Thoughts about the upcoming board of game meeting

The Alaska Board of Game will hold their Central & Southwest Region meeting in Wasilla from Jan. 22-29, 2021. This meeting covers proposals submitted to address issues in Game Management Units 9, 10, 11, 13, 14A, 14B, 16, and 17. The meeting will be held at the Best Western Lake Lucille Inn.

Written public comment on the proposals is due by Jan. 8, 2021. The department is not printing proposal books for the public this year, so you’ll have to go to the Board of Game webpage under meeting schedules and click on the specific meeting. That site will give you access to all the materials the department has posted, to date, on the meeting.

The Mat-Su Borough Fish and Wildlife Commission formed a subcommittee to review proposals which are most likely to impact borough residents. As a result, we limited our comments to the Regionwide, Glennallen and Palmer areas and left Dillingham and King Salmon area proposals untouched. If you hunt in the two areas we didn’t comment on, be sure to submit written comments to have your voice heard. Better yet, attend the meeting and testify in person.

Before I touch on some of the subcommittee’s proposal comments, I’ll mention a chronic problem with this process. I like to know what the department thinks about each proposal. In my time dealing with board proposals, both fisheries and game, the department is always late in getting their comments out in a timely manner for review by the public.

With the holidays coming up, it’s often hard to get your group together to discuss and hash out your comments on proposals in time to submit your thoughts to the respective board for consideration. This has been a problem with virtually every Board of Fisheries meeting in my memory and we have seen the same thing with the BOG proposals.

Why do I care what the department thinks? First, they have the best available biological data regarding population numbers, health, and distribution. While they may not have much information on a specific species or population, ADF&G oftentimes has the only data available. Secondly, a proposal that might look good on the surface can have some real law enforcement issues associated with it. And third, international treaty or federal/state concerns can influence how I view a proposal. These items are normally a part of department comments and serve as education for the board and public alike.

I saw no listing of department comments on the meeting website, so I called and spoke with a wildlife biologist in the Palmer office. When asked, he was not able to comment on proposals because the “official” department position has not yet been formalized. He told me department comments should be available sometime around Nov. 23. He further told me the Palmer office had already forwarded their comments up the chain of command for review back in September. Does it really take two months to review these comments? Is this another case where the working field biologists can say, “what do I know, I only do the work every day?”

So much for my rant. Let’s talk proposals. Under the regionwide proposals, there were a number asking for new seasons, new methods and means, season extensions or bag limit expansions. We liked the concept of lengthening the moose season, but specifics from the department were lacking. We had no consensus on proposals establishing an archery season for Dall sheep. My concern here was, last I heard, sheep populations all over Southcentral Alaska were down and there were some significant health issues. We supported tag fee waivers for brown bear hunting.

We didn’t support a black bear bag limit increase and took no position on shortening the coyote trapping season while extending the wolf trapping season. The “no position” recommendation also applied to allowing the harvest of beaver with archery gear under a trapping license. That’s a quick and dirty look at the regionwide proposals.

Under the Glennallen area proposals, we recommended no action on expanding a bison hunting area and repealing pre-2018 caribou hunting requirements. We were opposed to expanding a youth caribou hunt because ample opportunity already exists, and expansion of subsistence caribou allocations. We took no action on a new registration goat hunt, an expansion of an archery moose hunt, and establishing a registration bull moose hunt for archers only.

Much to my surprise, there was no consensus on whether to support the reauthorization of the antlerless moose season in Unit 13. We’ll pick up again next week.