Bull/cow or calf?

[werner.reiche]

Wow, sure is some nonsensical posts here. Sorry Dilly and Birdbull but you win the prize on this one to claim its a money grab. Really? There's not enough money generated in moose license sales to keep the lights and heat going in a district office. That thought insults all those bios who've dedicated their careers to doing the best job they can toward managing a very demanding program. MNR's mandate first and foremost is to ensure sustainable moose populations, not ensuring the viability of tourist outfitters. If you do want to point the finger at someone, then look in a mirror because hunters demand they have something to hunt. It now becomes a juggling act between proper management initiatives and satisfying a very demanding and vocal hunter group who often come armed with political backing. On the other end of this thread , MarkD and Blasted Sabers comments are just about as close and accurate as you can get to the current state of affairs.
The demise of once healthy moose populations from the 50's and 60's era isn't that difficult to figure out. I hunted in those years. Loss of habitat, increase in number of access roads, improved access tools, 4x4's, ATV's and side x sides. Smarter hunters, especially calf hunters, thanks to the internet. Ribbon rail--train kills. Those numbers alone would astound you. Unregulated native kill--another issue.
In my humble but honest opinion, the only way to get our moose population back to a sustainable but highly restricted hunt would be to close a large number of WMU's down completely for nothing short of 5 years.

Good post Sawbill. What a lot of people see as "the MNR money grab" is actually the MNR trying to keep the hunters happy (and quiet). Lots of hunters are not happy with the reduced opportunities. QC has done a lot of things right and while I like the points system, what they do is simpler. Not sure if they still do it, but it used to be bulls only odd years, cows calves bulls even years. Require multiple tags for a single moose and when your tag is used, you stop hunting. One reason there are so few tags available is that with party hunting, almost all adult tags get used. If you eliminate party hunting you could likely increase the number of tags available by 5X.

Hunters need to adapt their expectations to reality.

Regarding the OP's question about strategies. There's some guesswork involved, but generally, you want the guys with least points to apply for the easiest tags and the guys with the most points work towards the high-value (bull) tags. If I were in a group of 2 hunters with 8 points and your area required 8+ points for a tag, I'd save those point allocations for bull tags and forego the calf hunting. If it's all about the experience, you can go up north for a bird hunt and camping instead of the moose hunt and wait out a bull tag.

[werner.reiche]

Read it! Some stuff is just astonishing!
http://www.adfg.alaska.gov/static/ho...via_alaska.pdf

The way moose are hunted and managed in Scandinavia is
quite foreign to us. Moose meat can be sold. Landowners, including
public land agencies, own the moose on their land, and profit from
the harvest.

Almost every acre of moose habitat in Scandinavia isaccessible to hunters. Dense systems of high quality forest roadsare drivable by car or pickup.

Key phrase from that article.

"One of the biggest reasons Scandinavian hunters can take so many moose is because there are very few natural predators."

Ontario has a lot of predators, as well as the native hunting.

[Gilroy]

Key phrase from that article.

"One of the biggest reasons Scandinavian hunters can take so many moose is because there are very few natural predators."

Ontario has a lot of predators, as well as the native hunting.

Pretty much the reason for the success of the Moose in NFLD ,the NFLD wolves were eradicated before the turn of the century.
Compounded by the vey bad decision years ago to end the Spring Bear hunt, bears like calves.

[trimmer21]

Wow, sure is some nonsensical posts here. Sorry Dilly and Birdbull but you win the prize on this one to claim its a money grab. Really? There's not enough money generated in moose license sales to keep the lights and heat going in a district office. That thought insults all those bios who've dedicated their careers to doing the best job they can toward managing a very demanding program. MNR's mandate first and foremost is to ensure sustainable moose populations, not ensuring the viability of tourist outfitters. If you do want to point the finger at someone, then look in a mirror because hunters demand they have something to hunt. It now becomes a juggling act between proper management initiatives and satisfying a very demanding and vocal hunter group who often come armed with political backing. On the other end of this thread , MarkD and Blasted Sabers comments are just about as close and accurate as you can get to the current state of affairs.
The demise of once healthy moose populations from the 50's and 60's era isn't that difficult to figure out. I hunted in those years. Loss of habitat, increase in number of access roads, improved access tools, 4x4's, ATV's and side x sides. Smarter hunters, especially calf hunters, thanks to the internet. Ribbon rail--train kills. Those numbers alone would astound you. Unregulated native kill--another issue.
In my humble but honest opinion, the only way to get our moose population back to a sustainable but highly restricted hunt would be to close a large number of WMU's down completely for nothing short of 5 years.

Preach it. Some day,someone may listen.

[gbk]

[QUOTE=MarkD;1149398]G
It is math. Not very simple but not entirely complicated either. Think about it. To VERY simplify, statistically, if you shoot adult moose you miss 1.5 youngsters in the next year. If you shoot a calf you miss 50% of younger next year compared to the adult. Something like that…


Interesting calculation, however up until this Year this calculation was not valid,and had no effect to save the moose population.
Reason is the way the system worked-everyone had a calf tag.So hunters would not have to choose between calf or a cow,but would shoot both(or the whole Family)Most everyone of us heard about that,or know hunters who did that. Fully legally.
Your calculation will(may?)have impact from this year(if one chooses to shoot a calf and forfeit a shootable and legal cow).The group will have ONE moose to shoot versus in the past when everyone was able to shoot a calf in the group(minus the Bull/cow tag holder).Even he could ,If he choose not to harvest a calf when shot presented itself.
Only few years past we gor some(very few)dedicated Calf areas............maybe 10 % of the moose range was"protected"with it.

[Ata83]

do we still relocate Ontario moose to USA ?

[MarkD]

After some thinking… I would say…
Firstly, there is no simple reason for low moose population in Ontario and as such no simple solution to fix it.
It is a multifactor problem. Some factors we know: hunting (and probably wrong tag allocation (bull vs cow vs calf)); native unregulated harvest; predators (wolf, bear); brain worm. I might miss some… Some factors we might not know at all.
Then, I would think that considering the whole Ontario as a single and/or uniform moose habitat is very wrong.
It seems (after reading that article Alaska vs Scandinavian) that the Northern part population might be just normal and cannot be increased significantly just due to climate and poor nutritional conditions. At the same time the natural predation (wolf, bear) creates the most serious impact.
In the southern part hunting (licensed and native) probably gives the biggest hit along with the brain worm. It is well known that deer population negatively affects moose, probably due to brain worm.
In any case, even though it seems that the new tag system is the right way to go I would not expect significant changes in moose population at least in the coming couple decades or so.
Seems to me we have to live with it...

[rick_iles]

I have not seen any stats yet regarding any impact the later, and shortened calf season has had on moose numbers.

[MarkD]

Interesting calculation, however up until this Year this calculation was not valid,and had no effect to save the moose population.

Again and again and again...
MANY factors affect the moose population. Hunting is only part of them. See the posts above.
As such it is very possible that with any tag allocation system the result would be exactly the same. Even worse, it is possible that even eliminating moose hunting for years entirely would not give the desirable result.
You could see and try to understand that there are many differences between Europe and America's moose situation. Environmental, traditional and social altogether. Not everything that is easily possible to achieve in Sweden has any possibility here.

[Fox]

Preach it. Some day,someone may listen.

Probably not, this topic has been beaten for a while.

Remember all those claims about hunters being such great conservationists? They are, until you tell them they cannot hunt something because the population is crashing.