Ep. 1033: The Case for a One Buck Rule with Brent Rudolph

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast, your guide to the white Tail Woods presented by first Light, creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind. First Light Go farther, stay longer, and now your host, Mark Kenyon, Welcome to the.

00:00:21
Speaker 2: Wired to Hunt podcast. This week in the show, we are discussing the case for a one buck limit and we’re chatting about this with Brent Rudolph, the deer, elk and moose specialist with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources. Here all right, welcome back to the Wired to Hunt podcast, brought to you by Moultrie. Today we’re talking deer regulations. I know that sounds really exciting, but stick with me here for a second. We’re talking about why a Department of Natural Resources might want to shift their state to the one buck rule. That means you get one buck tag. That’s how it is done in Indiana. That’s how it is in Kentucky, That’s how it is in Ohio, and I think some other states too, and that’s where it might be headed in my home state of Michigan. That has been proposed by our Department of Natural Resources, and in just a matter of days there will be a vote that will determine whether that’s going to be the law of the land for the twenty twenty seven season and moving forward. So what does that mean? That’s what I want to discuss today. I want to talk broadly with our guest Brent about the idea of a one buck rule and what that can achieve, what that’s done in other states, kind of talking kind of generally, what’s the case for a one buck limit, How might that lead to changes in deer populations and age structure and sex composition, all those different things. How can this lead to us being able to reach our management goals, Questions around how that might impact hunting experience and hunter opportunity, and then of course all the questions around concerns about it. You know, this has been the proposal that a lot of people are excited about. Many people think this might lead to an older age class of bucks in the state of Michigan, It might lead to more quote unquote big bucks in the state of Michigan. There are hopes that this will lead to a higher antlust harvest here in Michigan, all things that a lot of people want. But on the flip side, there’s lots of concerns too. Some people I’ve talked to said this will lead to more people hunting less, or that this could lead to declines and license sales and funding for our Department of Natural Resources. All of those are good and valid questions that I want to cover today. So whether you live in the state of Michigan or somewhere else, today’s conversation will be relevant to you as we explore this possible regulation in Michigan that has worked in some places seemingly, maybe it’s going to work here in Michigan, and maybe someday it’s going to be tried somewhere else too. Rudolph is the guy to talk to because he is one of the architects behind this proposal in Michigan. He is our dear specialist in the state of Michigan. He’s had a long history and career in wildlife biology, in wildlife management. So I’m excited to chat with Brent, to dive deep into this issue and to get answers to the many questions that I know that hunters in Michigan have right now, and that I think folks have all across the country. Is this set of ideas is continuing to roll out across other states as well, So that’s the game plan for the show today. One quick other update, the Save Tuckertown campaign is still going on. The quick cliff notes on that is that there are four thousand acres of land in North Carolina that have historically been open to the public. They are now being sold and we are trying to help save them and keep them public in perpetuity. If you go to Savetuckertown dot org you can learn more about this. But what we’re doing until May fourteenth is chipping in one hundred thousand dollars as well as Onyx is to put up two hundred thousand dollars in matching funds, So anything you donate we will match up to that two hundred thousand dollars limit. We’re doing that until May fourteenth. We’re over one hundred and seven thousand dollars raised already. It’s been incredible participation. We would love to see that lead to a hitting our two hundred thousand dollars goal here in the next week and a half or so, so heading over to Save Tuckertown dot org. Thanks in advance for doing that. And now, without any further ado, let’s dive into the case for a one buck limit with Brent Rudolph. All right, joining me now on the line is Brent Rudolph. Welcome to the show, Brent, hey Mark, thanks for having me. Yeah, thank you for making time to do this. I gotta believe you’re pretty busy right now with everything going on. Am I right to assume that it’s?

00:04:58
Speaker 3: Yeah? I mean this is always a bit is the time of year, and we have certainly had entertained discussion around a wider variety of potential REGs changes this year than we have in many previous years. So that’s definitely got a lot of people interested and engaged and asking questions and opinions and all that good stuff.

00:05:17
Speaker 2: Yeah. So, like you mentioned, you guys have been up to a whole lot, and there’s a whole lot I want to cover in this chat. There’s a lot of kind of nitty gritty details of deer management and regulatory ideas that I want to cover with you. But I want to start in maybe an unexpected place, which is why are you doing this? With all of the pressures and the scrutiny and sometimes the tendency that hunters and anglers sometimes have of pointing the finger at the DNR and kind of blaming you guys for all of our problems and the challenges the Department of Natural Resources or the Fish and Wildlife, whatever the name is in your given state. It’s always easy to point a finger there and say, Ah, these guys, they’re screwing things up. It seems like you have a somewhat thankless job, Brent. Why do you get up in the morning and do this work? Personally?

00:06:18
Speaker 4: Yeah, that’s funny when you asked why are you doing this?

00:06:21
Speaker 3: There’s a lot of different ways to approach that question, But to that point, why am I doing?

00:06:26
Speaker 4: Broadly? You know what I do?

00:06:30
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean I I did not grow up in a hunting family myself. I grew up in an outdoors family and a suburban Cleveland, Ohio.

00:06:41
Speaker 4: Spent a lot of time outdoors, but didn’t have anybody that got me involved in hunting. When I was a kid, I.

00:06:46
Speaker 3: Had an interest in wildlife, and that’s the course I chose to take, probably even once I out fully understanding what that was. You know, when I started my academic path in college and other things, and it wasn’t until I got into more while I focused studies that I got involved in in hunting, and so for me, you know, that’s not unlike the agencies right is now. I am a pretty passionate, devoted hunter, especially I bird dogs. So I spent a lot of time, especially in Grause and woodcock country here in Michigan, but also elsewhere.

00:07:21
Speaker 4: I actually left that.

00:07:21
Speaker 3: Worked for the department for a number of years, but left for a while work for nonprofits, both with Rough Grouse Society and with Pheasants forever. So I had a chance to do a little bit more of the upland work and then returned to the deer work here in the state of Michigan where I still live. But the bottom line is agencies responsibility is first to the wildlife and the natural resources, and second to ensuring the kind of recreational use and broader even just appreciation of those resources. And so it can be a challenge more specifically why are we doing this? Like why have we propose some regulations that we have recently. We always have to strike that balance between trying to manage resources for the benefit of just the long term sustainability of wildlife and habitats, but also recognizing that hunters are a really important part of the equation whether you’re looking at it, because the harvest that they take has an effect on the population or the funds that they provide in their purchases and their recreational habits are a tremendous boost to the resources of the state in one way or another. So we always have to have that kind of dual consideration of how hunters and how hunter satisfaction and recruitment and retention other things might be affected, but also what we believe is needed for managing the resources.

00:08:49
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, so let’s dive into the deep end then, because the elephant in the room, the reason why we’re here chatting beyond you being a fellow Michigan State spartan, big fans glad to have someone like that on the show me. But other than that, you’re here because there’s been, as you alluded to, this massive news in our home state of Michigan. As you mentioned, the biggest changes in possible changes in deer management that maybe in my lifetime, if this possible one buck limit becomes you know, becomes an actual regulation. If this goes through, that’s a dramatic change in the status quo. And so there’s been a lot of discussion in my state, within my friend groups, within the broader hunting community. And you know this is also not just a Michigan thing, right, There’s been more and more states switching to this. I remember when Indiana did it. I’ve you know, I have hunted in Ohio, so I talk and have been a part of that in Ohio. I’ve been a part of that in Kentucky. So it seems like this is maybe a direction that things are trending towards elsewhere. And so my hope with having you here, Brent, was that I want to get a better sense of several things. And we’ll kind of go through this one one by one, but I at a high level, I guess kind of set in the stage. I’d love to understand kind of the broader case for this kind of regulation. Why might a one buck limit generically work for some states. That’s one thing eventually I want to talk to you about. I also want to better understand kind of the unique process and set of circumstances that led you guys in Michigan to this point. And maybe that’s the place that we should start is with Michigan specifically, what led you and your team to this point where it seemed like a one buck rule might be a good fit for our state right now. And once we cover that, then we’ll kind of zoom out to talk about other states and precedent and history and all that.

00:10:53
Speaker 4: Yeah.

00:10:53
Speaker 3: Yeah, so there’s there’s probably like a short term window on what’s gotten us here and there’s also a longer term window and what’s gotten us here. So I’ll talk about the short term first. You know, what you’re talking about for proposals just explicitly. You know, in Michigan we work with our Natural Resources Commission. The Department works with our Natural Resources Commission through all the regulation setting process for all hunting and trapping rules, but looking at deer regulations in particular, this is pretty much the calendar and cycle that we use. You know, around the springtime, we got to set up our regulations so that everything’s all ready to go by.

00:11:31
Speaker 4: The coming fall.

00:11:32
Speaker 3: You backtrack from that, our Natural Resources Commission process that the NRC members, they’re not department employees, they are appointed by the governor. They’re a citizen panel that have a lot of the authority to set much of our regulations, and they’re required to follow a certain cycle to have proposals up for consideration, so the public has a chance to provide input and then they have to wait a set of time until they can actually vote in and act regulations changes. We always backdate from when we have to have things set to what time we need to be introducing these proposals so that they’re publicly documented and have a chance for that input, and then backtracking even further from there. We use a variety ways to get input into each of the proposals we put out each year. So for this year, you know, why are we proposing some bigger changes than we have in a while. Well, some of it is because we’ve had a lot of input asking the department to consider bigger changes than we have entertained in the past, and that’s come a couple of different routes. We have a Deer Advisory Team, actually have a Lower Peninsula and Upper Peninsula dear Advisory Team that provides input to the department. They were kind of berthed out of a Deer Management Initiative process that actually the Commission originally put together and made a bunch of changes in twenty twenty four for the twenty twenty four season. After they provided that input to the NRC, they stayed in place.

00:12:58
Speaker 4: But our advisory to the.

00:13:01
Speaker 3: And that’s where a lot of this originally started. Our dear advisory team did forward a recommendation in Michigan to implement a one buck or to be clear, a one antlered deer limit.

00:13:11
Speaker 4: Well, you and I I’ll probably both call it a buck, but it’s one antler deer limit.

00:13:15
Speaker 3: And then in Michigan, we historically had what we call a single deer license, so you can take one buck if you buy that single deer license. And then we have a combination or a combo deer license that includes two different tags that historically, relatively recent historically has allowed.

00:13:32
Speaker 4: You to take two deer.

00:13:36
Speaker 3: Recognizing the potential financial implications if we limited folks to one antler deer one buck, a lot of people might go for that single tag, single license, so the advisory team said, just don’t sell that single license anymore. Basically require people to buy two licenses so you don’t have a revenue impact.

00:13:53
Speaker 4: But let’s restrict the harvest to one buck.

00:13:57
Speaker 3: And we actually we did some investigating that’s actually legally not possible.

00:14:02
Speaker 4: For us to do. We don’t have the ability.

00:14:05
Speaker 3: To simply not sell that license. But in the process of looking at other alternatives. Ultimately, what our proposal was we introduced in the April and our c meeting, is to implement that one antler deer one buck limit statewide and then throughout the Lower Peninsula of Michigan make that single tag valid only for an antlyst deer. And what the combination of those changes would do is it means every deer hunter in the Lower Peninsula in Michigan that went a field would have at least one ANTLYSS license. There’s no way you could buy a license to go out deer hunting in the Lower Peninsula and not have at least one ANTLYST license and you’d only be limited to a single buck or single antler deer. And that gets to the broader mentioned there’s a longer term question why are we here? And the big challenge we based in Michigan is that we have a hunting culture that still is extremely focused on bucks, extremely focused.

00:15:10
Speaker 4: On antler deer.

00:15:12
Speaker 3: We have a really hard time getting our hunters to participate in a significant level in annerless harvest, and we think a big part of that is although there’s a relatively few number of hunters that do take two bucks in a given year, that possibility still captures everybody’s focus and attention to the point that antless harvest is just not prioritized as much as we believe it needs to be. And so that’s why that long term perspective of trying to find as many different ways as possible to encourage.

00:15:42
Speaker 4: And not imp anerless harvest and not.

00:15:45
Speaker 3: Finding that to be super successful, and the more recent experience of having more people, not just the DIE advisory team, we can.

00:15:51
Speaker 4: Talk more about it.

00:15:52
Speaker 3: There’s other folks from the public and even commissioners that have asked us to entertain other options on buck regulations got us to that combination the proposals that we had recently rolled out.

00:16:04
Speaker 2: So talk to me a little bit more about how a one buck limit broadly might help and maybe is there any precedent or is there any history or other states that we can point towards and showcase, like, hey, this happened in Indiana or Kentucky or Ohio or elsewhere that might serve as a model for what we’re trying to achieve in Michigan or elsewhere. Is there anything you can speak to on that front.

00:16:30
Speaker 4: Yeah, there are some models.

00:16:31
Speaker 3: There’s always you know, it’s obviously something we hear a lot about. It’s not uncommon to have folks come from the public and talk about, you know, I hunted in Iowa and I’m seeing all kinds of great deer in Iowa and they have great books, and or in Ohio, I’ve done this and you know, this is how they do Itnro Sorry, is this what.

00:16:50
Speaker 4: They do with their buck Greggs?

00:16:51
Speaker 3: And obviously you know that’s pretty took close group of deer managers in the states that we talk and interact a lot, share a lot of ideas, share a lot of perspectives. There’s always some really good insights from how different states do different things. But you know, underlying one of the big things, even just looking in our region, what we can expect to get out of deer regulations in one state.

00:17:17
Speaker 4: Compared to another.

00:17:19
Speaker 3: There’s been a lot of attention lately Michigan that has We’ve lost a number of deer hunters over the past couple of decades, right, And that’s part of it. Part of the push we’re getting is the perception that people don’t enjoy Michigan hunting like they did anymore, and that’s why they’re leaving every state has been contending with declining hunting participation.

00:17:42
Speaker 4: Michigan is not alone in that.

00:17:43
Speaker 3: And although we have lost a number of hunters for variety reasons, we’ve talked about that Marpha line over the last few decades. We still between Michigan and Wisconsin. Across all of the Midwestern states, both of us are around eleven deer hunters per square Michigan’s was estimated about ten point seven, in Wisconsin eleven point two, and the next closest states are Ohio and Missouri that are around six or seven deer hunters per square mile. And then you look at states like Iowa that have three or few or deer hunters per square mile. So the combination of things again as I reference, we can talk about a little bit more.

00:18:26
Speaker 4: Our hunters are so focused on antler deer.

00:18:31
Speaker 3: And then we have, on average, granted it varies quite a bit around the state, close to eleven deer hunters per square mile.

00:18:38
Speaker 4: They put a lot of pressure on our deer hurry.

00:18:42
Speaker 3: And so what a regulation in one state amun accomplished compared to another. You have to consider it a very fundamental thing in terms of the amount of deer hunters and the access that we contend with as well. Michigan and certain parts of the state also has an abundance of public land, a lot more accessibility and opportunity that those lands offer, you know, different from states that are predominantly encompassing private land on the deer range. And so that’s really, from our standpoint, a really key consideration. I’ll me pause there, make sure there’s not something else you want to fall up on it, and then we can certainly jump into the discussion on what we believe a one buck limit well kind of question I might differ from what a lot of people would expect it, you know, to be as a likely outcome as well.

00:19:29
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, that that’s exactly what I was going to ask, is what what do you What does the agency believe this will achieve? What kinds of ripple effects might it have? I can see what I’ve considered it two different lines of possible impact, one in such a way it might impact bucks, one in such a way that it might impact the antler list harvest. So I have assumptions, I think everybody has assumptions. But what assumptions are you guys working with, and how are you coming to those assumptions.

00:20:01
Speaker 4: Yeah, good question.

00:20:02
Speaker 3: So you know we have we have assumptions as well as data that we you know, rely on, and a couple of the key things is we we see again, especially this combination of the proposals different treatment of the single deer license and then the limit to one for one ant deer a statewide. One of the things I mentioned we have struggled with is getting an adequate participation in anneralst harvests. So we typically have only about twenty percent of our hunters take an antlest year any given year. Some of them take multiples, but that means we’re close to eighty percent of our hunters that go afield that don’t even take one antless year each year. Who and overall, you know, our deer harvest and our hunter numbers both peaked around the late nineties early two thousands.

00:21:02
Speaker 4: That depended on which region you’re talking about. If we break our state down into the Upper Peninsula, Northern Lower Peninsula, and southern Lower Peninsula. In southern Lower.

00:21:13
Speaker 3: Peninsula, that’s basically your farmland, a lot of the residential and in urban lands, right, it’s productive habitat, but there’s also lots of opportunities for conflicts of high numbers of deer around people, crop land, automobiles, and other things. Over the last twenty four years, so from the time we had kind of our all time peak of hunter numbers and harvest only seven out of twenty four years, as our harvest survey estimates showing we’ve taken more antless deer than antlet bucks only seven out of twenty four years in southern Michigan and the last time it happened was in twenty twelve, So for more than a decade now we have been back in the mode of more hunters are taking bucks than antless deer. In the northern Lower Peninsula, only three out of those twenty four years aver hunter’s taken more antlest.

00:22:04
Speaker 4: Deer than antler bucks, and.

00:22:07
Speaker 3: Northern Lower includes our bulvine tuberculosis area in the Northeast where we’ve long term been very aggressive on antrost harvest trying to address that disease sustained within our deer hered in impacting our cultural industry. So for us, that’s been one of the perspectives. We have a relatively few number of folks I mentioned that take two antler deer two bucks in a year, but we have all those folks waiting.

00:22:31
Speaker 4: We believe on.

00:22:32
Speaker 3: That opportunity to take that deer and forego antlest deer harvest. And that’s really at the simplest level, what we want to do is provide a nudge to get more years where we are equivalent or higher on the antlist harvest side than we are on the buck side throughout most of our Lower Peninsula is.

00:22:54
Speaker 4: What we’d like to accomplish.

00:22:55
Speaker 2: Now, before you go any further, real quick, why does that matter? We’ve talked about this ad NOSM in many other conversations, but I want to make sure that if someone is new here and is dropping in for this conversation, why is it a problem that we’re killing more bucks than does Why are we so concerned about increasing the antler list harvest in Michigan? And what about Bob who lives up in the up or the northern Lower or somewhere where he sees two dos a year and he would never shoot him because there’s hardly any deer up there, And he says, who says is more deer? What’s your response to all that?

00:23:36
Speaker 3: Yeah?

00:23:36
Speaker 4: Absolutely, so, a couple of things.

00:23:39
Speaker 3: First of all, again, not to skip over to take it for granted, you know, I’ll keep seeing the antlest the idea of antrost service. You hope that most of that is doze, you know, not bucks, swish at antlers, not button bucks and other things. But basically it’s that antrolest service of that dough harvest is what we used to manage our population through hunting. Why do we need to take more? Again, as a referenced, we have place by place in Michigan issues we’re contending with, like bovine tuberculosis I mentioned in Northeast Michigan. We’ve been dealing with for decades now, chronic.

00:24:18
Speaker 4: Wasting disease in a variety of areas.

00:24:20
Speaker 3: A few places where it’s clearly established and we have serious concerns about its potential growing impact others where it’s emerging. We do also try and seek that balance. We know hunters like to see lots of deer when they go afield, but we try to balance that with the impacts deer can have with things like crop damage or more and more expansion into suburban communities and conflicts that they cause. Keep deer more broadly valued by Michigan residents on the landscape. If hunters can help us maintain them at something less than close to the maximum that the habitat is able to support them, and then from that idea what the habitat is able to support. You know, there’s a lot of different concepts between or around how switching your age ratios or your sex ratios or other things of your population might might affect dear. They certainly behave differently under a lot of different structures from a variety of ways that you can study.

00:25:21
Speaker 4: Or evaluate that.

00:25:23
Speaker 3: But the bottom line is we know that deer populations that.

00:25:26
Speaker 4: Are kept.

00:25:28
Speaker 3: Further below the capacity of habitat to support them tend to be much more productive so they can actually replace.

00:25:35
Speaker 4: A higher harvest on an annual basis. They tend to be much more physically.

00:25:43
Speaker 3: Improve physical development everything from antler development to higher number of funds, younger first year of breeding.

00:25:51
Speaker 4: And other things.

00:25:52
Speaker 3: So ultimately, again it’s that bigger picture perspective or trying to use hunting across the landscape a tool to try and manage our populations overall. And one of the key ways to do that, again from our perspective, is very simple trying to get more hunters willing to take and anerless deer would be with think a big step forward to improving the capacity of our hunting community to help balance those right things we try to achieve.

00:26:24
Speaker 2: A few years ago, Brent Chad Stewart sent out a like open letter to the Michigan deer hunting public, and I remember reading that letter and it seemed, what’s the word I’m looking for here? It caught my attention because it seemed very transparent about the urgency of the situation at hand. I mean, he really was pleading with hunters, please, we have to start taking more handlerless deer. We need you to participate. This is urgent, this is credit and in so many words, it seemed that he was insinuating that if we the hunting public, cannot demonstrate that we can manage the deer herds, that hunting is an adequate tool to manage the deer herd in Michigan, if we can’t show that, there might be some other alternative that might be pushed on us. And it wasn’t like he was saying that’s imminent, but that was like what I was reading between the lines? Was I reading between the lines correctly? And if so, help me understand that?

00:27:37
Speaker 3: Yeah?

00:27:37
Speaker 4: I think so. I mean, it’s.

00:27:41
Speaker 3: You you mentioned about other things they can be forced upon us. You know, it’s one of the things that with with hunting and trapping in general.

00:27:48
Speaker 4: You know, there’s there you you.

00:27:50
Speaker 3: Know very well that the people that the number of people that participate in these activities is by far a minority of folks on the landscape, and in many ways it’s a privilege we have that we don’t want to lose.

00:28:07
Speaker 4: To be able to engage in these activities.

00:28:09
Speaker 3: That are that are increasingly urban populous doesn’t always understand or appreciate, and a variety of the surveys and inquiries and other things of the general public pretty clearly shows that there’s a lot of support for certain aspects.

00:28:29
Speaker 4: Of hunting and there’s less so for others.

00:28:33
Speaker 3: And furthermore, there’s a little more ability to accept hunting when it is providing a broader benefit to society than when it is just what hunters get out of it, you know, And one of the things that that can provide that wildlife manages. Frequently references we need hunting to be able to manage, you know, wildlife populations, be able to avoid nuisance while life issues to be able to minimize impacts of disease, especially that can also have crossover into domestic you know, animals, livestock and other things. And if we can’t demonstrate that that’s being done, then a lot of members of the public that otherwise have little understanding or appreciation for hunting, we can’t expect them to want to support those activities, you know, continuing to occur. So, you know, it’s don’t want to paint a picture of like, watch out, guys.

00:29:35
Speaker 4: You know there’s a big threat next year.

00:29:37
Speaker 3: You could everything could turn over if you’re not taking this thing more seriously.

00:29:41
Speaker 4: But there is.

00:29:45
Speaker 3: A considerable need to think about not only now but into the future. If we continue to have struggles getting people to participate in this activity. It’s got two factors associated with it. One is there’s fewer and fewer folks that will be out there that appreciate, want to protect these opportunities.

00:30:04
Speaker 4: And two will have even a harder time to manage.

00:30:07
Speaker 3: Abundant populations if our hunting population continues to decline alongside it, there’s only so many deer that hunters are able or willing to take. And that’s another factor that we’re really looking at it from our regulations, not just what it might accomplish, you know, in the twenty twenty six and twenty seven and twenty eight deer seasons, but over the next decade or two of time, how we might need to reshape our regulations and reshape the general acceptance or experience that folks have when they go field.

00:30:54
Speaker 2: Okay, so kind of back to brass tacks of this change you mentioned how from an antler list perspective, the hope would be that a one buck limit would to some degree push more folks towards, nudge more folks towards taking an analyst deer, because they’re not sitting on that second buck tag waiting for that buck there. Instead they killed their one buck. And now it’s like, all right, well, I’ve got a dough tag with me, because like you said, now if you want a buck tag, you also will have an antlerlyst tag with you. Might as well take that antler list deer. Now, were there any other ways that you guys foresee this leading to additional analyst harvest? I mean, the one thing that I always thought was just simply the fact that the meat shortage kind of thing. If you need more than one deer, now at a minimum, you must now take one analyst deer. So that’s an obvious one for those people who depend on that. Were there any other antlerless implications of this that you want to cover, well, I think.

00:31:57
Speaker 3: You know, I mentioned at a pretty general level some of the the percentages or numbers involved. So again, I think a lot of folks will might might perceive that a two buck limit is going to save a lot of bucks, and again our data shows that’s not. The direct number is not substantial. It’s been around three to eight percent of hunters in a given year that take two bucks or two antler deer. Right, it’s it’s not a lot in the grand scheme of things to have carried over, whether it’s giving another hunter a chance at a buck, you know, because my neighbor got If my neighbor doesn’t get two, maybe one of them comes to me, or in terms of advancing them into a further into an older age class given.

00:32:41
Speaker 4: Another year or more than that, you know, to grow and continue to develop.

00:32:49
Speaker 3: But again mentioned only about twenty percent of a hunter’s taken antalyst deer. So yes, to your point, if you want a deer or if you want two deer, and your opportunity to fill that slot with a buck is limited compared to what it has been, an ant list deer becomes the natural alternative, you know, choice for folks, and so that’s that’s quite simply one of the basic things we’re trying to accomplish. And we’ve heard from people and then my inboxes getting.

00:33:22
Speaker 4: Plenty of input.

00:33:23
Speaker 3: And I’ll say on both sides, but a number of folks that have said, I don’t want to take a doll if you limit me to one buck, and some folks will even say, you know, you’ll you’ll force me to stop hunting after taking a buck. That’s obviously not true or not. People have opportunities to take antless deer, but there’s still a number of folks that are conveying that viewpoint. I will not take an antless deer if you limit me to one buck.

00:33:53
Speaker 4: That’s the only thing I’m going to have an opportunity to do.

00:33:57
Speaker 3: It’ll be unfortunate if folks, you know, lose the chance to continue hunting, if they’d like to continue hunting, because there’s simply refusing any option to take an antwerless deer. But we think there’ll be a number of people that even if it’s not in the first year or two that they experience, this will probably be won over by the idea of I can probably take a dell it’s probably not going to be the end of the world, and hopefully get them over the line to make that contribution and realize that that can be an important part of the hunting experience that maybe they just never really gave close consideration too, because again, they’ve always had that option to wait for the opportunity for another buck.

00:34:38
Speaker 4: To come around the corner.

00:34:40
Speaker 2: Yeah. So one, it just kind of blows my mind that there are still people so fervently antagonistic towards shooting an antlerless deer that they would refuse to do.

00:34:51
Speaker 3: So.

00:34:53
Speaker 2: I get it if you’re in a place where your deer population is so low that you are trying to recoup that population. But you know, if you live in southern Michigan or some other productive place across the nation that has a pile of deer, it’s hard to wrap my head around it. And it’s a whole lot of fun that you’re missing out on because hunting for does or antler this deer. You know, to be clear, that’s a whole lot of fun. I love dough season. But anyways, what I wanted to ask was, let’s talk about bucks now, because you know, in many places, Michigan especially, it seems like there’s a lot of attention on bucks. The one buck rule has been something that people have talked a lot about as a means to change aspects of our buck hunting opportunities too. Yeah, that’s what brought me to it originally, you know, fifteen years ago or whatever it was when I started thinking about this kind of thing. There’s been all sorts of different proposals and ideas in our state of Michigan and many other states over recent years, whether that be around using antler point restrictions or one buck rule or different ways that maybe you know, with you know, restrictions that that could maybe lead to changes in the buck harvest and lead to different age classes of deer or you know, bigger bucks. Uh, walk me through what we think this could lead to from a buck perspective.

00:36:19
Speaker 3: Yeah, So again on the on the perspective of a one buck limit, I mentioned there’s not a lot of numbers involved, but there is another element of selectivity that’s potentially affected by reducing folks to a single buck tag. So I mentioned it’s around three to eight percent, seven percent or whatever of our hunters that take two bucks or.

00:36:39
Speaker 4: Two antler deer in a given year.

00:36:41
Speaker 3: That’s with our our numbers over the last you know, decade or so, that’s around thirty two thousand deer on average.

00:36:48
Speaker 4: That is a second buck, right.

00:36:50
Speaker 3: So if we had if if in past years you couldn’t take two bucks, around thirty thousand or so of those.

00:36:58
Speaker 4: Deer would have been or not put in the bag.

00:37:01
Speaker 3: Now we know some of them would have, like I said, gone over the fence line and maybe someone else would have taken them. We know we can’t always stockpile deer, right, other things kill them other than hunting, So it’s not really a definitive number. But the other thing we do we can look at. Again, I mentioned we have a regulation structure in Michigan where folks have had an option to buy just a single license for an antler deer, whether they don’t think they’re going to hunt that much or whether they’re not interested in having.

00:37:29
Speaker 4: More than one deer, et cetera.

00:37:31
Speaker 3: And we have seen you mentioned Antler point restrictions. We do have Antler point restrictions in different parts of the state. We have some antler point restrictions in the Upper Peninsula that only apply depending on what type of license you have, but Southern Michigan again has been the one area where it’s broadly open really on what you’re able to take.

00:37:52
Speaker 4: And what we’ve seen there is that hunters in Southern Michigan recent years that have only had a single bucklight sense single antler deer license, about sixty percent of those folks, we’re taking a buck with four or more antler points on one side, whereas if folks were hunting with that combination license that gives them two tags, so they’ve had an option to use those for antre list deer, but that’s the only way you’ve been able to have licenses that will allow you to take two antlered bucks. Only around forty percent of those folks are taking bucks with four more antler points on a side. So you know, it makes sense, and we’ve had discussion about if you have two licenses, essentially, well, I can either I can go ahead and take whatever deer I see with the idea that maybe a bigger buck comes along. So there’s probably a little bit less you know, selection involved there, because you know, you can always have another go at it. It makes sense, but that’s the closest you know, data we have to directly look at the see. Yeah, there’s actually some evidence there too that folks with a single license are more selective. Now, we could argue, you know, if you weren’t selective in the past with two tags, maybe you don’t really care, and if you’re forced to only be able to take one antler buck, there won’t be a difference. But I think that’s pretty good indication that folks will likely, especially if they hunt multiple seasons and multiple days, probably aren’t going out in early archery season if they’ve got a single license for a buck and taken whatever comes in front of them with antlers, recognizing that they’ve got lots of later opportunity.

00:39:30
Speaker 3: So in that scenario, some Southern Michigan hunters, again hoping that I’ll push their willingness to take an antless deer so they can get a deer in the bag, know that they’ve gotten some venison secured for the year, and continue to wait on that single opportunity for an antler buck, and maybe more of those younger, smaller bucks walk not just because of the street numbers game, but because of the selectivity being a little bit affected by that different let’s say, regulatory package.

00:40:02
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, anecdotally, that was what I had always seen from, seen from and and heard from folks using combo tags. You know, oftentimes there’s that guy who everybody wants to get their buck, right, at least the old traditional way in Michigan was you got to get your buck and then after that, then I’ll be a little bit picky. I even know, like some pretty die hard deer hunters and good friends of mine who still kind of feel that way that they’d like to get a big old buck, but I got to get that nice bass credit eight still because they got me fired up. Uh, and then they’ll then they’ll wait and wait and wait and maybe take a bigger, older one someday. So I’m a little curious about the But how much that side of things matters too, from your perspective, because I know there’s a lot of like a lot of folks in the hunting community, especially you know, those who have been more involved in the management side of things, or maybe the younger generations who put a higher van value on you know, older age class bucks. The opportunity to kill a mature buck, the opportunity to see a big antlered buck, all of those things in recent decades have become more and more important to our community. I think more and more people are traveling out of state to go to these other states where they’re seemingly better opportunity at those things. So I’m curious about the why from that perspective, like, do you guys care that this might lead to more old age class bucks and bigger deer for hunters? Does that matter to the Department Natural Resources? Does that matter because it’s satisfying a desire from the hunting population, or is really that just going to be a nice side effect of the hopeful antalyst impacts.

00:41:46
Speaker 3: Yeah, I guess probably to be blunt, it’s more the ladder of a nice of a nice side effect.

00:41:53
Speaker 4: You know.

00:41:53
Speaker 3: We again, within our we have a we have a deer management plan in Michigan.

00:41:59
Speaker 4: It’s it’s ten years old.

00:42:01
Speaker 3: It’s up to be revised and potentially evolved this coming year. But it does have some pretty broad, just strategic level goals, and it includes maintaining hunting both as a management tool and as a recreational opportunity and just part of kind of the culture of the landscape at Michigan.

00:42:26
Speaker 4: So we are definitely.

00:42:29
Speaker 3: Committed to trying to provide valuable and enjoyable hunting.

00:42:34
Speaker 4: Experiences for folks.

00:42:36
Speaker 3: But what constitutes a valuable and enjoyable hunting experience also varies pretty widely. What doesn’t vary pretty widely is highly abundant deer populations create all kinds of potential problems.

00:42:51
Speaker 4: Both for deer and for their habitat and for a variety of other things, And so.

00:42:58
Speaker 3: Regulations, quite frankly, are a pretty blunt tool to try and manage all the various outcomes that you could get from a different, highly different structured population, trying to kind of just seek a different balance of our buck to dough ratio of our harvest and a little bit more management impact from the harvest outcome. Not only would this regulation change, but with almost all of our past regulations, really where much of the focus of our management efforts are.

00:43:30
Speaker 4: Getting into.

00:43:31
Speaker 3: Some of the nuances I referenced a little bit previously of how the sex and age ratios and structure of a population, how much they impact from a biological standpoint. If you could have a high degree of control over those things, you can probably see some notable outcomes by manipulating them, but accomplishing that across a land escape of a place is diverse as Michigan with basic hunting regulations, it is pretty hard to accomplish.

00:44:09
Speaker 4: So the short answer is.

00:44:13
Speaker 3: There’s not really a biologically right or wrong structure for some of those population ratios and other things.

00:44:20
Speaker 4: But also, quite frankly, it’s just not something.

00:44:22
Speaker 3: We’ve got a lot of ability to regulate from a hunting regulation perspective.

00:44:28
Speaker 2: Okay, are you guys operating under the assumption though, that this change will likely lead to a higher proportion of older age class bucks being a part of the harvest in the future. I mean, when I look at this, Yeah, the way I look at aus and I would assume things might go is that to your point earlier, there’s going to be some degree of folks who are going to kill the first buck that they see, no matter what and what I like about I’ll insert a little bit of my own bias here. When I have thought about this and looked at all the different approaches that people pitch for fixing our deer situation, if if you want to call it that, some people want Antler point restrictions because it’ll lead to, you know, more older age class bucks, or some people want a one buck rule because it would possibly lead to that. But what I like about the one buck limit is that it preserves the opportunity to choose. So if you are the person who doesn’t care at all about that and just wants to shoot a buck, more power to you. You’ve got one buck tag to use however you see fit. You can shoot that spike if you’d like. On the other hand, if you’re somebody who you know has been kind of on the fence and you’re like, you like a big buck, but in the past, maybe you would. You know, some years you get the big ones, some DearS you don’t. Well, now you’re gonna be a little bit pickier, you’re gonna wait a little bit, or you’ll consider taking that antalyst deer first to get your deer for the year. And now you be a little bit picky with your buck tag, so you you would, inevitably, I think, see more older bucks and older bucks equal eventually bigger bucks. Whatever the thing is that matters to you, you’re going to see that. But it allows people, no matter what their tradition is, no matter what their value is, you can go for big ones or you can shoot the little ones. You just have to make that choice, knowing full well that that’s your choice and you have one opportunity to do so. I’ve liked that about it. But are you guys operating under the assumption that my assumptions are correct? Do we foresee in older age class of bucks in the future. Should we expect in some number of years that what we can experience in northern Ohio or northern Indiana where they have one buck rules, might we experience that in southern Michigan, just over the border now with this new regulatory structure, so.

00:46:42
Speaker 3: I would say, and when we so, when we give our recommendations to the Natural Resources Commission, we always we include a memo that goes with it and provides it’s pretty brief, but some high level feedback on expected biology, social economic impacts.

00:47:01
Speaker 4: Of any other regulations changes.

00:47:03
Speaker 3: We were pretty straightforward that the combination of regulations we’ve proposed, we don’t believe. I don’t believe will lead to an immediate dramatic change in our harvest. I think it will be a nudge in the direction that you referenced. I do believe over time, especially as hunters kind of contend with a new regulatory structure they haven’t had to deal with, we will see more bucks passed. We will see probably a continued creep towards an older buck age structure. But honestly, we’ve been seeing that for decades in Michigan, not as fast as a lot of people would like, and not as pronounced as in some places, but from again, the combination of some rules like antler point restrictions in some areas, and just a general changing attitude. We’ve seen that happen for whatever reason in Michigan. One thing not seen happens much changing or reprioritization on the antrost harvest side. So to your latter question, would we see something like as occurred in you know, name that other state I referenced earlier. We still have a higher number of hunters than those other states. So dropping the success rate of antlered buck harvis, which you know, for us is actually close to fifty percent of our hunters. You know, do take a take a deer. I think it’s about the same for antlered deer as well. They’re still going to be removing a lot of deer off the landscape. Even with a little bit of that reservation, but it will increase our trend in that direction. And what we would see a lot more acceleration around is if hunters in southern Michigan, it would be more like, quite frankly, our southern neighbors who have always been more aggressive with their willingness to take antros deer take dose. You simply got to make a little bit more room on the landscape for that hopefully growing buck population by make a little bit more space on the reducing overall densities and bringing more does into into the game bag and home with you can.

00:49:12
Speaker 2: Can you expand on that a little bit for somebody who maybe has not nerded out on this as much as you and I have, who have not dug into the implications of of you know, of a herd structure or habitat capacity and how that can impact things. If I’m a deer hunter who will love to shoot a big old buck someday I live in Michigan, I’ve assumed I’ve got to go to Ohio or Indiana to do that. You just told me that they have that in part because they kill more antlerless deer. At first glance, I might be like, how does that make any sense?

00:49:43
Speaker 4: Yeah?

00:49:43
Speaker 2: Can you help me understand simply, like, how does killing more, antlerless deer lead to healthier, possibly older, bigger bucks.

00:49:54
Speaker 4: Yeah. So, Actually, one of the.

00:49:59
Speaker 3: One of the foundational original research studies that looked at the way deer populations grow and the different dynamics at different densities or abundance was from the Georgie Reserve, which is a property associated with another university in Michigan in the southern part of the state.

00:50:20
Speaker 4: And deer populations.

00:50:24
Speaker 3: You think conceptually, but again this was borne out by looking at an actual deer population and a fenced enclosure that was founded from a small number of individuals and then it was watched to grow over time. If you had an area devoiative deer and you put a few deer in, there’s not a lot of deer around. So to your point, hunters aren’t going to see a lot of deer or a lot of bucks, right because there’s just not very many there. But the habitat is able to support there’s no competition for resources. Every deer has abundant food available, they’ve got abundant cover, they have everything that they need, and that leads to females being highly productive. That leads to more more incidents.

00:51:04
Speaker 4: Of deer breeding when they’re only a year.

00:51:07
Speaker 3: Old, so you’ve got basically funds becoming pregnant and having their first faun.

00:51:13
Speaker 4: You know, as they’re yearling, you have more triplets and more twins and fewer singles, and so you have a very high rate of growth. So you don’t have a lot of deer, but you have a lot of funds per dough and you have a high rate of growth. On the buck side, that lack of competition for resources means, you know, bucks put all their energy first into their basic maintenance of their body and growth and you know, fending off any illness injury on other things. The last thing they invest energy in, just from a it’s not a choice, it’s a physiology aspect is antler development. So if they got tons of resources available to them and they’re not really strained, antlers are going to look a lot better than if they are constantly competing and stressed and under pressure to secure the resources that they need. And so that’s the combination of reasons why as you begin to get a more moderately abundant deer population, you generally still see those things not competing for resources.

00:52:17
Speaker 3: Buck Antler development is great. Those are still highly productive and you can actually kill more deer that will then be replaced by that high number of new animals entering the population than if you allow them to continue to grow. So as they continue to grow, antler development starts to decline on bucks, productivity starts to decline on adult females. Fawnds are no longer becoming pregnant, and you’re straining the ability of habitat to support that population. So it’s not always intuitive, but having fewer deer on the landscape, having a hunt a little bit harder for them. There’s a lot of evidence in that too. It takes a little bit more time per kill as you begin to reduce the numbers on the ground. Still puts you in a scenario though, to actually replace a pretty high level harvest and have deer in.

00:53:12
Speaker 4: Pretty good condition around them.

00:53:15
Speaker 3: The last thing on a local and local scale as well, also have a lot less dispersal. There’s a lot of biological factors that do lead young bucks off and to leave an area and go on, but you have a little lower dispersal rates, a little more opportunity to hold you know those bucks around if you’re not at that hyper abundant.

00:53:33
Speaker 4: Level as well.

00:53:33
Speaker 3: So again, those are all the things I mentioned, Like it’d be great to like study and look and determine for your exactly what the right number is and right ratios are to balance all that stuff out.

00:53:44
Speaker 4: We can’t really do that at that level.

00:53:46
Speaker 3: But understanding the basic idea of keeping deer a little bit further below the maximum ability to habitat to support them yields a lot of those same kind of benefits and seeing good antler development, good healthy deer, nice activity.

00:54:01
Speaker 4: It’s a pretty good scenario if you can get yourself.

00:54:03
Speaker 2: There is there any data available from other states that have done this that can help us confirm or deny our assumptions around this. You know, when I look at Indiana, which is I think the most recent that I can remember at least where a state switched to the one BUCKLEMA at least within my recent memory, anecdotally, it seems like they made that change, and then over the last you know, five, six, seven, eight years, it seemingly that there’s just been more and more big old bucks taken there. That just seems like Indiana has been rocketing up the charts as far as producing you know, record book qualifying bucks and all that kind of stuff. But I recognize that that’s anecdotal, that’s, you know, just a snapshot. Do we have any data from Indiana or Kentucky or Ohio or any other state like that that could help us get a better sense of the possible impacts because we’re guessing and assuming and thinking and hoping. I’m just curious if history, if precedent at all, might lead us on this front too.

00:55:11
Speaker 3: Yeah, when Indiana first put a one buck limited place, and it’s also it’s also worth noting when that first occurred, they had a one buck per season limits you could take two, but they still had to be in distinct seasons. You couldn’t take two, you know, in firearm to archery or whatever. So it wasn’t quite the same shift. But as they put a one buck limit in place, it looked at two things. Similarly, they looked at what effect it had on buck harvest, but also on antroless harvest. And there was a bit of a push up in the initial years of that change on ant roless harvest, although it had been on the rise, you know, to begin with already and there was.

00:55:53
Speaker 4: A big of a bit of a decline in buck harvest.

00:55:57
Speaker 3: Not surprising you’ve reduced that limit right after a few years, a lot of the same tendencies kind of crep back in, though, So I don’t know that it’s been examined, and I know I haven’t looked at anything to see if that factor of adding a little more selectivity in with a single buck limit may have been an additional factor, and then having a little bit more availability of those older deer might have allowed to kind of resetting of what the harvest level could be sustained. Right, You just graduated folks up in age class or two. That’s not unlike what we’ve seen in Michigan in many places with.

00:56:36
Speaker 4: Handler point restrictions, is.

00:56:37
Speaker 3: That the first year or two they’re in place, buck carvest overall drops, right, because you don’t have people just simply targeting the first antler deer that they see, and you tend to tip the scale up where a lot of times a year ling or maybe a two and a half year old buck was what most people were taking.

00:56:57
Speaker 4: You’ve pushed it up to two.

00:56:58
Speaker 3: And a half or three and a half years old. You tend to get the buck harvest back pretty close to what it was before. You’ve just graduated up a year class or two, and see things really kind of fall back into what they were as long as the hunter numbers stay, you know, relatively the same.

00:57:27
Speaker 2: Okay, I want to share with you some of the pushback that I’ve gotten on this. Some of my friends, some folks who have seen me talk about this publicly, have have offered me some of their concerns. And I think there’s many, many different opinions. I’m sure, as you said, you’ve gotten blown up and you’re in box full of them, But most of them kind of come down to, you know, a couple things other than what you just described, which is like, I simply refuse to do this because I don’t like anybody telling me to do something I don’t want to do. But one of the big ones is that there seems to be a resistance from some to believe that this will actually lead to an increase in dough harvest. Some folks that I’ve talked to said, well, you know what, most folks would that would typically have just shot the first buck they saw and then maybe held out for another buck. Now that guy is just going to shoot the first Bucky sees and quit hunting for the year, and he’s not going to hunt at all anymore, and he’s not going to shoot that dough anyways, when maybe in the past, if he had a combo tag, he would have shot that first buck he saw, he would have kept hunting throughout the rest of the year for that second buck, and then maybe would have incidentally taken a dough or two because he was continuing to hunt throughout the rest of the year trying to get that big, big booner or whatever have you got. I guess what’s your thought on that particular pushback.

00:58:50
Speaker 3: Yeah, so, first of all, I don’t doubt that there will be people that will do what folks have said. You know, they’ll they’ll still take the first or close to the first buck they see, or even maybe a buck that’s just below what they would prefer, and then decide Undone, I’m gonna go watch the Lions trying to win another game or two.

00:59:12
Speaker 4: And not worry about getting out and hunting any longer.

00:59:16
Speaker 3: The challenge is, and I don’t want to sound callous, and I don’t want to diminish the fact that again, I want people to be out there hunting, Moore. I want them enjoying themselves. I don’t want to see people hunting less and contributing less to that outdoor experience in economy and so forth. But if we are dependent on people who will only take an antlist deer at the last resort, close to the last few days or hours of their hunting season in order to accomplish an antlist harvest we need, then we are going to be up a creek in more years down the road as we continue to challenge ourselves to keep hunters engaged on the landscape.

01:00:03
Speaker 4: And so we got to try and push some folks, I.

01:00:06
Speaker 3: Would say, in that mindset to no longer fall back on that second buck tag and try and encourage them to experience the opportunity to take an antlest deer, contribute to that side of the harvest, and hopefully, if not, really invigorate our deer harvest and reduce deer numbers and see some of the benefits like we talk about, at least realize I didn’t result to take an antlist deer, and you know what, it wasn’t the worst thing.

01:00:36
Speaker 2: Ever.

01:00:36
Speaker 3: Maybe that’s just should be part of my deer hunting experience. So in terms of thinking about it and what I hope individual hunters get out of it is kind of that get over that hang up and realize that this is an okay thing, if not a great thing to experience and contribute to, but also just to kind of reset that mental calibration of our deer hunters I mentioned. I don’t think this will lead to a dramatic change just in a year or two, because again, I think even individual hunters sometimes you have to go afield a year or two, and with some folks quite frankly, that don’t hunt every single year, that might take three, four or five years that they’re out there.

01:01:16
Speaker 4: A couple of years under a new regulation structure to make that transition. Right.

01:01:23
Speaker 3: So that’s why it might take a decade under a different regulation structure for the vast majority of our hunters, they have gone through that mental exercise and determine what they’re kind of new normal is.

01:01:35
Speaker 4: Yeah.

01:01:37
Speaker 2: So another piece of pushback I got from some folks was that, well, if they really want if this is really about dough harvest, if they really want us killing more, does why don’t they give us dough tags? Why have some of the proposals we’ve seen talked about limiting the number of dough tags being available. I saw one of the proposals was shifting from a max of ten to a mac of five in some places. Why are those types of things not being explored versus this buck limit? Can you explain that one?

01:02:09
Speaker 3: Yeah, I’m glad you mentioned that. So there’s a couple of layers to that. First of all, some of the more restrictive approaches to antless harvest are also things that have been brought through at the request of our Natural Resources Commission, and the Department actually hasn’t been supportive of all of those proposed changes. But even within that some of it, there’s also a proposal to restrict the use of antlest licenses. So in Michigan, in most places, in everywhere in the Lower Peninsula in recent years, you could buy up to ten what we call universal antlest licenses, it’s the antlyst tag, and every hunter could.

01:02:44
Speaker 4: Go use those licenses.

01:02:46
Speaker 3: There’s even a few other kinds of ways you can take antalist here as well.

01:02:49
Speaker 4: Well.

01:02:49
Speaker 3: Those REGs aren’t in place because we want every hunter to buy and use ten ant or less licenses. They’re in place because there are some places where there’s severe crop damage issues, where deer management co ops that sometimes only have a handful of people that are willing and able to take a lot of antless deer and really try and push the boundaries on changing their kind of population structure. And so our approach on that liberal side has been largely keeping tools available for the relatively small number of folks that use them at a local scale, not because that’s what we want every hunter to do. Now, why aren’t we also, you know, further discounting or making it easier giving away you know, antlest tags. The history of the agency, we’ve taken a lot of different approaches to those things. In generally, sometimes there’s some combination of things that get a slight bump up for a year or two, and generally it declines again afterwards. So the bottom line is both folks, about half of hunters don’t take any deer, about half of hunters are successful. When we get up to our number of hunters that take two or three or more deer, it drops only five percent or so of our hunters take three or more deer. So there’s only so many that they want to take. Given a free anterless license. Again, I would certainly put a tag into everybody’s pocket. But as we’ve already seen, lots of options already exist for people to take antless deer, and they’re simply unwilling to.

01:04:17
Speaker 4: So we really still feel.

01:04:18
Speaker 3: That by having that alternative to take two bucks, that’s a hang up for a lot of folks that are only going to take one or two deer that don’t choose to make one of those be an antlest deer. And that’s not a that’s probably not another one of those not necessarily intuitive or easy answers to give to folks. But we would still encourage, certainly for people that do have the desire and ability to take multiples to contribute.

01:04:46
Speaker 4: But the bottom eye is we’re just trying to get more folks to take.

01:04:49
Speaker 3: A dough and by limiting what other alternatives they have, we’re trying to provide that nudge over time and that direction.

01:04:57
Speaker 2: Okay, so another one that you You did sort of address this earlier, but I want to make sure we address it really clearly so people pick up on this. What about the funding concerns. I’ve heard some people say, well, we’re always hearing about how there’s funding issues with the DNR, and they’re always needing more valors. Why would you limit us to only be able to get one buck tag now? And now people are not going to buy two buck tags. They maybe won’t even keep hunting for you know, the additional part of the season, so they’re not going to buy that extra dough tag. This is going to end up leading to not only me being pissed off because I can’t shoot two bucks, but now I’m not going to spend as much money with the state and that’s not going to be good either. What do you guys say to that one?

01:05:37
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I mentioned really early on the original proposal from the Dear Advisory teams was to just simply not sell that single deer license with again that recognition if you’ve just cave.

01:05:46
Speaker 4: They just gave the you can’t take two bucks.

01:05:48
Speaker 3: Our combination license has been our most popular license in recent years, and I follow those folks with just you know, downgrade essentially to half priced twenty bucks for the single dear license. That’d be pretty big revenue impact, So they just just don’t sell it. So our recommendation in the Lower Peninsula to make that tag an antrolest license.

01:06:07
Speaker 4: Really is a two part.

01:06:08
Speaker 3: It is, like I mentioned one approach to say there’s now no way a hunter doesn’t go a field with an aneros license. We don’t think many people are going to buy that single deer license only using it for an antrosteer, because for the same price, or in some places or seasons for less than that price, they can get in the anarrolest tag. Right, So there is a revenue consideration there as well. It’s a combination of saying that there’s now no way in which a hunter and Lower Peninsula wouldn’t have an antless license, but also quite frankly, we do think it’ll be a pushback to offset the number of people that would dowgrade to that single tag. Ultimately, in a Lower Peninsula, we’ve had a little bit under about one hundred thousand hunters that have been purchasing that single deer license.

01:06:55
Speaker 4: In some ways, So those are the people most directly impacted that we know.

01:07:00
Speaker 3: Again probably the vast majority, if not one hundred percent of them, are buying that license for a buck. They will have to choose if they want to have an opportunity to take an antlad deer to buy the combination license, it’ll be forty bucks instead of twenty dollars, but it’ll also include an ant elyst license available to them. On the other side, we’ve had hundreds of thousands of additional folks that have been buying the combination license. They will still be able to take an antlered buck. Again, over ninety percent of our hunters have only taken one antlest deer. They’re not going to be constrained from doing that, but they’ll have a second tag and if they want to.

01:07:42
Speaker 4: Use it, it’s going to be for an antlest deer.

01:07:46
Speaker 3: So from that perspective, we really think in terms of the outcome, there’s not a dramatic impact on the majority of hunters in terms of the options available to them. We’re hoping that option of an antlest deer, which is really more of a forced choice upon them, as something they’ll elect to take an opportunity.

01:08:06
Speaker 2: Yet, are there any other major gripes that you’ve been getting in your inbox or that the that the department has been getting from folks that we haven’t addressed yet that you’d.

01:08:16
Speaker 4: Like to Well, there are a couple of things. Some of them are gripes and some are just other important considerations.

01:08:21
Speaker 3: First of all, we’ve talked a lot about the Lower Peninsula, So are your up listeners or anybody else.

01:08:26
Speaker 4: From a similar kind of landscape will probably, you know, give me grief about that good pint. Yeah, we have.

01:08:31
Speaker 3: We have not proposed changing the single tag in the up and we’ve had since two thousand and nine in the Upper Peninsula what we call hunter’s choice regulations, where someone buys that single deer license. It’s good for any antro deer if someone buys the combination license when they use it in the same license everywhere, but to use it in the Upper Peninsula, there’s actually a requirement minimum three points on a side for for deer. In the Up And we’ve always had on the restricted tag of the combination license a minimum four point on the.

01:09:04
Speaker 4: Side, so a reference earlier.

01:09:06
Speaker 3: We have this variety of antler type restrictions, and that’s one of them there that that combination license for many years has had a restriction statewide on the second tag. It’s one of the reasons also why fewer people take two bucks, because one of them does have to have that restriction on it.

01:09:22
Speaker 4: So we’ve proposed.

01:09:26
Speaker 3: Leaving that single license be eligible for an antler deer in the Upper Peninsula, the challenge is and again even in the UP it’s not monolithic. There’s places in the Nominee County south central up close to the Wisconsin border that there’s actually quite an abundant deer herd.

01:09:43
Speaker 4: There’s less impact from winter.

01:09:44
Speaker 3: Whether they take the majority of deer harvested in the UP or in that region and they can sustain it ros harvest there, But that would be the area of the UP where those other tags that aren’t valid for bucks anymore. That’s the only option that folks that have across all seasons to take an antalist year. So there are places in the Upper Peninsula where in the past they’ve been able to take that by that combination license. Yes, it’s been a point restriction on both of those tags, but it’s given them the chance to continue to go afield, and they’ll be more limited in those options by not having as many places open.

01:10:18
Speaker 4: For antlest harvest.

01:10:22
Speaker 3: The other thing I will also point out is that even in the the April mission meeting of our Natural Resources Commissions, when I rolled out all these proposals, by the way, those those meetings are now live streamed and they’re recorded, so everybody wants to go see everything that was presented, all the information that’s all available through the Department’s YouTube page. But the commissioners immediately made some amendments that would also potentially add point restrictions. I would add some different restrictions. We may they may not choose to take the Department’s recommendation to change that single license to an anneralst only, dear, And it’s the May meeting on.

01:11:01
Speaker 4: The thirteenth.

01:11:04
Speaker 3: Of May coming up that each of those amendments and the other potential new amendments and then the final deer regulations package you know, will be voted on. And so again as a reference, we’ve spent a lot of time talking about what the Department’s proposals are, but in this process there’s still additional outcomes that might take place and pretty short window of time before all that stuff.

01:11:26
Speaker 2: Onefold, So how can the public participate in that?

01:11:31
Speaker 3: Yeah, So that’s one of the key ways is that from our from the Natural Resource Commission’s website, you can get the information on all the proposed REGs changes when the meetings are occurring, information on signing up if you want to have input, and there’s an email inbox directly to the NRC to provide comments. So that’s one of the key ways. And I’ll also add, you know, in the mix of all this, because we’ve had people asking about timelines not only of the votes and the outcomes, but all of the changes to these buck licenses. The department is proposed not to take effect until twenty twenty seven, because our deer licenses go on sales starting March first, and we’ve had probably close to sixty thousand people that have already bought deer licenses. Now, we’d prefer that those changes then not go into place to twenty seven, so people know that, you know, what they planned when they bought their license is still how the regulations work. But there was an amendment introduced by one of the commissioners that would put changes in place in twenty six, So there’s an opportunity that that might there’s a chance that that might become the rules in the books already in this forthcoming deer season. So we’re continuing to have a lot of discussions about that. We feel pretty strongly that it would be the preference that wait until twenty seven for unfolding. But there’s been a variety of input both ways. Some folks are upset don’t want to see things change. We’ve had other people say, hey, we appreciate the direction, we support what the Department’s doing, but we don’t want to wait twenty seven.

01:13:06
Speaker 4: We want to happen now.

01:13:07
Speaker 3: Let’s get these rules changed, and let’s minimize the potential that maybe a regulation changes, is voted on and then it is undone before you know, we have a season able to see that unfold. I feel that undoing that change is highly unlikely in the Department, and the Commission would be you know, ill advised to make that change when we push pushed through getting any substantial alteration in place.

01:13:33
Speaker 4: But there’s some anxiety around that. Folks that want to see the the the hill, you know.

01:13:41
Speaker 3: Surmounted right now here while it’s in front of us, and jump right into the.

01:13:46
Speaker 4: The new normal.

01:13:48
Speaker 2: What’s this antler point restriction amendment that you mentioned.

01:13:53
Speaker 3: So there’s been a couple of different things involved, but one of the pose was being entertained is that take the Department’s recommendation to put a one buck one antler deer limit in place, but instead of putting the restriction on the single tag to an antalist license, put a point restriction on it, and so that’s another I believe that’s kind of a dual consideration. Some members of the public that have been very vocal on supporting and pushing for some other changes recommended have said they feel an antler prite restriction is needed in addition to a one buck limit to keep progressing on protecting some.

01:14:39
Speaker 4: Younger deer and advancing the buck age class.

01:14:42
Speaker 3: And again there’s a little bit of a thinking that similar to making the switch to an ant list deer, we think will reduce the number of people that would would switch up and downgrade, you know, they’re purchased from.

01:14:53
Speaker 4: A combo to a single license.

01:14:55
Speaker 3: I think some commissioners think that would be another you know, potential benefit. Restriction on the single license would mean that anybody with just one licenses probably passing those younger deer that don’t meet that point restriction. But also that might keep folks in the combination license purchase camp and reduce the amount of people that would basically downgrade on the on the expenditure and bring us revenue into the department.

01:15:23
Speaker 2: Okay, So so final, just clarifying question, just so people really understand this process. Yeah, you guys do all this work in the department, putting together your recommendations, your proposed changes, but ultimately it comes down to this commission, right and they can make amendments, they can take or leave your recommendations and do as they see fit based on your recommendations plus the input of the public. Ultimately, it comes down to what happens at this meeting. Am I correct on that?

01:15:55
Speaker 4: Yeah, that’s right.

01:15:56
Speaker 3: I mean for the vast majority of regulations, So there’s you know, there’s some things, for example, that are set legislatively, so neither the Commission or the Department has the ability to just create a new license or to increase license prices or things like that. So some of those things are set legislatively, and there are some things that are delegated to the department, and one of them, for example, is that our director of our department has some authority to discount antlest licenses.

01:16:19
Speaker 4: But for the most part, most of these rules.

01:16:21
Speaker 3: That dates the equipment that you can use, limits on ANTORLEST license purchases. These buck harvest restrictions like we’ve talked about, are under the NRC or Commission authority and follows their whole process for announcing the proposals, taking the input, holding open public meetings, with the final votes, talent, and final decisions made.

01:16:45
Speaker 2: All right, Brent Well, I appreciate you taking the time to walk us through this. I appreciate the work and the time and attention that I know you and everybody else at the Department has been putting into this effort to try to get it right, to try to make sure we’re doing what’s best for or deer heard and the habitat and our hunting community and balancing all that. I know that’s no easy task. I can only imagine it’s been very challenging over the years and now especially with all these changes and all the public inquiry that comes with it. So thank you for that. Do you want to give folks any final call to action or send them to that website or anything in particular to do after they listen to this, to either participate in this or anything else up in the upcoming weeks and months.

01:17:32
Speaker 4: Yeah, I guess I would say two things.

01:17:33
Speaker 3: First of all, yeah, simple answer in terms of where they can go to get more information, So Michigan dot gov slash NRC or Natural Resources Commission? Is that Natural Resource Commission website that I mentioned that I’ll have information on timing and meetings and topics and a bunch of other information on what’s upcoming. And then second, I guess I would also just say more broadly, sometimes they have people asking questions or pushing or pressing on do you really believe this?

01:18:05
Speaker 4: Do you really think that?

01:18:07
Speaker 3: And then sometimes they’ll apologize like I’m sorry, sorry for giving a hard time, and I people don’t need to apologize, and as long as they’re being respectful and open minded in the process, it’s really important that people speak up, be engaged, and you know, take some ownership of the responsibility we have as a conservation and hunting community to try and do what’s best for the resources.

01:18:33
Speaker 4: There’s no right or wrong answers in any of this.

01:18:36
Speaker 3: There’s not a single thing that we’re going to do that’s going to be the absolute disaster, the absolute savior of everything that we’re contending with. We’re really trying to find a way forward again, not to look at just what’s going to happen over the next year or two, but to build some changes into our regulations that we’ll have we think important impacts, you know, over the next decade and even two to come. There’ll be other tweaks and other adjustments made along the way, but we’re happy to do the hard work needed and happy to try and be as accessible as we can to the public to have these dialogues around what we’re trying really to accomplish together.

01:19:16
Speaker 2: Well, Brent, I will certainly be submitting my comments and participating, and I will be shooting. I will do my very best to shoot a pilot dose for you as well, I’ll say that. So, so, thanks for all the hard work, Brent, and thanks for this chat.

01:19:31
Speaker 4: You got.

01:19:34
Speaker 2: All right, and that’s going to do it for us today. Thanks for joining me today. If you would like to participate and share your perspectives and comments with the Michigan Natural Resource Commission, like Brent mentioned, there is a meeting on May thirteenth in Gaylord. Go to that url he mentioned to get the exact location of that in the time, or you can email your thoughts in as well. Let’s, you know, continue to be participants in this conservation process and make sure that our voices and our thoughts and hopes and perspectives are heard and included. So until next time, thanks for being here, thanks for being a part of this community, and stay wired to hunt,