antelope?

thirtythirty · Jan 10, 2010

The last few year, I've had the opportunity to crisscross Idaho a number of times. One thing that always strikes me is that for being so desolate in many places, you would think that would be a lot more antelope. I know we have herds but it just seem there is room for more. Can anybody expound upon this?

30-30

deepforks · Jan 10, 2010

wolves have now moved into our lowland deserts and eaten them all. ya...im sticking with that.

orion23 · Jan 10, 2010

LAST EDITED ON Jan-10-10 AT 09:30PM (MST)[p]one theory, until last year, archery antelope has been OTC and have been hit extremely hard. even last year it was unlimited draw and the ones that forgot to apply, they let them get a tag too!

Travis
www.RidgelineOutdoors.com
Blacks-Creek Packs Dealer

7mmgilbert · Jan 11, 2010

LAST EDITED ON Jan-11-10 AT 11:36AM (MST)[p]We have had some hard winters.

Frontier · Jan 11, 2010

LAST EDITED ON Jan-11-10 AT 10:25AM (MST)[p] If people will go back into the history book of IDFG you'll find the answer. I can't remember what year it was exactly, but around 1990 we had some severe drought's. One of those years the high numbers of antelope Idaho had in a number of areas were depredating the fields severely. The few farmers were raising holy hell over it and wanted depredation damages. At that time the IDFG did not pay depredation damages. Joann Wood spear headed the legislature in making the IDFG fiscally responsible for damages due to depredation. That left the IDFG scrambling and their answer was to kill off as many antelope as they could over about a 3 year period. So we went from record high numbers to record low numbers and they have tried to keep the numbers fairly low to avoid paying depredation damages.