This late culinary note just in from the Colorado high country, where the menu over the coming months will feature such delicacies as beef tips over rice, buffalo burgers, braised pork loin and lamb kabobs.
Trailing on this bill of fare we find elk, normally a winter favorite, only this season in short supply.
With only the brief, five-day closing session that begins today remaining on Colorado’s primary hunt calendar, hunter success continues to lag noticeably across most of western Colorado.
“Harvest is very low. There are a lot of disappointed hunters,” declared Tom Spezze, Colorado Division of Wildlife Southwest Region manager.
That finding is echoed in the northwest, where Bill de Vergie, DOW area manager out of the Meeker office, estimates hunters have taken 20 percent fewer elk from his portion of the Flat Tops, the place that produces more animals than any in the state.
Game managers hope a fast-moving snowstorm that pounded parts of the northwest late Monday will boost prospects during this finale, running through Sunday. De Vergie reported a pronounced movement of animals in advance of the storm, but this fourth season rarely features the raw numbers of hunters that might boost overall harvest numbers.
“I think we’ll have a good fourth season. Last Friday we started to see large groups of elk starting to move,” de Vergie described the aftermath of a Nov. 4 snowfall that stands as one of the few significant weather events of the entire hunt.
“During the last three days of the third season, those hunters who stayed around did well. But most people who heard about the approaching storm pulled out.”
J Wenum, area manager in the Gunnison country, reported much the same circumstance, saying: “Folks who did stick around last Thursday and Friday did OK. Unfortunately, not a lot of them did.”
The overall assessment of an elk season also buffeted by the recent economic downturn and high gasoline prices is that the trouble was brewed during the brutal 2007-08 winter — only not in the way everyone perceived.
“The heavy winter snow left lots of moisture that grew good vegetation throughout the range,” Wenum said. “Springs that had been dried up the past three to four years started flowing again. That really changed the distribution pattern. Animals could be anywhere they wanted to be.”
The bottom line, Wenum said, was that hunters badly needed to abandon the tactics that had worked in recent years, when animals generally were concentrated farther down- slope in more huntable terrain. This season, elk tended to remain at higher elevation, closer to dark timber.
“Even if hunters did have the ability and desire to get into those higher areas with dark timber, dry, noisy conditions gave the animals a real advantage,” Wenum explained. “If hunters could see only 30 or 40 yards ahead and animals hear them coming at 70 or 80, they just disappear and you never know they were there.”
In the Steamboat Springs country, area manager Jim Haskins reported that elk are beginning to drift down from the Mount Zirkel Wilderness Area on their normal migration westward.
“But we still haven’t received the kind of storm that will really move them,” said Haskins, who surmised a decline in both hunters and elk throughout the first three seasons.
“We had a lot of places where we normally have big hunter camps, but the numbers were down substantially.”
While most experts expect a solid deer harvest, de Vergie observed that many deer remained at much higher elevation in the country east of Meeker because of the same lush forage conditions, causing a decline in success toward the west toward Maybell and Rangely.
“Until recently, we still had green grass high up on the forest. The acorn crop on the oak brush was fabulous. Deer stayed higher than they normally do.”
Spezze generally discounts a common hunter complaint that many animals died during the severe winter.
“That may have been true for deer in some places, notably the Gunnison basin. But we didn’t lose adult elk to any degree.”
Spezze said precise results won’t be known until the agency conducts its annual aerial surveys in January. Meanwhile, it’s something to chew on.
