la panza bull tag

[manzanamangler]

my dad drew a bull permit for the 1st season. does anybody have any suggestions on where to hunt besides the carizzo plains. has anyone seen elk in the black mountain, queen bee, american canyon, rock front or gifford areas?

 

[quicknick]

The short answer is no. There is some elk on private lands out in some of those areas but I have never heard of them venturing onto public lands.

 

[easymoney]

No would be the answer.
The La Panza Elk stay primarily on the private ranches where they have abundant food, water and lack of hunting. They rarely if ever make it onto the LPNF lands you mentioned, if they do it is just passing through at night. The Carrizo is the largest public land (BLM) that they tend to use, but again you will find them mainly on the adjacent ranches. Some of these ranches are huge as in tens of thousands of acres or more, they are cattle ranches and are tightly managed with no hunting or only limited hunting through guides or outfitters with limited PLM tags. Some of these bull elk tags go for as much as $10,000.00 or more.

 

[DFGELK]

Elk do use a lot of the private ground in that zone but they also use a lot of the public ground as well. DFG has a couple wildlife areas and a lot of the ground is in CRP so it has excellent vegetative growth and is not grazed. Radio (GPS) collar data clearly shows heavy use of the CRP lands. Some years the elk spend most of the time on the public and some times they sit at the fence on the private, but after looking at the data it seems there were usually animals on public ground during the hunt period just have to spend some time finding them. It can be an easy hunt or it can be very frutrating with animals sitting on the fence. The Department is working on some private land access as part of the SHARE program. Will not know yet if that will get completed in time for this year but we are trying. Good luck

Joe