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Report on Jan 6th 2009 AGF Public Meeting
By: Doug Emmons
On January 6th the Arkansas Game and Fish held a public meeting looking for input for changes in the 2009-2010 hunting regulations. Some of the key topics that would affect us most are deer check-in and harvest guidelines.
The AGF are considering three options to the deer check-in:
Options 1: Discontinue all check stations and deer camps in the check sheet program in favor of telephone checking.
Option 2: Phasing out of check stations and deer camps in the check sheet program and phasing in telephone checking.
Option 3: No change.
From the AGF side I understand why they would like to see a telephone check-in. Currently, they to go all the check stations and collect all check sheets which are a time consuming and costly. Deer camps mail in their check sheets. They can scan in most of the information but the scanning is still a manual process.
I asked the question “How would this effect clubs in DMP and the data collected from jaw bones?” They said when a hunter called in their data they would be issued a check number and that number would be written on the tag for the jaw bone. If this passes we need to do a much better job tagging jaw bones. This past season about a third of our jaw bones where tagged incorrectly. I was able to correct all the jaw bone tags by looking at copies of check sheets. Some of them took a little guess work. I am working on a video for proper jaw bone tagging and it will be posted in the near future.
I also told them we collection a lot of data before the check sheets and jaw bones are sent in. If the telephone check-in is implemented we would lose all this data from AGF, but we would be printing our own check in sheets to be able to continue to run our reports. If the telephone check-in is implemented club game managers or officers would need to have access to down load the check information. At this time they don’t know if we would have access or not. We do receive a harvest report but most of the time it’s not mailed out until the end of August or the first of September.
One suggestion I made was one or more of the clubs officers go on line and enter the check information. Today individuals can check-in their game on-line. But we still need the information for the reports that we run for the club.
What ever happens, look for change!
Game Harvest
AGF is proposing raising the limit on does from 2 to 4. I don’t think this change will affect us much. Over the past few years we have received 40 additional bonus tags. With the number doe tags that come with our license and the bonus tags we can harvest 80 does. We are averaging only about 20 does per season. I believe everyone would agree the bonus tag program is not working for us.
The only other proposed change is increasing the squirrel possession limit to 32.
After the presentation they opened the floor for comments and suggestions. One suggestion I made was to have a fall turkey hunt. There was another guest that agreed. Last spring turkey season we only had 4 turkeys taken on the club. From talking to other members it seems our turkey population is getting out of hand. Either we need to start harvesting more birds or we need work out a deal with AGF to trap some of our birds and move them to different location. I did a survey last deer season and on one morning there was about 100 turkeys seen. These turkeys were all seen about the same time of day over different parts of the club. In my opinion I’m getting a little tired of feeding so many birds.
If you have the opportunity to attend the next public meeting in February I encourage you to attend. Also go the Arkansas Game and Fish web site www.afgc.com and voice your opinions or what changes you would like to see.
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