Biologists sometimes take a good lashing

Mama, don’t let your babies grow up to be wildlife biologists – unless your boy’s named Sue and your girl’s dubbed Bubba.

If they don’t have a skin thick as a bison hump, they’ll never last in the profession of managing game.

About 140 hunters and landowners devoted their evening last Thursday to comment on proposed hunting regulations in Spokane. It was the largest turnout for any of the statewide meetings conducted last month by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Standing on the sidelines and moving from group to group, I was, in most cases, proud to be a sportsman, although it was a short course in the futility of pleasing the public.

Hunters gave biologists their field observations, opinions and suggestions for new regulations. Many hunters listened and learned the rationale for management options, such as increasing moose permit application fees or lengthening turkey hunting seasons.

Unfortunately, some hunters didn’t listen at all. Griping was easier than understanding. They clung to the traditional baseless premise that game managers are nitwits with no interest beyond collecting license fees.

The largest group gathered around the biologists taking comments on hunting proposals for northeastern Washington.

A few of those hunters agreed with the department’s plan to maintain enough restrictions to help assure a healthy ratio of big whitetail bucks.

But the loudest hunters disagreed, claiming there was no shortage of big bucks and insinuating that the biologists were hoarding them.

The biggest complaint was the short season for hunting deer with a rifle. This sentiment often was delivered with a good dose of the traditional contempt for the long season archers enjoy, even though archers kill far fewer deer than rifle hunters.

But then it got silly.

Several hunters dismissed all the biological arguments against liberalizing rifle hunting during the rut and the impact that would have on the number of mature bucks.

“In Alabama they can kill a deer or two a day in a season that goes for months,” one hunter said, indicating that we ought to be able to do something similar here in Eastern Washington.

The whiners have the advantage of suffering no ramifications for being loose with facts and ignoring circumstances. They can say what they want and melt anonymously in to the crowd.

Game managers cannot shoot from the hip. They shoulder the responsibility for maintaining healthy big-game populations.

My hunting partners and I counted 171 whitetails last year in the 7 miles we drove in Central Montana to where we had permission to hunt during midseason. Maybe there’s a reason they allow a longer deer season there.

Even next door in Idaho, the habitat and hunting terrain is different enough to allow more liberal seasons.

As for Alabama, instead of simply nodding my head in agreement with the yahoos blasting the WDFW biologists, I looked into the matter.

Alabama has a gun season that runs from the Saturday before Thanksgiving through Jan. 31. In some areas, hunters can, in fact, kill up to two deer a day.

Of course, if every Alabama hunter killed two deer a day throughout the season, there would soon be no deer, said Bill Gray, an Alabama state wildlife biologist and co-author of “Biology and Management of White-tailed Deer in Alabama.”

Don’t get caught up in those details, he said in a telephone interview.

“It’s a little different down here,” he added, noting that:

Alabama has perhaps the third-largest whitetail population in the nation.

Nearly all of the state is whitetail habitat.

“Alabama has so many deer – about 1.5 million – our biggest problem is keeping a handle on it in some areas,” he said.

Nevertheless, most public hunting areas are heavily restricted, with hunting allowed maybe only a dozen days a year.

“Overhunting isn’t an issue, I mean we have swamps. But overharvesting of bucks is something we have to guard against even in Alabama.”

“Hunting access is an issue. You have to pay to play here. You don’t just show up at a farmer’s house and ask to hunt because the farmer’s already leased his land to hunters for $7 to $20 an acre.”

With this little bit of research, one can understand why hunting seasons are more liberal in Alabama, where sportsmen barely check the growth of whitetail populations by harvesting 500,000 deer a year. Washington kills only about 40,000 deer a year and that includes whitetail, blacktails and mulies.

My hat’s off to biologists willing to wet their fingers to the wind of public opinion. But the day they give more credence to the crowd than to the science, we’re doomed.