Poor Season For Hunters, Wildlife Watchers Fish And Game Criticized For Not Feeding Deer, Elk In Coeur D’Alene River Basin

It’s been a disappointing season for hunters and wildlife watchers in Shoshone County, and some people blame the Idaho Department of Fish and Game.

Hundreds signed a petition complaining that the agency didn’t feed deer and elk in the Coeur d’Alene River basin last winter.

The big scroll of taped-together notebook pages will be sent to Gov. Phil Batt.

“It was a hard winter … there was a massive kill,” said Sue White of Osburn, one of those who signed in support of state-sponsored feeding in future harsh seasons. “We give a portion of our tax dollars to do that.”

The money actually comes from hunting license sales, and wildlife managers decided that the Coeur d’Alene River basin was not the best place to spend it last year.

Greg Tourtlotte, regional supervisor for Fish and Game, asked for $32,000 from the department’s $417,000 fund last year. It was used to feed 2,852 whitetail deer and 105 elk at 50 sites, he said.

Most of the feeding places were in Bonner and Boundary counties. The main reason: The animals tend to congregate in larger groups there, making it efficient and more valuable to feed them. In the Coeur d’Alene basin, the animals were more scattered, Tourtlotte said.

“There’s lots of places where you get two or three here, 10 or 15 there,” he said. “And the last thing you want to do is get food out there for one or two days, draw the animals in and then not get back in there because of snow conditions or bad weather. The animals may end up getting trapped in there.”

Biological sense isn’t the only incentive to put out hay pellets, Tourtlotte acknowledged Tuesday.

“When people are calling us and saying, ‘These animals are starving, you’ve got to feed them,’ … that drives the program more than anything,” he said.

There was no public outcry from the Coeur d’Alene basin last year, he said.

Claudia Childress of Murray helped gather the signatures. She counted 500 of them. Her family owns Babin’s Store at Prichard, where the petition was signed.

White was among those who signed because she knew that Lloyd Babin, Childress’ father, had spent a lot of money feeding elk on his property.

“They do an awful lot up there. They’re real good people,” she said.

People signed because they are goodhearted, state biologist Jim Hayden said.

“They really hate to see a situation out of their control, and they want to do something,” he said.

Biologists are trying to determine whether this year’s poor hunting season was due to the harsh conditions that killed a lot of big game. But hunters didn’t have much luck around Priest Lake, either, and volunteers on snowmobiles worked hard there to feed 1,400 deer.

“In the areas where the deer were fed, it made a difference (to survival),” Hayden said. “But in the entire unit, the answer is no.”

Tourtlotte wanted it made clear that the feeding decisions were made in Coeur d’Alene.

“There’s a misconception that money that might have been available to the region wasn’t spent here because Boise wouldn’t let us,” he said. “That wasn’t the case.”

, DataTimes