WDFW To Present Possible New Bear, Cougar Hunting Frameworks To Commission

The Washington Fish and Wildlife Commission will get a good look at WDFW’s science and potential hunting frameworks for future black bear and cougar seasons when it convenes Friday in Ellensburg.

The agency is pretty comfortable with instituting the more adaptive approach to bruin seasons it has drummed up after deep dives into bear density, habitat and population modeling, but will look to the citizen panel for a little more certainty on that and three mountain lion hunting options before proceeding with rulemaking on them late this coming winter for next year’s hunts.

Hunting both species has been a hot button issue in recent years as former commissioners have leaned one way, environmental groups and some current commissioners have yanked it the other, and meanwhile WDFW has been looking into how to best manage the populations and opportunities into the future. At the very least, the proposals show the agency is putting a lot of energy into being able to offer seasons and extend the heritage of the hunt while incorporating new science around bears and cats.

PER A PAIR OF PRESENTATIONS posted ahead of tomorrow’s meeting, WDFW is now considering a base general bear season that would run August 15-November 15 with a limit of two, but down at the management-unit level, both season length and bag would be tied to female mortality.

Where sow mortality is determined to be 8 percent or less, the above set would be the regulations, but in units where it’s more than 8 percent, season may first be shortened by two weeks on the front end to start September 1 and harvest lowered to one.

The 8 percent figure comes from 10 years’ worth of datasets collected from collared bears in the greater Snoqualmie Valley and middle Wenatchee Valley and it represents what’s known as the population’s “intrinsic growth rate,” or how fast bear numbers would otherwise grow absent hunter harvest and timber damage and human conflict removals.

Anis Aoude, WDFW Game Division manager, terms 8 percent “a pretty good number to be using,” based on the science.

“We’ve been working on it for months and it is what we feel is the best path forward at this point,” he said.

Female mortality from harvest and removals would be monitored and rates would be reviewed every three years.

“If we can keep female mortality at or below 8 percent, populations will be able to replace themselves,” noted Aoude.

It would be a shift from the current harvest management criteria that combines the percentage of sows in the harvest and theirs and boars’ median age to determine whether to liberalize, keep the status quo or restrict seasons.

WDFW is also looking to expand the number of black bear management units, or BBMUs, from the current nine across Washington to 14. Combining results from a number of observed and ongoing bear density studies, the effect is to better group similar habitat types together.

For instance, today’s BBMU 4, which encompasses 20 game management units in the Southern Cascades, would be split into two BBMUs, with one comprised of GMUs in the mostly higher elevation federal forests around Mounts Rainier and Adams, where bear densities range from an estimated 12 to 15 and 20 to 22 per 100 square kilometers, or roughly 36 square miles, and the second being GMUs in the largely state and Weyerhaueser timberlands of the foothills, where densities are just 6 to 12 per 100 square kilometers.

Aoude does anticipate that pushing back the start of fall bear season to August 15 from August 1 may be a tough one for hunters to swallow. WDFW data from the 2020-23 seasons shows that on a statewide basis, those first two weeks of the month accounted for the single highest proportion of the average overall harvest, between 20 and 25 percent. It was just two years ago that Evergreen State grouse gunners lost the productive first half of September. But that later bear start date will also be a familiar one to many hunters too.

“If you do look backwards, it wasn’t always an August 1 opener. There was August 15 and September 1,” Aoude says, a reference to the South Cascades, Okanogan and Northeastern B, and Northeastern A, Blue Mountains and Long Island openers, respectively. “It’s only been August 1 for the last three or four years. It’s not a departure from historical seasons.”

In some individual BBMUs – South Cascades East, Okanogan Highlands, Northeast – the highest proportion of harvest occurs during September’s and October’s deer seasons, state data shows.

WDFW is also proposing to outright make it illegal to shoot females with cubs – right now, hunters are only “urged” not to – and cubs, and bolster language in the regs around the deadline for submitting the first premolar tooth, which is used for aging bears.

While the agency will take a lot of grief for supposed bias against consumptive opportunities, Aoude himself is a hunter and he defended this more adaptive bear management approach. While on one hand it will reverse the recent (and blessedly simple) uniformity of the statewide regs, it will more closely track local bruin populations.

“If there’s an area we’re concerned about, hunters should be too,” Aoude said. “It’s about as classical as wildlife management gets.”

AS FOR MOUNTAIN LIONS, WDFW is trotting out a trio of options, as well as expanding the number of cougar hunt management units – or CHMUs, itself a new term – from 50 to 58.

Two of the options would sort of revert to using a 10 to 16 percent intrinsic growth rate, a break from the commission’s set 13 percent for the 2024-25 season, while the third would stick with 13 percent but without the expansion to 20 percent for units that exceed that guideline due to roadkills, human and livestock conflict removals and other mortality sources before hunting season even begins September 1. Removals starting April 1 would still count towards the cap, and if that quota is reached before season, the CHMU would not open.

Things get a bit more complicated after that.

Under framework Option A, managers would review the past three years’ harvests and if mortality at the overarching cougar data analysis unit, or CDAU, level was more than 16 percent, the CHMUs inside the CDAU that were over 16 percent would be capped at 10 percent. If CDAU mortality was below 16 percent, CHMUs would have a 16 percent cap.

CDAUs, which are similar to the overarching BBMUs though there are only 13, correspond roughly to genetically identified cougar populations, deer and elk herd ranges, and movement barriers such as I-5, the Columbia and Snake Rivers.

Option B would split the season into early (September 1-November 30) and late (December 1-March 31) segments, but if conflict removals hit 10 percent in a given CHMU before September 1, the early season would stay closed but the late season would open. If mortality was still below 16 percent, the late season would stay open till hitting that mark, but wouldn’t open if 16 percent was reached in the early season.

If your eyes haven’t glazed over by this point, you are a trooper – two gold stars for you! And since I actually now have to get back to my regular day job, which is editing werds, I’m going to give Aoude the last word here and call it a day.

“WDFW is trying to provide as much opportunity within the science people feel safe with,” Aoude told me.

Tune in tomorrow on TVW beginning roughly at 2:45 p.m. to form your own opinion. The commission will otherwise begin its meeting at 8 a.m.