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Montana FWP received 347 pages of comments about season proposals for the upcoming 2026/27 hunting seasons in the state. Nearly every comment had something to do with mule deer and/or the lack thereof, as well as hunter crowding on public land. The Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Commission recently voted to axe nonresident deer licenses by 2,500. While the state is at a 10 year low for deer numbers, it does seem normal to axe some licenses.
Even more importantly the commission also voted to decrease the number of deer a single person can kill from eight to three. And even more important than that, the commission also also reined in the number of does a person can harvest on public land.
As a resident of Montana for 25 years, now that I am a nonresident, I think these are steps in the right direction for Montana’s deer herd, especially when it comes to doe harvest. Does are the foundation of any deer herd population recruitment, so if you want a robust deer herd, the first step is to protect the does. Will reducing 2500 general deer licenses (buck harvest potential) affect Montana’s deer population? The science says no, but taking a percentage of hunter pressure off the landscape only has the potential to reduce hunter crowding and increase hunter satisfaction. Another thing to consider is the revenue lost for Montana’s local economies and well as outfitters able to acquire tags for their clients. I think both of these are important factors to consider with these reductions but it is common practice for game and fish agencies to adjust the number of tag allocations based on population counts in all states across the West. I mean that is what wildlife management is all about.
However, something that I think should be considered to help make up for lost revenue from the reduction of nonresident licenses, is to increase the price of tags across the board in the state for residents. Montana has the cheapest resident tags in the West by more that half, with a general tag coming in at $16. Other states like Wyoming and Colorado are up around $42 while Idaho is on the cheaper side at $24.50. For a little perspective, my first year hunting in 1999, a general deer license for a resident was $13 – so prices haven’t changed much in several decades for the residents in the state of Montana.
Should Montana raise the cost of resident deer tags? I think so but what about you?
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Restricting access to licenses is a good start but doesn’t address the causes of the low deer population; namely predators like wolves, coyotes and bears. The deer population will likely never recover unless predators are constantly controlled, and a bounty system should be developed as soon as possible to reduce the population of predators. The non resident hunters bring a great deal of money to the state of Montana, and predators contribute nothing.. chute the bastards.
Wow! I wasn’t aware that it was possible to harvest 8 mule deer, that is a lot of mule deer.
I would like to see antler point restrictions so more of the deer population are mature deer.
If the population of mule deer have been in a decline, why wasn’t the number of tags reduced before now? Having eight deer tags should not have been an option.
Having hunted on the same ranch in Roundup for the past 30 yrs with my husband we have watched almost all of the big game numbers ( except elk ) drop. We would not mind if they cut the number of tags for nonresidents. This year and in the past few yrs we have seen quite a few small herds that had more bucks than does. My husband shot a button buck this yr on his B tag but did not feel too bad when we noticed the imbalance in a couple of the small herds of WT and MD that we saw. We also found a fresh kill sight near the river one day and a few days later an elk hunter got camera footage of a pretty good size black bear in that same area . Obviously Mt needs to make predator hunting easier. As a non resident my husband and I can not afford to hunt with A tags and so only hunt for meat, but we do try to support the local economy when and how we can and for our hosts we cut their winter firewood while we are there. We hope Montana will not have to totally slash nonresident tags and can figure out how to fix deer numbers.