There are a lot of changes in the pipeline for hunting and fishing rules. Several proposed changes are out for public comment, from who qualifies for landowner hunting licenses, to setting up a commercial fishing guide system, to otters. With the Game and Fish Commission set to meet next week, I asked Game and Fish Department Director Angi Bruce to talk through what's being proposed.
She started with landowner licenses, which are special hunting licenses that are made available to certain landowners before the general public can win a license through a lottery. Many non-landowners see these licenses as a big advantage to landowners. The proposal came from the Game and Fish Commission.
Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited lightly for clarity and brevity.
Angi Bruce: They've [Wyoming Game and Fish Commission] been working on this issue since 2023. They've talked about it at seven commission meetings, which are public, and just haven't gotten much of a response. They really wanted to hear from landowners and they decided that if they put out some proposed changes, then they will get feedback. And they were right. We got so much feedback.
Currently, to give you perspective, landowners get just under 4,000 landowner licenses a year. It's about 3% of the total [licenses] available. So not many in the big scheme of things, yet a lot of landowners may be affected by any proposed changes.
The commission will visit the subject July 15 at the Casper commission meeting, which is public. In fact, they've actually dedicated the entire day to the discussion, which rarely happens. They are really serious about allowing time to have a good conversation with the public, if these changes should go forward or not.
Kamila Kudelska: What are those proposed changes?
AB: Currently, if you have 160 acres of continuous acres in the state, you qualify for a landowner license. The proposal they put out there is to change that to 640 acres, and if you have ranch land, if you had cultivated crop, such as row crop, irrigated fields, it would remain at 160.
The second change that they have proposed is you must have at least 20% ownership in the property
KK: To be qualified for the landowner license?
AB: Absolutely.
KK: Got it.
AB: Then currently, there is a wildlife component to qualifying. We talk about it as 2,000 animal use days. It's a formula we look at to see how many big game species or turkeys are using the area over the year and come up with a yearly estimate. Part of the proposed change is to take 2,000 and go to 3,000.
KK: You said we got a good amount of comments from the public. What's been the wide range? Is it positive? Is it negative?
AB: There's been an overwhelming amount of landowners expressing their opposition to the proposed changes. Those landowners over the years have highly valued getting those tags. With these recommendations, about a third of those landowners or more, it's hard to predict, would no longer qualify for the landowner tags. Therefore, they would have to apply like the general sportsperson in the raffle and put their chances out there to get the tags.
Editor’s Note: In response to these public comments, the Game and Fish Department axed the proposals Bruce mentioned. It still includes expanding the definition of immediate family to stepfamily members. The commission will still spend July 15 considering what to do with landowner licenses
KK: So moving on. In addition, there are a couple of new laws that the department has to implement. Let's start with the Game and Fish regulating commercially guided fishing boats for the first time. Where are we in that process?
AB: Wyoming does not have a registration or regulation process for fishing outfitters and guides. A lot of our neighboring states do. Legislators, as well as the general public, decided it was time for us to get ahead of this before it becomes even more of a problem in the state.
KK: How is it a problem now?
AB: We all have our favorite fishing spots out there, but what people have seen over the years is some stretches of river and some water bodies getting more and more occupied with boaters. It doesn't affect our fisheries, but what it does affect, and what we're hearing from the public, is about their quality of experience. There is an assumption that a lot of these [boats] are outfitters or guides. This first step in the process will help us gauge how much of a problem this is.
We have put out for comment some regulations that would be a requirement for them to register. They would pay a fee, they'd put in their information needed and then they would be provided a sticker for their boats so that we could also manage this in the field.
But what this will do after a year or two it will allow us to say, “Oh, there's maybe 20 outfitters and guides on one day using this area.” It'll help gauge: Do we need to go to the next step, which would be regulating them? And when it comes to regulation, that means limitations, [that] is really what we're getting to.
They will have a lot of this summarized and ready to go this fall. But anticipating more work will be needed after we get this first round of information back.
KK: Another new law that got a lot of attention this year is about otters. They're no longer considered wildlife.
AB: A lot of folks thought, “Oh, this was going to allow hunting.” No, no. A lot more steps would have to happen, and the population would have to be at a level that it had recovered in order to do that. The otter has been slow to recover in the state, more slow than most states across the nation, primarily because we have not moved the otter around. We had a native population, so we've let those native populations expand and come back.
What this will do is this will not really change much at all, except for what we can do to manage nuisance otters as the population grows. They love to take over areas such as individual small farm ponds and affect the fisheries populations and other things. We are limited by anything we can do. So this would give us a tool by moving them into non-game to be able to trap them and translocate them across the state to deal with those problems.
KK: And lastly, I just want to touch upon the Wyoming State Wildlife Action Plan, also known as SWAP. The state is starting a revision. It's required every 10 years. Let's just start off with what this is?
AB: The State Wildlife Action Plan was a requirement that the [U.S.] Fish and Wildlife Service put into place in order to receive some additional funding from the federal government for species that are beyond game species.
That funding every year is just under $900,000 and it's extremely important, because that is a key funding source for us to manage species that aren't hunted in the state. How we are set up in Game and Fish in Wyoming is a hundred percent of our funds come from hunters and anglers. The hunters of the state are paying for wildlife management, and this gives us this extra source to focus on species of concern or species of greatest conservation need.
The idea is to keep them off the Endangered Species List. We went through a public survey to ask folks about changes that they would like to see in the state plan. We're currently drafting that plan and plan to have it out for public comment in the spring.
