First I want to congratulate Sam and the other members that were successful! - job well done guys!
Second, I want to share our group’s report for our 15B hunt which you can see from the title was unsuccessful. We hunted the Dog River area.
As usual, we went for a good time and getting a moose would be a welcome bonus but not a must have. We got a good number of birds and enjoyed the fall foliage and outdoors, but to say that the moose hunt itself was atrocious again would be an understatement.
Huntable moose population: The report that numbers are only down 20% (recent Out of Doors Magazine article) is a big understatement in our opinion. We have hunted the area for almost 30 years, so we can see the difference of before and after. The area went from us seeing moose everywhere, and if the group worked hard, success being almost guaranteed, to totally relying on luck of seeing a moose passing by on its way to elsewhere. So, IMO, we conclude that the HUNTABLE moose population, went down way more than 20%. I would say at least 60% or more.
Hunter numbers: To say that 15B was the usual "Sea of Orange" this year would be a gross understatement. It seems that this year everyone came to 15B. Without exaggeration, every nook and cranny had a camp on. We heard that there were disputes to access to camping sites with the usual “Hey we had that spot last year- this is OUR spot! Get out!!”. We witnessed both the OPP and the MNR racing up the road I guess to look after these disputes. I would say that every camp had an average of 8 hunters, with some camps having more than 20 hunters. We counted the numbers of hunters in one small area to be to more than 50. This did not include the hunters that came to the area from local resorts. I would say without doubt that hunters outnumbered the moose by a hundredfold in the area.
15B Area: We, as many others hunt cuts and close to water areas. I believe with the decline in demand for paper, the forestry companies seem to have not been very active, resulting in very few new cuts in the area. The existing cuts for the most part are way overgrown and have closed in roads that are hard to access. The newer ones seem to be sprayed right after cutting, resulting in no new growth and the resulting poor habitat for moose.
Blocking the roads: There were a FEW good spots generally near water that had good sign, but for these the competition for access was brutal and intense. 99.9% of the hunters in the area were super nice and cordial and respected the first come first serve rule, but more than a few bad apples resorted to blocking roads and denying access to the crown land to others. We ourselves scouted a couple of good spots only to find the entrances to the roads to HUGE areas blocked 2 hours before legal time by trucks and the occupants refusing to move. We reported these to the MNR who said that they would follow up and that there is a charge for this of interfering with a legal hunt, but it seems that nothing was done about it as these continued the practice morning and night.
Our conclusion is that the MNR gave way too many tags for the area and sent a good number of moose hunters in 15B. This clearly is not sustainable as there are few spots to put all these hunters and even fewer huntable moose in the area.
Again a big congratulations to those lucky few that were successful and do not have to have tag soup like us this year.
Cheers
