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The choice was made through the center of the 2023-24 looking season, with the rule modifications taking impact in March

The Jan. 11 choice is the most recent within the ongoing debate surrounding mountain lion looking in Colorado. {Photograph} by Jacob W. Frank / NPS

The Colorado Parks and Wildlife Fee voted final week to chop again on mountain lion looking by canceling the April looking season and outlawing using digital calls statewide. These modifications handed although Colorado’s present mountain lion harvest falls effectively inside CPW’s harvest objectives, and as CPW’s wildlife biologists level to a rising and wholesome inhabitants of lions within the state — thanks partially to many years of carefully regulated looking. The brand new guidelines will impression the present season after they go into impact March 1.

Colorado has historically held its main mountain lion looking season from late November by means of March and a second season through the month of April in sure items. Commissioners cited “low hunter numbers” and “ineffective administration outcomes” as the rationale for chopping this April’s looking season, in keeping with the Colorado Solar.

It’s unclear how a lot these rule modifications will have an effect on mountain lion hunters in several elements of the state. Digital calls have been already outlawed in all however just a few hunt items, and an clothes shop on the Western Slope tells Outside Life that it’s been years since hunters have had an April season in his space.

“It doesn’t have an effect on me as a result of we haven’t been in a position to hunt in April over right here for fairly awhile,” Scott Summers of Canyon Rim Outfitters says. “However once we did have it, it was a good time to get out and hunt. You possibly can run round in a flannel shirt and a jean jacket. And I’ve associates [in other parts of the state] who do nonetheless hunt in April.”

Nonetheless, the timing and reasoning behind the fee’s Jan. 11 choice are regarding for Colorado hunters. Adjustments to looking and fishing laws all the time draw some degree of skepticism from sportsmen, however Colorado’s looking neighborhood stays on excessive alert on account of some latest shifts surrounding wildlife administration there. Final July, Governor Jared Polis appointed three new members to the state’s Parks and Wildlife Fee whose backgrounds are extra grounded in animal rights than conventional wildlife administration. Then, in September, anti-hunters filed a extremely controversial poll initiative that will outlaw the looking of mountain lions statewide.

Some defenders of regulated looking fear the state’s Parks and Wildlife Fee might be making an attempt to appease anti-hunters and the non-hunting public whereas ignoring the science that has historically guided wildlife administration selections in Colorado and elsewhere. These advocates level to the small impression that hunters have on cougar populations, which is commonly blown out of proportion by those that need to see mountain lion looking banned outright.

This broad vilification of hunters was already underway when CPW commissioners met for his or her first assembly of the yr in Denver on Wednesday. Simply someday earlier than that assembly, Cats Aren’t Trophies, the advocacy group that’s behind the proposed mountain lion looking ban, issued a sensationalized press launch claiming that “mountain lion trophy hunters in Colorado are outpacing the yearly common for killing females” although the 2023-24 looking season “is much from over.” The group famous that hunters had already killed 276 lions as of Jan. 9, with 198 of these taken through the first month of the season. (That quantity had elevated to 307 lions as of Jan. 11, the Colorado Solar stories.)

Nonetheless, information from earlier looking seasons exhibits that these numbers fall according to previous harvest numbers. Extra importantly, the cougars already taken by hunters this season characterize fewer than half of CPW’s 2023-2024 harvest quota of 674 animals. The company’s cap through the 2021-22 season was 634 mountain lions; hunters killed 486 that season — effectively under the brink to make sure the state’s mountain lion inhabitants stays wholesome.

Biologists work on an immobilized mountain lion. Searching laws and harvest quotas in states like Colorado are set utilizing the perfect accessible science. {Photograph} by USFWS

CPW’s carnivore and furbearer program supervisor Mark Vieira gave a presentation through the second day of the fee assembly on Jan. 11, throughout which he corrected a few of the claims made in CAT’s press launch. Vieira clarified that mountain lion looking is closely regulated in Colorado, and that harvest limits are set in keeping with inhabitants estimates in sure looking items. CPW retains an in depth eye on these harvests and closes items when hunters attain set quotas.

“Our lion harvest has been round 500 for the final 5 years or so. By way of seasonal harvest, Colorado has one of the crucial restrictive laws,” Vieira advised commissioners. “We are inclined to frontload our harvest, from late November into December and early January. There are many causes for that, together with the opening day push, when extra people are out, snowfall, and the closure of items after harvest limits have been reached.”

Vieira additionally known as consideration to CAT’s declare that hunters are harvesting extra females than common, because the particular curiosity group identified that 111 of the 198 mountain lions killed between Nov. 27 and Dec. 27 have been feminine. This equates to 43.9 p.c of the general harvest up to now, which the group known as “unsustainable.” Vieira identified that in most seasons, roughly 40 p.c of the general harvest is made up of feminine lions. Nonetheless, he defined that greater than half of these females are usually sub-adults, that are too younger to breed and have little to no impression on the general inhabitants.

And that inhabitants is prospering. CPW presently estimates there are between 3,000 and seven,000 mountain lions within the state — a quantity that’s grown since 1965, when CPW first began managing cougars as large sport. Vieira spoke proudly of this administration work and known as the final 50-plus years of regulated mountain lion looking in Colorado a conservation success story.

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“All formal observations level to a rising, wholesome, and more and more steady inhabitants of lions in latest many years … And by utilizing scientifically supported administration thresholds, CPW can present for lion harvest as a administration instrument whereas additionally having very strong populations of lions on the panorama,” Vieira mentioned Thursday. “It’s not one or the opposite. These two circumstances should not mutually unique.”

Apart from shortening this yr’s season and tightening up the prohibitions round digital calls, the wildlife commissioners didn’t make every other rule modifications that will have an effect on mountain lion hunters in Colorado. CPW didn’t instantly reply to a request for touch upon the brand new laws, or their timing in relation to CAT’s claims.