9/17/2023 0 Comments Cow elk hunt wyomingGame and Fish responded at the time by more than doubling its population objective for the herd, from 2,250 to 5,000, Binfet said. “Sometime in the late ‘90s, early 2000s, there was certainly a recognition that elk numbers really took off,” Binfet said. The herd grew, slowly at first, but that growth became exponential. Back in the 1960s, Binfet said, there were few enough elk in the region that managers even augmented numbers by releasing elk captured from the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Justin Binfet, who coordinates wildlife for Game and Fish’s Casper Region, has managed the Laramie Peak Herd for two decades. It’s enough of an issue that a statewide task force is exploring changes to how the Wyoming Game and Fish Department issues licenses that would increase hunting pressure on herds holed up on private land. They find it on private properties, and now there’s too many of them. When bow- and rifle-toting hunters hit the hills each fall, elk go where they’re most likely to stay alive. But interwoven are traditional cattle ranches, mega ranches sprawling out over as many as hundreds of thousands of acres and properties that are bought and held mostly so they can be hunted for a couple weeks a year. The highest-elevation areas are generally part of the Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest, state land and Bureau of Land Management property. Problems persist because of the patchwork of land ownership, wildlife managers say. This swath of the Rockies’ eastern front reaches from Laramie to Casper, home to the Laramie Peak/Muddy Mountain Herd, which has averaged somewhere between double and triple Game and Fish’s 5,000-elk objective. In Wyoming, where elk are overpopulated statewide, the Laramie Mountains are the poster child. Across the West, state wildlife management agencies have struggled to knock back herd numbers, especially in places where the adaptable animals have learned to take refuge on private property, away from public lands hunters. Issues with overpopulated elk, of course, aren’t restricted to Turtle Rock Ranch. “But now, almost every day, our top concern starts with elk.” “Talk to a rancher, you’d think the welfare of their cattle, management of their grass and other natural resources would be at the top of their mind,” Grant said. In the Wyoming wind, the tarps take sail. For some reason the elk have a habit of tugging on the tarps with their mouth and flipping them into the air. Tarps that the Grants use to dam up their ditches and flood-irrigate their fields are evidently attractive to the 400-plus pound native ungulates. Elk are also a headache in less predictable ways. Fixing up fences used to take a day or two. That’s just the start of Turtle Rock Ranch’s elk problems. The state agency reimbursed them more than $70,000. Last year the cost of getting replacement hay to the family’s remote central Wyoming ranch was $260 a ton. “Our total hay crop is usually around 800 tons of hay,” Grant said, “and with measurement technique, we’re losing at least 200, sometimes up to 270 tons of hay” to elk. Turtle Rock Ranch owners Mark and Angela Grant at their kitchen table on April 19, 2022.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |