Quote:
Originally Posted by Rockymtnx
At what age are you starting your 10% decrease?
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I'm just following the last couple posts with regard to the link that SG posted.
So at age 3 10% mortality per year use any number I used 100 for easy calculating.
The thing here is that recruitment (anything that makes it through one year) numbers around 40% would be good to great. So 40% off births make it to one year 60% mortality. Usually then the next year you could be fairly high as well first winter on there own. I would suggest that up to 75% of lambs born never make it to be a two year old (I don't have numbers in front of me but something like that) then after that these animals along with most ungulates can manage quite well and it is stated in that abstract that 10% mortality going forward from that point.
So if it gets to the point that we are not able to keep the age classes above say 6 years old then the problem is probably with increasing that 10% as long as the first two years are stable. This then is increased predatation, decreasing habitat disease and unfortunately hunting.
The problem we have here is that there is a group pushing reduced hunter numbers for there own selfish reasons. If we follow the Bighorn Sheep management plan resident hunters come before allocations on the priorty list, and if numbers of harvested rams have been reported accurate in previous posts the allocations already exceed the 80/20 split that was agreed on quite some time ago.
If there is a problem then lets start there and work our way to other solutions later.