I recently received a Fish and Wildlife newsletter from the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry. I found it quite interesting, but focused on the moose harvest results from 2021. I already had and reported much of it previously, but other aspects aroused several new concerns.
My main concern deals with mandatory reporting (MR) of hunter information and recent changes to it. I’ll deal with a few small concerns first and address this problem last.
First, I see that hunter numbers have truly dropped from about 88,000 prior to 2013 to less than 39,000. It was precipitous in the past two years. This strikes me as a massive failure towards the mandate to provide social and economic benefits from moose. Perhaps the decline was a temporary result of the pandemic.
Hunters, through the Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters (OFAH) wanted earmarked funding from licence sales (a “special purpose account”) to support wildlife management activities. As far as I know, that meant that management did not get money from general tax revenues. The significance of this drop in hunters is that there is less licence money to be used for inventory and assessment work.
If the program is to avoid total collapse, the government is going to have to inject general revenue funds to bolster surveys — a drop in the bucket at probably a few million dollars a year. If I had the minister’s ear, I would recommend the “government” lend “hunters” the required money, to be paid back when the population and licence sales recover. That’s an incentive for both parties to succeed.
This isn’t a point of concern, but it is a point of interest. With 17,000 tags available and 39,000 hunters, most parties should have had lots of tags. That’s not my understanding from folks around here.
Second, the cow harvest was way out of line with what it should be, but that’s not new information. As far as proportions go, the bull harvest is appropriate (at 55 per cent), but the cow harvest is more than twice what it should be (at 31 per cent) and the calf harvest only half (at 14 per cent) of what it should be. These numbers should be reversed.
The acceptability of the bull harvest assumes that the populations are high enough that polygamous breeding can take place. In units at low densities, the total harvest should be lower and the adult ratios closer to equality.
Finally, I see they are going to start “charging” hunters for failing to submit mandatory reports. It will be $25 for the first offence, then suspension from obtaining a licence. It’s certainly a good way to enforce compliance, but I’m not convinced that it is a good way to get information and reliable management information, not compliance, is of paramount importance.
I have been very critical on MNRF’s moose management practices, but on this one, I’m taking their side – sort of.
It appears that MR was implemented in 2019. It resulted in a large increase in reporting — from 51 per cent in 2018 to more than 80 per cent in 2019 and 89 per cent in 2021. Thirty to forty per cent of hunters have been forced to comply but still, 10 per cent of hunters have not. This suggests that hunters are not happy with reporting, either out of ignorance or lack of respect for MNRF.
I am not a supporter of MR for a variety of reasons (1). That said, I know all too well the frustration of trying to manage a resource responsibly and effectively, when hunters — those “conservation minded individuals” — fail to provide the information that is essential to good management.
The need for reliable information should be patently obvious to anyone intelligent enough to obtain a hunting or firearms licence. That said, I understand the (justified?) lack of respect for MNRF and the “screw them if they can’t do a better job” attitude.
It should also be patently obvious that this is a self-harming philosophy. Misinformation leads to mismanagement, and it isn’t just hunters who pay the penalty for that mistake.
When I retired, reply rates to statistically designed, mailed surveys were in the order of 65 per cent. Apparently, they fell even lower after that since. Those numbers do not suggest that a high proportion of hunters are truly conservation minded. A variety of techniques were tried to increase return rates, including prepaid postage, but nothing worked.
Faced with the possibility that they were not getting enough information to make management decisions, MNRF implemented mandatory reporting (MR). They certainly got more information, but did they get better information? I am skeptical.
With voluntary reporting, it was presumed (and there is evidence to support that presumption) that hunters who killed a moose believed they had “important” information and would reply. Those who did not kill, did not have “important” information, so didn’t bother. A lack of understanding of why all harvest information, both from successful and unsuccessful hunters is important, might explain low return rates.
Because successful hunters report at a higher rate, the estimated harvest is higher than the actual harvest. There are simple ways to correct that to get a more accurate estimate. I don’t believe hunters provided false information with voluntary reporting. They just didn’t report.
With the lack of respect for MNRF and declining tag numbers, hunters submitting MRs are more likely not to report kills — “gaming the system” in the belief that more tags will be available. This will result in an underestimate of the harvest and there is no simple way to correct for that. As I said, MNRF is getting more information, but I doubt it is really better information. In fact, if they actually believe the numbers, they may be making a disastrous mistake.
Frankly, I don’t know how I would manage with this uncertainty. Presumably, one should build in a BS factor, but what value should be used: two, five, ten per cent or some other number? Totally unscientific and unprofessional, but better to err on the side of conservation.
I have always believed that some hunters try gaming. MR makes it worse and more dangerous for managers. In recent days, virtually everyone I’ve spoken to has said they know hunters who do that. Whether that is hearsay or firsthand information, I am not able to judge.
One example of gaming is shown in the reporting of wolf sightings. Hunters report more than are actually seen. I have spent a fair bit of time in the bush, not hunting from roads, which may give me a different perspective. I have had a number of encounters with wolves, mostly through howling, and seen several on my property, but I certainly haven’t seen one for every 11 days I’ve spent in the field, as is reported for the 2021 season. Nor have any of the hunters I know seen anywhere near that many.
Hunters saw a moose every 2.7 days, on average. Taken at face value, it would appear that the wolf population is about one quarter the size of the moose population. But big “black” moose are a more visible than small, grey wolves. Because of this bias, the wolf population would be expected to be even higher than that. Pretty much garbage information in that context.
When I was looking at that information before I retired, there were reports of hunters seeing 99 wolves. It might have been 999 if there had been three squares to fill in. Such answers are possible, but highly unlikely. Just for the record, I would not distinguish between “seeing” and “hearing” wolves. Either answer is valid. It is just a relative index to assess trend over time if answered honestly.
I should point out that there are two types of information from harvest surveys. Absolute information is the number of folks who actually hunted, and the number of moose killed. They are “counts” as reported through MR (or extrapolation from mail survey samples). There is no “range”. They are single numbers, summed provincially or by zone and used to assess or plan the harvest and tag allocation.
Trend information (days hunted, moose and wolves seen) is used as, or to create, indices that help support things like population survey trends. They vary among units and are averaged at the provincial or zone level. Even if hunters game value like wolves seen, and the gamesmanship remains constant, there are probably enough honest answers that the trends will still remain useful.
While it is an offence to provide false information, it would actually be difficult to enforce that provision. Who can prove how many wolves you saw? I can think of a couple of ways to enforce moose killed reports, but once used a couple of times they would become common knowledge and easily circumvented.
It appears that MNRF did increase response by more than 30 per cent with MR. The essential point is that by forcing hunters to give information they don’t wish to give, the quality of the information is going to be compromised. Compromise should not be acceptable for such important information, especially when the population appears to be in jeopardy.
About 2014, I suggested to the OFAH that they should publish an article on the importance of accurate harvest information. The exact response surprised me coming from what has been described as Ontario’s lead conservation organization. They just were not interested. Concurrently, I have never seen anything in the Hunting Summaries either.
In the absence of that information, here is my explanation for why all hunters should willingly and accurately report their hunting activities.
The simplest answer is that reliable and accurate information is essential to making informed decisions. That’s a factual explanation, but admittedly boring. Perhaps more explanation might make the story interesting?
Moose management is simple in some respects and quite complicated in others. It boils down to a deaths versus births game. Much of the information is too difficult and too expensive to obtain, especially if it fluctuates annually. Usually, it can be inferred from research, often from other jurisdictions. Historically, different provinces or states undertook different aspects of this task, depending on local concerns and the interests and skills of staff. Collectively, it has presented a reasonable picture of the life history of the species.
With a useful information system, things like winter severity, tick infestations or non-hunting mortality, can be measured at low cost and used to adjust harvest plans for both good and bad years. I believe these surveys have been stopped.
There is no need to go into the complexities of either the birth side (habitat quality, age structure of population, density dependent aspects of reproduction) or the mortality side (disease, predation, subsistence and recreational hunting) of the equation. It all comes down to the fact the only practical thing that can be controlled, under existing circumstances, is human-caused mortality.
Even then, only part of that can be regulated without the full involvement and cooperation of First Nations.
All available information, from estimates for factors which are numerically uncertain to the best factual information you can get, goes into the process of adaptive management. You create the best management plan you can and modify and improve things as you identify failures.
For all their rhetoric, MNRF has consistently failed to do that, or if they did, moved in the wrong direction, to wit: killing more cows.
At relatively low populations, you need a reliable population estimate and reliable harvest numbers. You don’t have room to make mistakes. Depending on the population trend, you manage the harvest in a predictable and effective manner to achieve whatever the desired goal is.
Generally, to achieve social and economic benefits (or to protect biodiversity and ecosystem integrity) in Ontario, at this time, that should be population growth. As populations approach the capability of the land to produce moose, you no longer need aerial population estimates, and must replace them with habitat assessment to prevent overpopulation and the deterioration of habitat and ecosystems.
That’s moose management in a nutshell. It means predictable and effective control of the harvest. Please note that I have underlined “reliable” several times. Without it, you might as well throw darts.
In previous articles I have criticized the incompetent efforts of MNRF to have reliable population information. Historically, this was in part because of increasing search intensity and in part because it was not aggregated in a manner that made it easy to interpret population trends. More recently can be added the questionable practice of using “landscape level” surveys with significantly fewer plots (average of 213 for 2019 to 2021, down from 1,000 prior to 2001) and extrapolating observations based on unproven habitat relationships.
As an extension of that, I have criticized MNRF for managing with computers rather than using real inventory information and setting population objectives using depressed populations with the same questionable techniques, while ignoring historic survey information to determine what “ecological populations” might really be.
I have criticized them for having management policies that are incompatible with their own objectives and the Endangered Species Act (e.g., moose vs caribou), and not doing even the simplest things to resolve those conflicts, like creating a separate caribou WMU on the north shore of Lake Superior.
I have criticized their failure to plan sustainable harvests, to observe that tag numbers did nothing to regulate that harvest, or to review or modify their management approach in the face of professional level criticism (2). This is also a failure to use adaptive management effectively.
I have indirectly criticized them for allowing the harvest allocation to tourist outfitters to increase from the historic level at seven per cent to twelve per cent (a 71-per-cent increase), thereby depriving Ontario residents of opportunities that should rightly be theirs.
I have, or should have, criticized historic harvest assessment for poor sample design and failing to include an estimate of the calf harvest until about 1997.
I have criticized them for a tag allocation process that is unwieldy (apply/reject, apply/reject), lengthy (apply in April finish in August) and inefficient. The point system is much fairer, but the allocation process a shambles. If my information is correct (from the garbage data I was directed to) some 5,000 tags (30 per cent) were not allocated at all in 2021. I expect that a lot of those were bull and cow tags.
I asked for the correct values by age/sex class for 2021 and 2022 but am being stonewalled, even by the Freedom of Information folks. Failure to provide six simple numbers, after several requests, suggests that they are trying to hide the fact that they have a poor allocation system and know it.
As the Senior Policy advisor wrote: “Of the 24 bull tags available (apparently all allocated in the ‘Primary Allocation’) in Unit 1C, only two hunters claimed their tag. … The proportion of tags that end up in hunter’s pockets are much higher in the south”.
The fact is that with a good allocation process, all tags should be allocated (even though way too many are currently offered to control the harvest). I would guess that another one or two apply/reject cycles would be required to issue all the tags. Nobody knows what the other group members will get. They cannot plan effectiveely and must resort to a shotgun approach.
I have criticized their failure to include First Nations as equal partners in the moose management process.
I would like to criticize them now for MR, just as a matter of principle. In this case, they don’t deserve it — at least not all of the blame.
I think, MNRF, in association with the OFAH, could have done a better job of explaining the importance of accurate information and thus improved the results of voluntary returns. They might also have done a better job to simplify the questionnaire by eliminating the useless information on three WMUs.
However, hunters bear most of the blame for their failure to respond to voluntary surveys and failure to provide accurate and reliable information. This has been a hunter’s ethical responsibility since management began and there is no good reason to ignore that. Providing false information is inexcusable. I really don’t like MR and I don’t like the charge for failure to submit a return. Faced with diminishing returns, MNRF had little alternative — and it’s too late to go back, at least for now.
The point of this article is a plea to all hunters to honestly complete these reports. If you fail to do so and moose management fails, you should consider yourself one of the significant points in that failure.
As a final note, I will point out that it is possible to game the system because of the “tag filling rate”. Until MNRF adopts the one-tag-per-animal management approach they will never achieve the true social, economic, and ecological potential from moose. To hell with their hypothetical, computer “population objectives”.
Gamesmanship will stop. There will be no tag filling rate and no reason to provide false information. Successful population growth will be the reward from reliable information. Then, and only then can the moose population be restored.
References
1: Alan R. Bisset. 1999. Mandatory Reporting: An Implementation Strategy. Northwest Sci & Info. Thunder Bay, Ont. NWSI Technical Report TR-??. 13 pp.
2: Moose Management in Ontario: An Alternative Strategy. 2014. A. R. Bisset. Available at: https://tinyurl.com/Moose-alternative.
Alan Bisset is a retired regional moose biologist and wildlife inventory program leader with the former Ministry of Natural Resources. He has written and published many papers on moose management, both Internally and in scientific journals. Bisset lives in Strathroy, west of London, Ontario. You can find his other submissions by typing “Alan Bisset” into the searchbar at Sudbury.com.
