biggest problems is their inability to think outside the box and look outside the state's borders when trying to figure something out.

[get-n-birdy]

Is that a moose in a cottonwoods bottom? Blasphemy, global warming should be killing that bull.

[Quack]

What I view as another one of the DNR's biggest problems is their inability to think outside the box and look outside the state's borders when trying to figure something

Don’t even have to go outside the state.

The arrowhead is mostly public land, and mostly USFS and a whole bunch is WILDERNESS

Tribal wildlife guy is amazed at the numbers of moose that show up in a burned over area 5 years after a fire in the middle of old growth & blowdown (aka the BWCAW). On the other hand, Foresters are not surprised when moose show up one year after an aspen clear cut.

Guess what? Just west of all that Federally mismanaged forest is state, county, and industry land that is getting clear cut regularly. Guess what? Old People between Hwy 53 and Hwy 71 are seeing more moose than they’ve ever seen.

DNR is either too stupid to notice, or they like getting the grant money for research that keeps them in the news for the climate change moose crisis.

Habitat is better outside the traditional moose range now.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[get-n-birdy]

X2!

[get-n-birdy]

Have talked to dnr people who think the lack of logging in the superior nf is moronicluly ignorant.