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‘Stella!’ — Project reignites passion for elk season By Mark Freeman Oct 28, 2022 01:00 AM A A Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife officials hope a November elk season will rekindle interest among hunters. [Mail Tribune file photo] Murmurs would be going through the point of sale licensing line now at The Black Bird Shopping Center — if there was a line. Last year’s shift in the Cascades’ general rifle season for bull elk — the first such November season in three decades — helped double the number of bulls shot in the Rogue Unit, Jackson County’s most popular elk-hunting environs. In fact, it doubled in the Evans Creek Unit, as well. “There was an increase in success across the board,” says Mathew Vargas, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife’s assistant Rogue District wildlife biologist. But before you start calling in to work with a protracted case of bull fever next week, you ought to put that into a bit of perspective. The general season success rate for rifle hunters out of October and into its historical November slot did double. But that’s from 2% of hunters bagging a bull in October 2020 to 4% in November 2021. So your statistical chances of bagging a bull in what used to be one of the region’s elite general seasons has now improved from once in a lifetime to perhaps twice. But still that injects enough new juju for at least some hunters to believe the one-week general season that starts here Nov. 5 this time will become more than a weeklong backwoods camping excursion. Last year’s shift out of October and into November helped put hunters in far better hunting weather than the Rice Krispies-like forest they often found during the mid-October days. And those rainy and snowy conditions greeting hunters last November are more likely to repeat than not. “Now that the season is later, we should get more consistent weather that’s more conducive to elk hunting,” Vargas says. But for the Cascades bull season to return to its heyday of the 1980s will take a change in forest conditions. For that, there’s one promising word elk hunters will hear a lot in future years: Stella. More on Stella later. But first, how we got here. In the old days, the Cascade general season elk hunt began, as it does now, the weekend after the general rifle season for black-tailed deer, and it was lovely. Wildfire restrictions gone. Tracking snow usually on the ground. And big bulls close to the rut, making their sex-crazed brains easier to fool in the woods. One in 10 general-season hunters bagged a bull most years. But bull ratios suffered, so ODFW biologists pushed the season into mid-October, fragmenting the general blacktail buck-deer season. The move was done to allow more bulls to escape the November season and strengthen the herds. In the short term, it worked. Bull ratios grew, and hunting success was never better than in the early 1990s. But elk patterns changed. While bull ratios grew to as high as 30 bulls per 100 cows in 2017, elk gradually moved out of Forest Service lands, and now they dominate lower-elevation lands like pear orchards. Success rates dipped to as little as 2% in 2009 and 2010. That horrid percentage resurfaced in 2019, as well. The great general elk season had turned more into a weeklong camping trip than a chance to hang an animal in camp. That means an adult hunter buying a $34.50 hunting license and $49.50 bull-elk rifle tag has the statistical expectation to shoot one bull in a lifetime. Not the kind of math that gets hunters excited. But the move was intended to improve bull ratios that were often below the benchmark of 10 bulls per 100 cows. The move back to November has helped boost hunter interest — and success. But the outlier here is that the Cascades of the 1980s no longer exists. “The heyday of Cascade elk hunting was probably around the same time as the heyday of Cascade logging,” says Duane Dungannon, spokesman for the Medford-based Oregon Hunters Association. Intense fire suppression and lack of logging on national forestslands have created less elk-friendly habitat, Dungannon says. And this is where Stella comes in. The Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest’s Stella Landscape Restoration Project will tackle wildfire risks, improvements to stream health and wildlife habitat largely on the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest. The plan calls for aggressive work within a 43,955-acre footprint that includes almost 2,500 acres within a sliver of the Umpqua National Forest in Douglas County. The plans calls for about 21,000 acres of pre-commercial and commercial thinning, and also introducing prescribed fire to 17,185 acres of often dense forest primed for potentially intense wildfires. While most of the public reads this as aiding wildfire suppression, elk hunters see this as regenerating elk habitat in key areas of the Rogue and South Dixon hunting units. Such projects can grow elk food and habitat better than ODFW can, and it might make future November seasons more akin to those of your grandpa. “It’ll be interesting to see in the years to come how things progress,” Vargas says. Reach Mail Tribune reporter Mark Freeman at 541-776-4470 or [email protected] m.