WDFW has posted a final draft of its updated Game Management Plan ahead of Friday’s Washington Fish and Wildlife Commission meeting featuring a briefing on the 215-page document meant to guide how the agency manages hunted critters in the coming years.
Official public comment on the plan closed last summer, but that input was considered in the version before the commission, a spokesman stressed to me.
Slated for adoption in February by the citizen panel overseeing WDFW policy, the GMP won’t actually set any hunting seasons, but WDFW will use it as the broad framework for the hunting and managing of deer, elk, moose, black bears, cougars, birds, small game, etc. It provides a thumbnail of the status of each species in the state, lists issues around them and how those are to be addressed, and is to be considered a “living document” that can be amended should need be.
This latest supplement to the OG 2002 GMP is a long time in coming, and the final draft before us here in early 2026 represents the culmination of a process that began back in 2022. The previous 165-page edition covered 2015-21 and “expired,” per se, in mid-2023, and development of this latest one overlapped with pushes to broaden its scope into predator-prey relationships, trophic cascades and “(infusing) more science into the process,” as well as concurrent tussles over bear and cougar hunting management.
I don’t know if in bringing it to my attention earlier this week WDFW hoped for me to do more than inform you, dear reader (hi, Mom and Dad!), that it’s available for your perusal – I don’t always have time for deep dives like, say, the 7,400-word 2025 year in review I posted last week – but as I sit here waiting to proof pages from one of our four magazines, it’s given me a chance to do a very small bit of comparing and contrasting.
The updated GMP enfolds the former’s Executive Summary and Chapter 1 into one place. It begins with an “Overarching Chapter” that confirms the Fish and Wildlife Commission’s and WDFW’s legislative mandates, which, to quote the plan, “recognize that hunters will continue to play a significant role in the conservation and management of Washington’s wildlife without infringing on other diverse uses or impairing important natural resources,” as well as their authorities.
It ditches a long-winded “Background Setting” section about tribal inhabitation, European settlement and the development of the landscape for a more succinct acknowledgement and reaffirmation of comanagement, and leaves off with a brief “Management challenges” paragraph to say that headaches are “increasing.”
The plan then moves to a “Hunting season guiding principles” section (bolded in the original) where some new wordings appear, such as “ecosystem health” and “other outdoor recreationists,” both of which are recommended to be considered when setting seasons.
On the flip side – and you knew I was going to search these – the words “wolf” and “wolves” have been lethally removed entirely outside of footnotes related to the authors P.L. Wolff and J.B. Wolff and a 2014 survey with wolf in its title. By contrast, they appeared a combined 96 times in the 2015-21 edition. Canis lupus, of course, is not currently a game animal in Washington outside of two reservations, but the former plan at least scoped out a potential pathway to reclassification as one; the new plan does not mention any such thing, though the February issue of Northwest Sportsman will explore it.
I could go on, but alas, my free time this morning has just come to a screeching halt with the arrival of several last layouts and a buttload of postscript files, so sadly I’m going to have to leave off there. Happy reading!
