Montana Special Lion tags

Please tell me if I am not thinking clearly with my thought process when in comes to the special lion draw in Montana: You put in for years for a tag for let’s say 121-00 (max points is 10 now I think), draw it after say 12 years along with 22 other hunters, and book a hunt with an outfitter for Jan because it works with your schedule. In mid Dec the male quota of 8 is met for that district...so now you get to shoot a female, or eat your tag? What a joke, right? What is the point of having the permit if you possibly don’t even get to hunt what you waited years to draw. Or say you start your 10 day hunt with an outfitter and the quota is met on your 3rd day, I would think you aren’t going to get a refund. It looks like all the special permit districts are like that, where the male quota is half or less of the allocated tags. Am I missing something? My attorney was unavailable to decipher the regulation brochure for me so I come to the best source available.

You are correct. I'm personally looking at hunting another area of the state or even out of state for bobcats/lions. I will be called a "Tony", but with the wolf populations being heavy, and its concentrates a lot of houndmens into areas with no wolves. Seems like a lot of females/kittens in my area.

Ok, so I understood it correctly then, good to know my college education wasn’t a waste. But, I think it is crazy that this is how the drawing/hunt works. I wrote FWP an email, can’t wait to hear their response. It will probably be like the meeting I had with the BMA director back in 2007 asking why on earth BMA maps weren’t available online, he spent an hour dodging the point I was making while telling me how awesome the program was and how no one wanted maps online. A few years later they were online. A points only option would solve the issue if they are willing to consider changes down the road.

You are correct with your understanding of the process. Hopefully this is a hypothetical with your scenario and you haven't drawn yet.

I love how you have to ask for these stats, as if they can’t be posted like deer, elk, or sheep. I have 10 points, so I should draw unit 213 in another 20 years or so. Maybe the system will be fixed by then. I am almost afraid to draw, because Murphy’s Law is often a real phenomenon in my life.

Another hunttalker wanting to draw in the future is facing the exact scenario you outlined after drawing his first year of applying. If you are booking with an outfitter, make sure your schedule allows for an early December hunt unless you want to shoot a female.

Does that second page have the breakdown of drawing odds with preference points? I had called and asked for the odds a couple years ago, but haven't checked into it this year.

No, just 3 other units and totals for all the units in the state. I am sure that is top secret for some reason since they don’t post it like every other species that has a drawing.

Thanks. Good luck in your draws next year.

All the sheep, deer, and elk will be thanking me for supporting the lion management plan in a couple of weeks

Thanks Gerald. Good luck to you too. For the record the lion management plan is fine with me, just the way special licenses are allocated that I think is very flawed. I wrote a comment the other night on the FWP web site and one of the biologists called me the next day. It was hard for him to directly come out and say it but he agreed that there needs to be a discussion. His argument was that they want females harvested, my counter was why not have a male/female specific license. If you can hunt one or the other after one of the quotas has been met they obviously trust sportsmen to tell the difference.

I agree. I think it is a flawed plan if the idea is to harvest more females. If you look at kill statistic back a few years when there was a female sub-quota rather than a male sub-quota I'm pretty sure more females were being harvested. I'm not sure if the plan is working the way they intended for an increased female harvest.

There are a few other dynamics that factor into this strategy. Under the old female sub-quota the average age of toms harvested was fairly young. Mature tom lions are a significant cause of mortality in young lions as they will kill kittens in an attempt to get the female to cycle back into heat and also to protect territory. In our area, lion numbers were actually increasing because most of the older cats in the easy to access areas were being shot by hunters and the females were more successfully raising their kittens to maturity. As I understand it, the male sub is intended to try and get an older age class of toms. I'm not sure if this is going to actually be effective in achieving the goal. I suspect that it is going to just concentrate pressure on toms in the easier to access areas. In some of our areas, I don't think the bigger toms move out of the high country until the snows get deeper, sometimes after the quota is filled. (I don't have scientific proof of that, just anecdotal conclusion)

From a hunting perspective, I don't like the way the sub-quotas concentrate the hunting pressure into a narrow time frame. Realistically, even though the quota was open for nearly a month of hunting, there were only three short time periods where fresh snow made for optimal conditions. The second snowfall was on a weekend and every lion hunter in the county seemed to be concentrating on the same drainage we were hunting.

Once the males quota is reached I think most tag holders end up not hunting as much. Many are locals who don't have dogs and are drawing in hopes of tagging along with a hound man who wants to see a cat shot over his dogs. Everyone wants a tom as first preference and when you have to sort out toms and lactating females in hopes of finding a legal female the amount of legal lions available decreases dramatically. Even though many of them would have happily shot a female if they had seen a legal one in the tree while hunting toms, when they can only hunt females, many don't bother.

Add into the mix the occasional cat in a tree that it is difficult to determine sex with 100% certainty and you have more treed cats that live to see another day.

I think, emphasis on "think" that the male sub-quotas are not going to meet the long term biological goals. I noticed that this year in 121 the quota has already exceeded the target of 8 by two toms that were killed in the interval between the 12 hour check in call and the 24 hour official closing.

In my opinion I think more female lions would be killed by removing any sub quota and leaving the tags either sex. I think hunting pressure would be distributed more evenly and the ratio of toms/females killed wouldn't deviate significantly from long term trends. I know that when there used to be a female sub quota it would always fill. Now, I don't know if hunter even killing as many females as they used to.

Very well stated! You should just copy and paste that into the public comment section for the proposed 2018 lion season. http://fwp.mt.gov/hunting/publicCom...telopeMooseSheepGoatBisonBearWolfSeasons.html