Here’s another regional roundup of important information as the month and year draws to a close.

Still Time to Comment on Trophy Species Proposals

Did you miss the trophy species open house at Fish and Game this week? No worries. You can still review the proposals and make comments.

Several season changes are being proposed for moose in the Southeast Region based on field observations and harvest data trends. The proposals include:

• Increase archery-only moose hunting opportunity in Game Management Unit (GMU) 68A. This will include two additional antlered tags and two additional antlerless tags.
• Eliminate antlerless moose tags in Hunt Area 75. Currently, there are five antlerless tags in this hunt area.
• Reduce antlered tags to seven in hunt area 76-3. Currently 10 antlered tags are offered in 76-3, so this represents a reduction of 3 antlered tags.

Public input is important to our season-setting process, so please take the time to provide Fish and Game with your thoughts on the proposed changes. Trophy species proposals for the entire state can be viewed online at idfg.idaho.gov. Comments may also be submitted online or by contacting Regional Wildlife Manager Zach Lockyer or Regional Wildlife Biologist Eric Freeman at 208-232-4703.

Comments will be accepted through Jan. 4.

Mandatory Hunt Reports

As you are getting ready for Christmas, maybe planning your first ski trip and even getting your ice fishing gear ready, just remember you may have some unfinished business left with the recent big game hunting season.

If you purchased tags for deer, elk or pronghorn, you need to file the mandatory hunt report — even if you didn’t harvest and even if you didn’t hunt.

Harvest reports can be submitted online — it is quick and easy. Just go to Fish and Game’s website at idfg.idaho.gov. Select the Hunt Report option shown on the bottom of the home page. Make sure you have your license or tag number handy, and within a couple of minutes you can complete your report.

You can also file your hunt report anytime with a live operator by calling 1-877-268-9365. And, as always, you can call or stop by your local Fish and Game office and we would be happy to enter your report for you.

Anytime you harvest a bear, mountain lion, moose or wolf be sure to follow all rules for mandatory check-in. Requirements differ for species, so please refer to Fish and Game’s regulations or give the regional Fish and Game office in Pocatello a call at 208-232-4703.

The information you submit helps Fish and Game better understand the numbers and types of big game animals harvested in the field, and is an important part of the wildlife management process.

Still Hunting for that Perfect Holiday Gift?

Christmas is getting close. Is your shopping done? Need some gift ideas?

Shop with us at the Fish and Game office in Pocatello where you can purchase gift certificates for your favorite hunter, angler or trapper to use on tags, licenses and permits. Just remember they must be redeemed at a Fish and Game office. The Pocatello office also sells birding guides, wildlife watching guides and Edson Fichter art prints for that outdoor enthusiast on your list.

Jennifer Jackson is the regional conservation educator for the Idaho Department of Fish and Game, southeast region.

It will take two articles to cover the Alaskan salmon fishing trip that Ron Spomer and I went on. The main course of the trip was to focus on brown bear/moose hunting and duck hunting. Salmon fishing was something to fill the blank spaces, but due to the spectacular fishing I can hardly call it a side event.

I caught more salmon on a flyrod than I ever have in my life. It was borderline unbelievable. For example, there were two Canadian fishermen in camp and one day they had a race to see how many fish they could land. Mario netted 58 and his cousin netted 62. And they went back to the lodge one hour early.

I’ve caught a lot of silvers in the ocean, but not in rivers. On this trip all we caught were silvers and they were huge. There were a lot of 14 to 15 pounders and plenty of 16’s and quite a few 17’s. On the second day, I caught a beautiful 15-pounder and a few minutes later Ron caught a 17. In the picture, his made mine look like a dink, and a 15 is a big silver!

We fished most of the time within a mile or two of the ocean, so we were catching mainly fresh fish. You want to bring home fresh fish because they taste a lot better. You can tell ones that have been out of the ocean for a while because they start metamorphosing. Their jaw gets hooked and they get darker. In the later stages, they really start to deteriorate.

I’ve fished for pinks, dogs and kings in rivers before, and usually I had to heavily entice them to hit. Not so on these silvers. Boy, you talk about aggressive. Once I had 13 hits in a row. They just slammed our flies.

It seemed like we did best on days that were overcast, not blue bird sunny days. I’ve never been smart enough to correlate everything with the tides, but no doubt, they affect the runs. The theory is when it rains, the fresh water running into the ocean instigates a run. You can tell they’re stacked up waiting to come in as evidenced by the seals at the mouth of the river feeding on them.

But back to fishing. The biggest flyrod I had was a 6-weight, so I went to Cabela’s and got a 9-weight and a heavy salt water fly reel. I don’t like 10-weights because it’s like fishing with a broomstick. Yes, an 8-weight would work, but you’d spend too much time fighting fish and less time catching, so to me, a 9-weight is perfect.

I took a lot of tippet material, 12 to 15 pounds, but like all my salmon fishing, they’re not leader-shy, so a third of the time I just tied onto the leader.

For flies, I had ordered a lot from flydealflies.com, but the guides also tied up a lot of their favorite flies for me. Of course guiding on the river all year they knew what flies work best. And speaking of guides, Alaska Expedition Co. had some great young men. We had a blast and they worked hard for us.

As you know, Alaskan weather is unforgiving and can be brutal. It’s not a place to use rinky dink equipment. We had a few sunny days but usually it sprinkled or just all out pounded us. One night we had 80 mph winds. That’s some serious wind.

In weather like this, you want good gear. We wore Simms waders and boots. Wow, were they comfortable. We put them on when we woke up and didn’t take them off until we went back for dinner. We lived in them. Not only were they comfortable but they didn’t leak a drop.

Charles had advised to wear fleece wading pants. Boy was he right. I grabbed a pair of fleece wading pants at Cabela’s and took a pair of Simms wading pants. Both worked great. I also wore some good wading socks, which are basically a thick knee high hiking sock. I took two raincoats in case I ripped one. I used a Simms Gortex and a Cabela’s Instinct Goretex. Both are excellent.

Well, I haven’t even got into some fishing techniques and we’re out of room. I’ll finish up next week. If you want the silver trip of a lifetime, give Alaska Expedition Co. a call at 800-572-0980.

Tom Claycomb lives in Idaho and has outdoors columns in newspapers in Alaska, Idaho, Utah, Nevada, Colorado and Louisiana. He also writes for various outdoors magazines and teaches outdoors seminars at stores like Cabela’s, Sportsman’s Warehouse and Bass Pro Shop.

If I remember correctly, about two years ago I wrote about finding a small number of bison on mountain property that my family owns.

We later learned that they were part of a group of bison that had escaped from the Fort Hall Indian Reservation bison herd. The Fort Hall reservation started their bison herd in 1966 with 21 bison acquired from North Dakota’s Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Now there are over 300 bison.

The relationship between the Native Americans and the bison they depended on for food, shelter, and nearly every other material was an essential part of Native American culture and religion for centuries. Then, between 1872 to 1874, an estimated 4.5 million bison were slaughtered by hunters, the Army and a large population of civilians moving west.

Several weeks ago, 10 bison from a genetically pure population that the federal government maintains in Iowa were released onto the the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming. The Eastern Shohone Tribe is hoping that one day these 10 bison will grow into a thousand animals on 750,000 acres that the tribe owns. That is more land than inside Yellowstone park.

In April, 89 genetically pure bison were placed on Montana’s Blackfeet Indian Reservation. These bison were transported by train from Canada’s Elk Island Park. These bison are certified to be brucellosis-free and will start a herd that will roam 4,000 square miles of Blackfeet land, as well as Glacier National Park and Badger-Two Medicine Wilderness. These bison are descendants of 410 bison bought by the Canadian government and transferred from Montana in 1907.

In 2012, Montana’s Fort Peck Indian Reservation received 70 genetically pure bison, certified free of brucellosis from Yellowstone National Park. They joined a herd of 200 animals already on the reservation.

The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation co-manage the National Bison Range in Western Montana with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Montana’s Crow Reservation has the largest herd of 1,000 bison on about 300,000 acres.

These are some examples of efforts to build bison herds on reservation lands in the Western United States. Concerns of diabetes among Native Americans has begun a movement to return to a more traditional diet of bison.

Most tribes permit tribal members to conduct limited bison hunts. Some tribes also allow the general public to hunt bison. In 2010, the Fort Belknap Reservation sold five tags for trophy bulls for $3,000 each.

Hopefully, the restoration of bison to Western Native American lands will help restore an important part of the heritage and culture of the tribes.

Smokey Merkley was raised in Idaho and has been hunting since he was 10 years old. He was a member of the faculty of Texas A&M University for 25 years. There he taught orienteering, marksmanship, self-defense, fencing, scuba diving and boxing. He was among the first DPS-certified Texas Concealed Handgun Instructors. He can be contacted at mokeydo41245@hotmail.com.

When Charles Allen, owner of Alaska Expedition Co., told me that he had high-speed duck hunting, I was in. Duck hunting is a blast when they come zooming in at Mach V.

If you’ve never hunted over a good set-up, you have to try it out. It’s cool to have a good layout of decoys in front of you and someone who can really call. I don’t get to hunt ducks much anymore. It seems I’m always swamped with some other type of hunting, so I was excited to go.

The first morning they told me the weather had been too nice, so we might not have much shooting. However, if we got some bad weather, it would get the ducks moving south and they’d flock into our area. For hunters that morning, it would be Ken and I, with Jordan as our guide. There wasn’t a lot flying, but I got to drop five ducks with four shots, which is better than my norm.

That afternoon, my partner, Ron Spomer, flew in, so we decided to duck hunt the next morning. It was a little cooler and it rained a hair, but still, no big amount of ducks were flying. But the next day, my shooting went downhill fast. So of course Ron thought I was stretching it in my tales from the day before.

This morning, Ken hunted in another blind in hopes that we’d push them back and forth. Jordan dumped us off and went over to meet up with Ken and call for him. Jordan had barely gotten out of sight when I dropped a duck across the creek. It wasn’t 2 feet deep, so I jumped out of the blind and ran over to get it.

Our blind was on a little dry hump and the edge of the creek was grassy. As I waded into the creek, there was a sudden 3-foot drop off. I face-planted into a pile of floating weeds. My toes were hung on the higher ground and my face was in the floating weeds, and it was tough to get up. Water was trying to seep in the top of my waders. Cold mountain water. My Mossberg was already under my chest in the water so I stuck the butt down, hit the bottom and pushed up.

I wasn’t but 10-15 feet behind the blind, but supposedly Ron missed it all, which is hard to believe because he films everything. If this dunking shows up on a YouTube in the near-future, it’s going to strain our friendship.

Well, I finally got upright, poured water out of the barrel, opened the action, made sure there were no obstructions in the barrel and kept hunting. I think the 5 gallons of cold mountain water poured down the front of my waders adversely affected my shooting. That’s my excuse.

We shot a few ducks but they weren’t flying too hot and heavy, and it was now time to focus on moose and brown bear hunting. Of course later that week, while setting on the river bank bear hunting, I bet 40 ducks flew right over my head. Arrgggh!

Well, it was fun to be able to duck hunt in Alaska for a few days in some cool country. 

Click here for a recipe for delicious bacon-wrapped duck poppers: http://www.idahostatejournal.com/outdoors/xtreme_idaho/how-to-make-bacon-wrapped-duck-poppers/article_432b9ec9-f0ae-55f6-bf21-45b7a25b0bf1.html

Gear:

For this hunt, I wanted to select the best gear since it’d be in some unforgiving country. Here’s the gear I used:

• Mossberg Pro Series Waterfowler 930
• Federal Black Cloud ammo
• Simms waders & wading boots
• Simms wading pants & rain coat
• Sure Shot calls
• Trumpeter Swan decoy. The ducks like feeding in the holes that the swans dig out.

P.S.: Note to self. Next time remember to use the belt that comes with the waders that keeps water from coming in if you tip over!

Tom Claycomb lives in Idaho and has outdoors columns in newspapers in Alaska, Idaho, Utah, Nevada, Colorado and Louisiana. He also writes for various outdoors magazines and teaches outdoors seminars at stores like Cabela’s, Sportsman’s Warehouse and Bass Pro Shop.