Spike hunters face longest odds, show greatest discretion

Hunters who bag trophy elk get all the press, posts and glory.

But the most discriminating and respectable sportsmen in Eastern Washington come from the humble ranks of general tag holders who succeed in hunting for the proverbial needle in a haystack – a spike bull.

A hunter heading into the Blue Mountains or Yakima areas must beat the daunting odds of drawing a special permit for the chance to shoot a branch-antlered bull or an antlerless cow or calf elk.

Without a coveted special permit, the general elk hunter’s only fair game in 78 game management units is a yearling bull.

Drawing a permit is a big deal. Overall success rates for special elk permit holders run from 50 to 90 percent. Success rates for spike bull hunters in the Blues run about 5 percent or less.

There’s more to it that just supply and demand.

Adding to the general hunter’s difficulty, some yearling bulls are not legal. State rules define a spike as having no more than one point on one side of its antlers. An antler point is a branch measuring 1 inch or longer. But points don’t count if they are within 4 inches of the skull.

More rules are detailed in a full page devoted to antler points in the 2016 Washington State Big Game Hunting Seasons & Regulations pamphlet. And spike rules are even more restrictive in some units.

The point is that calculating points in the field can be a challenge.

Imagine doing all the eyeballing, estimating and math required to determine whether a spike is legal at a distance of 300 yards. Harder yet is making the decision as it bolts through timber among snags that look a lot like antler tines.

It’s tough enough just trying to be safe and on the mark. Spikes often mingle with cows and calves during the rifle season, essentially using them as shields against a clear shot.

Hunters might have only seconds to make the call, and there’s no instant replay to reverse a decision to squeeze the trigger.

A trophy hunter simply decides whether the antlers are up to his standards. A spike hunter has to decide whether the antlers meet the letter of the law.

Ethical spike hunters pass up shots at questionable targets, partly because killing an illegal bull is punishable by a ticket and confiscation of the animal.

Good marksmanship takes poise and practice. But the highest measure of a sportsman is knowing when to hold fire.

Spike-only regulations were adopted by the Department of Fish and Wildlife for much of Eastern Washington in 1994 after research had shown problems in elk herd age structure.

Spike management is designed to increase bull survival, increase the ratios of adult bulls to adult cows and promote early, synchronized breeding.

Researchers had documented two peaks of calves being born, said Mark Vekasy, department assistant wildlife biologist in Walla Walla.

“When cows went into estrus in the fall, there weren’t enough mature bulls in the herd and a lot of cows had to go into a second estrus in order to be bred,” he said.

“Calves born in the second peak had less time to mature and had lower winter survival resulting in low cow-calf ratios.”

Yakima and Blue Mountains elk herds have responded to spike-only management. All age groups of bulls are well represented in the population and cow-calf ratios have improved.

As a bonus, people regularly see big 6- to 8-year-old bulls – a treat even for sportsmen who don’t have a permit to hunt one.

The main issue causing game managers to limit the Washington portion of the Blue Mountains elk population to no more than about 5,000 animals is to control damage to surrounding agricultural crops.

From there, it’s a matter of keeping hunters from overharvesting the herd.

When the Department of Fish and Wildlife revised the state Game Management Plan in the early 2000s, about 80,000 Washington elk hunters were harvesting about 7,000 elk a year from a statewide population of about 56,000.

Spike-only hunting was tested and appears to be here to stay in a state that has more elk hunters per elk than any other western state as well as having no limits on the number of elk licenses sold.

Spike-only restrictions combined with adjustable numbers of special permits prevents older bulls from being overharvested in the Blues and Yakima herds, biologists said.

Three-point minimum rules were set in areas of the West Side and northeastern Washington where denser cover makes hunting more difficult and naturally reduces harvest success. Road management is another element in controlling harvest.

Some hunters have argued that spike-only rules should be liberalized to allow harvesting yearling bulls that have fork-horn spikes on both sides. By protecting these elk to limit the harvest of yearlings, they say the rules are taking spikes out of the gene pool and selecting for “super spikes.”

“Pretty soon, the herd won’t be producing any real spikes,” one Blue Mountains hunter surmised last month.

But biologists have found no evidence that the ratio of spikes and fork-horn spikes is changing, Vekasy said.

“It’s very difficult in a wild population to influence genetics with hunting,” he said. “There are many factors in antler development, including genetics, nutrition and influence from bulls coming in from Oregon and Idaho, plus the cows are half of the genetic equation.”

Harvest statistics haven’t appreciably changed, he said: “We’re still harvesting similar number of spikes over the long term in relation to herd numbers.”

Washington-licensed hunters killed about 400 elk in the Blue Mountains east of US 395 last year with 136 being antlerless (permit required) and 135 spike bulls.

Hunters with branch-antler permits enjoyed high success rates to kill 94 bulls in the six-point or better category. You can be most if not all of those trophies are hanging on walls to commemorate the hunt.

Spike hunters are more likely to be remembering their hunts only when they go to the freezer and pull out another coveted package of the best red meat in the mountains.