Landers: Record bids help all bighorn hunters
UPDATED with name of bidder for Montana tag, released Feb. 21, 2013:
A hunter from Utah has raised the value of big-game hunting with a record bid of $480,000 for a special Montana bighorn sheep permit.
Selling coveted bighorn tags to the rich generates fallout from some hunters who’ve failed for decades to get a permit the regular-guy way – in a lottery drawing.
On the other hand, big bids for bighorns are a windfall for state wildlife biologists struggling to curb wild sheep woes.
The annual auctions for tags offered by Montana and other states, tribes and provinces were held at the 2013 Wild Sheep Foundation Convention and Sporting Expo, Jan. 31-Feb. 2, in Reno, Nev.
Wild sheep tags have been auctioned since 1980 at the convention to raise money for wildlife conservation. This was a banner year, with six records for the highest amounts bid for special permits. The 40 tags offered this year garnered a record $3.2 million.
The Montana bighorn sheep tag bid by Con Wadsworth of Draper, Utah, shattered the state’s record of $300,000 set in 2012. The “governor’s tag” holder has an edge with special privileges to hunt prized trophy areas with more favorable seasons than roughly 160 hunters who will draw ram permits in the state lottery.
This year’s Montana bid also surpassed the foundation’s previous record bid of $405,000 for a bighorn sheep tag, set in 1999 for the Alberta special permit. In other auctions at the convention:- British Columbia’s permit sold for $275,000, topping its record of $250,000 set last year.
- Oregon’s Rocky Mountain bighorn permit brought $135,000, bettering the $130,000 record set in 2011.
- Idaho’s bighorn tag sold for $150,000, down from a record $180,000 in 2005.
- Washington’s bighorn tag sold for $64,000, down from the record $100,000 set in 1994 before a pneumonia epidemic nearly wiped out the trophy herds near the Snake and Grande Ronde rivers.
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