NM WIldlife Commission Sets Big-Game Rules

By Ben Neary

NMWF

The New Mexico State Wildlife Commission on Friday approved plans that will govern hunting for elk, deer, bighorn and pronghorn over the next four years.

The deer plan will cut the number of licenses the state issues in Game Management  Unit 2B, which borders Colorado between Bloomfield and Chama. That move comes in response to a request from the Jicarilla Apache Tribe to manage the area to produce older, trophy bucks.

For the past several preceding years, the state has been issuing nearly 2,000 public land licenses annually in the unit, which is about 477,000 acres. Under the new plan, the state will issue 885 fewer licenses for a total of just over 1,000.  

Stewart Liley, chief biologist with the wildlife department, said that will likely result in about 400 fewer bucks being killed in the area.

Under the elk plan, New Mexico hunters will have access to fewer cow elk and youth-encouragement licenses in the Gila region. The 11-percent decrease in tags in the southwest region of the state will mainly come from youth encouragement hunts. The reductions are in response to falling populations as the region continues to face dry conditions.

Liley told commissioners that the department received many comments from members of the public demanding changes to the state’s system of allocating elk licenses but said many of those were addressing issues codified in state law that are outside the commission’s control. New Mexico directs more than a third of total elk licenses to landowners – far more than any other state in the West.

The bighorn sheep plan the commission adopted calls for opening a new hunting area in the Manzano Mountains that could offer up to two tags per year, Liley said. The bighorn live 90 percent of the time on private land. Liley said the state has reached an agreement with the landowner to split the tags. Half will go to the public and half to the landowner in exchange for allowing public access, he said.

Liley told commissioners that the state plans to begin a new bighorn hunt next year in the Sacramento Mountains. He said the population was established in 2018. 

The commission didn’t address written comments from the New Mexico Wildlife Federation and others who protested the state’s system of lumping all Rocky Mountain bighorn hunts together and lumping all desert bighorn hunts together. 

Putting the hunts together increases the number of licenses high enough to allow the wildlife department to earmark some of the highly coveted tags to hunters who retain outfitters before applying in the public draw. 

New Mexico’s “outfitter set-aside” law reserves 10 percent of the licenses in a given draw for big game animals to hunters who have retained an outfitter. More than a dozen state legislators this year have asked the state attorney general for an opinion on whether the law violates the anti-donation clause of the state constitution, which prohibits the state and local governments from giving things of value to private parties.

Specific sheep hunts are often only one or two tags in a given area at any one time. Counting that as a single, separate hunt would not allow setting aside 10 percent for outfitted hunters because it wouldn’t reach a whole number. 

The NMWF for years has protested that lumping the bighorn tags together runs contrary to the state law that requires each separate hunt for big game to specify a particular place and time for each hunt. The various sheep hunts are commonly hundreds of miles apart and can be months apart.

The pronghorn rule the commission adopted calls for cutting the number of licenses issued in the northeast quadrant of the state by 17 percent – from 1,005 down to 831. The rule also caps the number of tags that private landowners can issue for hunting on their own property and requires ranches to register in order to be eligible for landowner tags. The caps are generally about the same as the number of tags that have been issued in recent years.

The commission voted to specify that the pronghorn hunting around San Antonio Mountain in Northcentral New Mexico will be restricted to muzzleloaders. The commission has allowed centerfire rifle hunting there for the past few years ahead of the muzzleloader hunts. The New Mexico Wildlife Federation had urged the commission to change back to muzzleloaders only in the area.

At the start of Friday’s meeting, Commission Chair Richard Stump called for a moment of silence to recognize the recent death of Jack Young, archaeologist for the wildlife department for the past 19 years.

Stump said Young died last week while leading a group of archaeology students on the Marquez Wildlife Management Area, near Grants. Stump said Young is survived by his wife and daughter.

Young received the 2014 Heritage Preservation Award from the state’s Cultural Properties Review Committee in recognition of his work on a project at Lake Roberts, near Silver City. As part of a project to make safety improvements on the dam, Young oversaw the protection, excavation and management of two archeological sites that dated back to about 700 to 1100 AD.

Under comments from the commission, Commissioner Chris Witt said he’s working on developing a comprehensive plan for the new ranch of roughly 11,000 acres the state has required on the Mimbres River, south of Silver City. He said the commission's approach needs to afford adequate protection to the area’s cultural and wildlife resources.

Jesse Deubel, executive director of the NMWF, praised the commission and the agency for work that’s been done recently on the expansion and maintenance of the state’s wildlife management areas.