Ep. 41: Elk Predation Blues with Paul Wik
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Welcome back to Cutting the Distance. Today I'm in a cabin about 27 kilometers from Esotan in the Blue Mountains of Washington helping try to wrestle newborn elk calves in an effort to put collars on them, ear tag them, and let Fish and Wildlife monitor them to see how they're doing. I'm here with Polwick who's been here for the last 20 years and currently serves as a district wildlife biologist

He completed his undergrad at Central Washington and received his master's from the University of Idaho. After completion of his master's, 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 to rival any elk hunting 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, 10 short years, the units seem to have taken a little downward turn. And two years ago, they had only a 13% 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 elk are 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 going 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 tag in it, had a collar on it, but you're in the thick of 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 27 calves in the area we're currently in. We also have two other groups working in the Dayton and Toucan areas that are catching calves. Our goal is to have 125 by the end of next week and

And although the numbers I just gave you aren't going to say we're going to get there, but we have a helicopter showing up in two days that is going to 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 phase. 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 going to get into it here in a little bit. Um, exactly what, uh,

capturing calves looks like. Cause to me it's all brand new too. So I'm, I was asking you questions like, how do I glass for them? Where should they be? You know, cause this is a time of year most elk hunters aren't thinking about elk or they're not necessarily out in the woods 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 going to jump into that a little bit more.

But we're going to start this cutting the distance episode like we do every episode. We're going to 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 phelpsgamecalls.com or send us 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 wreaks the most havoc on elk?

So for calves, which we have the most data of right now, it's cougars, at least in the Blue Mountains. We're finding that cougars are taking 62% 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 mature elk? 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 mature elk 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 in 03. We were marking adult bulls and some adult cows, but mostly adult bulls.

And cougars 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, um, by any means, but it sounds like from the data, from, from the science, um,

cougars are the predator that at least has the biggest effect on calves and from old data it had the most effect negative effect on mature bulls or adult bulls 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 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 hopefully 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? Are there places where bears will have more of an effect? Or maybe cougars aren't so much and wolves are heavier? You always hear about the famed Lolo area in Idaho. Do you have much insight to if...

the Cougars 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 90% of the Blue Mountains are in Oregon. And Oregon's done some similar work with calves in the early 2000s. 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 and some are eco region 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, you

and climate and fire history all play a pretty big, 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 um included in that in your opinion like how do you is it you know when we talked about this a little bit you know it's the same things we talk about but uh 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 difficult.

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 30 40 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 size 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 timeframe where there was no hunting, correct? As we tried to rebuild these populations? - There has always been hunting in the Blues.

Uh, there's been one game management unit, the lit Creek unit where we weren't issuing branch bull tags for a period of time, but there was still the spike only season. Uh, 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 1930s. I think the elk were brought back in the 1920s from Yellowstone, put on a train, brought to Dayton, brought to Pomeroy. And, uh,

from what I've been told from some of the locals within five years, we were having egg damage. Gotcha. I was, I was just kind of, I was digging it. Um, I didn't know if that was like a unique way to maybe study carrying capacity, why there were so many, you know, few tags given, were we able to watch those herd numbers? Because there was, I mean, we, we've talked about it back, but probably 2010 to 14, maybe you might be able to envelope those dates better, but the blues were maybe an all time high or, or, uh,

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 bulls, you know, all of these things kind of add into these little factors. And it seemed to be, and you know, maybe 2005, 2015 was like the high. Did we get to a point where you thought we were close to carrying capacity or has it always been off of that a little bit? No. And the reason I'd say that is 2015 was roughly our recent high in elk numbers that we, for monocultures.

modern data. And that's kind of a relative term because we've been doing elk population estimates through aerial survey since 1996. And the highest counts we got were roughly around 2015. 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. Yeah.

And living to one year of age. Because it has to do with nutrition that's available and those things will start to affect. Just like our last podcast with Brock, we get into...

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 you were close to carrying capacity. - Yeah, at no point in the last 20 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 guest. Feel free to email those to us at ctd at phelpsgamecalls.com or send us a message on social and we'll do our best to get them on here.

So now we're going to 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

2013. 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 at 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, we kind of kicked this off with some,

I had even heard numbers of worse than the 13% survival, mortality above 90%. The blues from a hunter's perspective seems to be deteriorating. And so I got ahold of you and just wanted to come talk to you. And what you're seeing, a guy that's out here with these elk, deer, sheep 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...

All the biologists I've got to meet, you know, get to hang out with you so far for just a couple hours, like you care about the elk. You're 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 you're seeing on the ground and shed some light on that.

So we're going to jump back into what you're doing right now, 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, 2000 through 2016, we had pretty healthy calf ratios. You know, we really want a minimum of 25 calves per hundred for our population just to remain stable. About 2016, right after 2016, the numbers started dropping. The numbers have been consistently below 25 since 2016.

Which indicates a problem. Something changed. We didn't know exactly what. We have some ideas that climate played a part 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 2016, 2017, 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 bulls 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

And let's see, about 2019, 2020, 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 collaring effort in 2021 was our first year of doing that.

We caught 125 calves in 2021. In 2022, we were able to catch 102. We weren't even able to catch all 125. The helicopter couldn't locate enough calves to keep going at that point. And it is a bit of a cost prohibitive effort there. 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 the

what we think is our final year of doing this to look at calf survival estimates and is there options for the agency to make management actions that can improve calf survival. So with that said, make management decisions, in your opinion, is there... And we're going to get into this more. I may be jumping ahead on my own topics here, but what...

So I look at it from like, if maybe cows just aren't getting pregnant, like do you need to have more bulls on the landscape? Or, you know, so some of this like, what can be made based on calf survival? I mean, we know it'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 abiotic factors climate.

how good a shape is the winter 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 account for 78% of the mortalities that are occurring, and that's the first two-year average.

And of that, 62% of the calves dying are dying from cougars. So it really points that cougar predation is the leading cause of mortality in

Now, the one thing we can't determine 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? Uh, 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, or 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. Uh,

And that's where wolves, you know, they tend to take the old and the young and the susceptible. On 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 62% of the calves are dying from cougars at this point. Gotcha. Yeah.

So what percentage of calves, I mean, you may have alluded to it. You need 25% here in the blues is the determinant. You know, so what, what percentage of calves do you need to make it through in order to maintain, which you've said 25%, I believe it correct me if I'm wrong. We use a ratio of calves per a hundred cows. So if you have 25 calves per a hundred cows, break it down 50, 50 by sexes. So you have 12 and a half male, 12 and a half female per a hundred cows. And again,

Average adult cow survival, good cow survival is 90%. So annually across your herd. You can see as low, 85% to 90% is kind of average. So you need to replace 10% to 15% per 100%. So that gets you ballpark needing 25%. Just maintain. Maintain your population stable. Okay, and then...

Is there a point in which those calves, I mean, we talked earlier and we'll get into the story of you going up finding the mortality calf yesterday. But is there a point at 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 the mom beds them down. They're basically cougar bait at that point. But what's the data show as far as collar tracking that they've got a good chance of 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 150 days of being alive in the last two years. So our winter survival has been 100%. So we really see that zero to three months is when a majority of them are dying. It's really consistent. I mean, the numbers taper off pretty quick if you're losing the percent we're losing in 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 bell curve and you lose about 70. I don't know what the data is. You lose the majority of your calves in those first 120, 150 days. And after that, the line's straight. You just don't lose any more that are collared. Yeah, which is really surprising because there still should be some sources of mortality occurring. And one possible explanation is we've lost so many calves by that time hits. Our sample size is pretty small through winter.

I think we had like 13 calves going into the winter the first year. And last year we had a problem with collars. So in September, October, we lost 36 collars to fences. So these are expandable collars with just pleats that have a couple 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 a barbed wire 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, um, to, to get some of your predation, um, number, it sounds like you guys are doing something where you're, you're sending in saliva swabs now, um, on the study. And, and what that is, my understanding is so that you guys can confirm what you're visually 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 crop scene in the field. Uh,

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

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 would be interesting just to if nothing else just 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 may be

disrupt their home territory or you know i i don't know what you're going to gather out of that but it'd be definitely interesting to see um the 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, cause around home, I don't know if blues is different or the density is higher on cougars. I obviously compared to where we're at at home, but you know, we always hear people talk about like 25 to 50 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.

Yeah, we did do cougar work here in the blues, I think in 2009 through 2012. And the numbers are probably not correct on the top of my head, but I thought it was about 45 to 60 square kilometers for a female and roughly 150 square kilometers for a male.

I have to make a joke on kilometers. Is Esotan County the only county in the state that still uses kilometers? Yes. Since the 1970s is what I was told. That was my joke on the intro. I was following, it's not mile posts here, it's kilometer posts and the cabin's 27 kilometers. So I found that a little funny fact about Esotan County. So let's get back to how you would normally, let's say without the saliva swabs confirming, what do you...

I don't 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 animal. 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. When we're walking in on a scene, we're looking for tracks if there's the potential for tracks.

We're looking for caching of the animal. So cougars definitely tend to scrape grass and brush and stuff and bury their kill after they're done with their feeding. Then we're going to skin the animal. So we're going to examine the outside, look for bite wounds, 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 going to see bruising, uh,

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 premortem or 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. Some of these calves are so small, you know, they're roughly 30 to 50 pounds at this zero to seven day age. You can skin it out a lot of times and hold the hide up to the sun and you can see the scratch marks from the four talons 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 and side.

Cougars are really quick and effective at killing these things. We're not seeing a lot of damage to these things. Then they typically feed around the paunch. Their first feeding is near the paunch. We're getting to these things, so the collars are set. If it doesn't move for four hours, we get a text and an email that something's not right. And we've been getting to these things within 24 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 are 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 and glassing the right spots. You're going out on a high ridge, glassing into these pockets that are known to

bee 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 um and leave and then you're able to just walk in and and you had mentioned and i'm going to get the term wrong i'm not going to mention it that some people believe that the elk have 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 bradycardia. 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 those one day old calves are extremely easy to handle. We don't have to hobble them.

We put a blindfold 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 incisor growth of their teeth, the color and softness of their dew claws and hooves, and the umbilical cord attachment point, the umbilicus, whether it's still bloody, scabbed, dried, and

And being able to see them walk a lot of times is 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. 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. Yeah.

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. But we definitely miss occasionally. And then just to coordinate,

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 it should have an effect but doesn't seem to have much of an effect on elk, so at least from South

Southeast Washington down to most of Utah, it doesn't seem to be much effect at all when that peak of calves is hitting, which is a little bit interesting that there's no real change as you move down latitude or up latitude.

at least within the data we have from me hunting in New Mexico to Washington, the rut seems to coincide at the same time and same dates. - Yeah, roughly September 19th to 21st is gonna be your peak of breeding.

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So one thing I want to jump into, we talked a little bit about carrying capacity. In the blues, especially where we're at, I don't think we need to hide the location, but we're here in the Lit Creek unit currently. And I know you'd mentioned earlier that the data shows about 500 plus or minus. Maybe a little bit of a lack of mature bulls is really what's limiting what people would call the big bull tags, the quality tags.

where there's a unit across adjacent to it that seems to have double the carrying capacity for a similar 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's doing so much better than an adjacent unit? - That's a tough question to answer.

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 2016. We missed our opportunity to, you know, 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 inexpensive to go start capturing elk with the hope that it was a short-term thing. The,

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 carrying 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 Lit Creek unit are going to private land.

uh, throughout the winter. It's hard to compete with farmers and winter wheat and canola. Yeah. Even with a nice, healthy bunch grass ecosystem that we have here. Yeah. The mountain view elk, a good percentage of them go to a feedlot in Oregon and get fed all winter. Uh,

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. Winters are probably more severe actually down in Mountain View. So I don't have a good answer as to why some units are performing differently than others. And calf survival, you mentioned it's just the adult survival of calf.

calf recruitment or 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 there is a difference, but it's not a huge difference. I mean, we're still below 25 down there. I mean, a couple of years in a row, the feedlot was 600 elk on it, was averaging 12 calves per 100.

Yeah, 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 350 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 may be affecting it is, you know, climate change. And what I mean by that is the extreme weather swings. We may have, you know, bad, an extreme winter 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 calf recruitment, which may, it may play into it,

um you're not we're not being helped at all by the weather right it's not it's not giving us a favor so we're trying to you know compound poor calf survivability in between this but then get dished out some crappy winters and some dry summers yeah i mean in the last eight years uh we've had two severe winters the winter of 16 17 and 18 19 uh

probably one of the worst winters in 50 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 2015. We also had a 21 drought that was some of those temperatures that set all time records. It was like 122 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 2015 and a severe winter of 16, 17, so if they're bred in the fall of 15, they're born in 16, we count them as calves in 17 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. To rebuild this, you need all of that ideal. 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

um, issues that are ultimately not helping us out with the elk population. Yeah. And our calf study, we did, we started in 21 in a severe drought. Uh, 22 was one of the more wet springs and summers in the blue mountains. And we don't know what 23 is going to be. I mean, we did see higher survival in 22. Is it related to the weather? You know, those are really tough questions to tease apart. Yup. Yup. It's tough. Um,

So let's, within management and management strategies, what are the bull to cow ratios here in the blues? Or does it vary tremendously from unit to unit? Or is it fairly...

It does vary unit to unit. Our goal is 20 to 25 bulls per hundred cows and 25 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 Wenaha typically high, a 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 bull 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? Do you get what I'm saying? Direct me there. Are we managing for quality still or are we going to have to get to a point where, hey, we may just need to manage for quantity and opportunity at some point?

We definitely still are managing for a little bit higher bull ratio than other units in the state, with the result being quality. Quality opportunity, quality bulls in terms of age structure, mature bulls 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 rewrote our elk plan 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 definitely, you know, go through that process and evaluate it and let the majority know.

you know, rule 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 die of old age on the landscape. I think that's healthy for an elk population or any hunted population. Uh, so I don't want to necessarily go down the road of, uh,

having average age of three to five year old in the harvest but if that's what the hunters want we could do that but there's 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 um a matter of fact we probably had a 20 minute conversation today on the hill is how do you manage for everybody and i think it's impossible we're gonna save that that little bit here for the end um

So back, let's rewind back to predators. I think that's the main purpose of the calf study. 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 collared, what, within the last week? Yes. Got a collar and 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.

Yeah, so I walked in on this dead calf and the dead calf was there. And as I'm getting close and these collars give you a GPS point, I'm using telemetry to listen to the calf and I can tell I'm probably within 10, 20 feet of it at this point.

Can't see the calf for sure, but I see this little tan patch in this shrub and I immediately conclude that that's the calf laying there under this 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, that I was then 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 20 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 wished you had some bear spray, maybe brought just 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 one of those things where they're how cool is this? And also am I in a bad spot? - Yeah, yeah. It looked a mature cat, maybe 110, 120-ish is what I was guessing, maybe a little bigger.

in the video? I was guessing a little bigger. A little bigger. I was guessing it was, you know, a tom that it might have been over 131, 40, but, you know, it is a really difficult thing to 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. It was, you know, tough, but yeah, it was kind of cool just for you to capture that and that cat running away and it's, you know, literally,

in such a short timeframe, you are the ones that 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 first 120 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 you're 90% chance of dying in that first year and then a 70% 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 yeah

We do have a healthy cougar population in the blues. Yeah. Yeah. So back to my question, I wanted you to share that little story. I forgot about it earlier when we were talking about the predators on the ground. In your opinion, 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 we're given now and the tactics that we can employ. 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 structures that Washington currently has.

Cougars, Washington's currently targeting 12 to 16% as our harvest guideline of cougars. And that's what the science shows that they reproduce with an excess of say average of 14%. So you can harvest 14% 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 30% 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 secretive 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. Yeah.

harvesting cats is not a bad thing in any way. I mean, I have a cougar tag in my pocket. But without political support and commission support,

we probably wouldn't open our season up to that, that structure without those people buying into it. We used to have a Cougar season year round season in the blues for one, one tag per person. And we actually killed less cats, uh, pre 2008 when we started adjusting our season structure than we did once we adjusted it. And, uh,

There's not a lot of people that want to kill a bunch of cats. Taxidermy is expensive. Time's expensive. Gas is expensive. And you got to spend a lot of time. Yeah. There's not a lot of proven tactics, right? To come out and be successful like deer 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 to,

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 of elk, 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.

Do, in your opinion, are hunters having a drastic effect on the population or is it a small enough population that it doesn't calculate in, if that makes any sense? It totally does. In terms of bulls, as long as there's enough bulls to breed the cows. And there's been some work done at Starkey in 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 bred in first estrus. 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 a population is killing cows. And in the blues, we've historically issued a lot of antlerless elk opportunities when the population can support it.

Uh, we're down to zero antlerless opportunities on public land and the tags we issue now are on the ag area. So we're, you know, trying to protect the farmers from damage and still balance the elk population, uh,

But that's kind of outside the core public land portion of the Blues. So there are some places that I'm still happy to issue lots of cow tags and say out by Tri-Cities, the Burbank area. You know, it's not an area we want the population to really grow or establish any more than it already is.

But in the core blues and 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.

- Gotcha. 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 age class like,

not necessarily trying to dig it, why there's a reduction in tags. Obviously, I'm in full support of definitely Cal, you know, and then ultimately Bull Tags coming down if you can't support that quality and that potential. But is that...

I don't want to twist what you said, but 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 what dictates that tag.

Yeah. So we do what's called an aerial site ability survey. So we fly in a helicopter, typically the first two weeks of March and the blues, uh, we fly the blues is broken into 37 different survey zones. Uh, we fly a percentage of those surveys zones based on what we determine are how many elk are in each one. And that's really based on 25, 30 years of doing this at this point.

So we have a good idea where the elk like to be for winter. And that accounts for elk you 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 95% probability of having this many elk with a range of this. With that, I actually have a formula that we calculate how many bull tags that we want to issue. So we calculate how many bulls we want to take

for the bull ratio, the bulls per hundred cows, broken out by GMU. And then that is further broken down by percentage of weapon type, archers, muzzleloaders, 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 is 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 manage 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,

Because we are managing for trophy, but are we managing on, all right, you've got 10 bulls over 350. I don't know if that's a horrible metric, but I'm throwing it out there. Or we've got tooth data back on the four bulls that were killed out of this unit and they're all averaging this. 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 yearlings, raghorns, what we call like three to four-year-old bulls, which you know probably are in that 250 to 300 range, 310 range, and then what we call adult bulls that are

you know, likely over 300. Judging a bull from the helicopter is not easy. It's really hard, but you can tell when it's a big bull versus a small bull. That's pretty easy to do. But if we run an average of just 20 to 25 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 sense.

So everything we've talked about, some struggles, you know, historically what I would, I would even great, great elk hunting, right? It's got 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 a potential but i almost feel we're at a point where we almost need to accept that it may not ever get back to where it was the historic highs maybe maybe not maybe you're going to disagree with me here but let's roll this up here to kind of to close this up do you have like an ultimate fix for this area and 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 in your opinion, like what are some things 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. You know, the habitat's in good condition in the Blue Mountains. We've had

numerous landscape level fires since 2005. A huge percentage of the Blue Mountains has burnt in the last 18 years, creating what should be good elk habitat. You know, fire has a

you know, a 10 to 20 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 and 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

uh, struggling lately. So are there dials we can turn? Yeah. 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, the very, um,

opinionated hunters right we talked about this on the mountain already this morning is I'm at a point in 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 13 year old son that's starting to hunt

I don't necessarily want him to have to go out and challenge himself to kill a trophy. I want him to have opportunity. My old man, where I'm at, yeah, he was good. 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...

versus muzzleloader 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 um you know and then you hear the rifle hunters argue about how many 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 going to voice our opinion differently when we go talk to the 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 going to end ours with it just because

I don't think we can all sit back and be the armchair biologists. Yeah, I would say most people on the landscape got good ideas. They're out there. They're observing. We're an intricate part of this balance, right? And so we're all involved, but I don't necessarily think that it's as easy as saying, I'm an archery hunter that wants to hunt trophy bulls. This is the way it should be. 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 rule 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 I honestly feel you guys are doing what's right by the herd and and making good decisions just

What do we do about this like opportunity versus quality? 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 20 years. Haven't drawn a branch bull tag yet. Sitting on 20 points. Really would like to pursue an adult bull while I work here as 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 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 2% success on our general season spike hunt, well, you know, one in 50 people are getting a shoot of 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, uh, we could go permit only, uh, people don't get a hunt every year. Uh, draw odds in Washington are, are not that good. Uh, our current system is not favorable to drawing tags very often. So it'd be great if our, our hunters could get together, not fight over weapon type, uh,

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. Uh, and in this day and age with the internet and social media, uh, 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, uh,

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 feasible and correct to keep the system functioning the way it should be. Yep. No, 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,

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 works for everybody. And yeah,

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 it is that we're trying to manage to a point that's sustainable and provides an 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. Um, yeah, we'll close it with that. I really appreciate you inviting me here. Hopefully we can go wrestle some, uh, calves tonight and, um, really looking forward to that, but I appreciate having you out. Thank you for being on the podcast. Um, I really, like I say, me being semi, um, numerical driven, science driven. I love being able to interview biologists because it lets us know exactly what's happening, not just a bunch of speculation and guessing. Um, so really appreciate you having me here, Paul. And, um,

good luck on what seems to be maybe a little bit of a of an uphill battle here with the the elk and the blues well thank you and hopefully we can see some positive change in the next couple years here yeah like i said i was very very fortunate last year to have a tag um 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 2013 but the opportunity is still there um

And so, no. Thank you. Thanks for being on and good luck and everything in the future. Thank you for having me. Yeah. Hey, we're going to take a little break here and talk about interstate batteries. Now, if you're like me enjoying the great outdoors, you need gear that is as reliable as it gets. That's why I power my adventures with interstate batteries. I use interstate batteries in my boats. I use interstate batteries in my camper. Great for your truck too. From Alaska to Montana, they're outrageously dependable.

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