Wolf harvest picking up in NW Montana

Heading into the final week of the big game hunting season, the deer and elk harvest picked up but still lags behind last year's numbers while the wolf harvest is approaching quotas for a few Northwest Montana hunting districts.

Northwest Montana has six wolf hunting districts with a combined hunting quota of 71 wolves.

For District 101 covering the area between Libby and Kalispell, hunters have taken down 15 wolves out of a quota of 19 for the district.

In District 130 covering the area east of Kalispell including the Swan Valley, nine wolves have been harvested; the quota is 12.

And in the North Fork's District 110, one wolf has been harvested out of the quota of two.

For all six Northwest Montana hunting districts, hunters have taken 41 wolves. The total quota is 71 wolves.

Hunters are required to report wolf harvests within 12 hours so state officials can close districts once quotas have been reached. The general rifle season for wolves continues through Dec. 31.

However, the big game season for deer and elk closes at sundown on Sunday.

After four weeks of hunting through Nov. 20, the region's six check stations had recorded a total of 14,986 hunters stopping with 606 whitetail deer, 494 of them bucks, along with 70 mule deer and 87 elk for a 5.1 percent rate of hunters with game, as compared to 6.9 percent at the same point last year.

With improved hunting conditions over the weekend, hunters checked 200 whitetail bucks.

At the Swan Valley check station, hunters stopped with more whitetail bucks than they had during the previous four weekends combined.

But the number of deer and elk checked still lags considerably behind last year's numbers, with hunters checking 22 percent fewer whitetail, 44 percent fewer mule deer and 26 percent fewer elk.

Counts at the check stations, which are operated on weekends only, reflect only a sampling of the overall harvest.