The Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge is opening up a registration moose hunt in Zone 2 of its Unit 18 game management area on the Kuskokwim River.
There will be 140 permits available on a first come, first served basis, with a quota of 70 moose. For the first time, this hunt is not limited to antlered moose – any moose may be harvested within the hunt boundary. Find a map of the boundary at the bottom of this page.
Eligible hunters must have a State of Alaska hunting license, have not harvested a moose during any other fall 2024 moose hunt, and be a resident of Akiachak, Akiak, Atmautluak, Bethel, Eek, Kalskag, Kasigluk, Kipnuk, Kongiganak, Kwethluk, Kwigillingok, Lower Kalskag, Napakiak, Napaskiak, Nunapitchuk, Oscarville, Quinhagak, Tuluksak, or Tuntutuliak.
Hunters can call the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge to register for the hunt starting at 9 a.m. on Dec. 11 at 907-543-1008, and leave a voicemail with their name, phone number, and village of residence. Voicemails received before 9 a.m. on Dec. 11 will be deemed void.
Refuge Subsistence Specialist Aaron Moses sat down with KYUK on Dec. 5 to talk about the details of the hunt and how moose management decisions are made.
Read a transcript of the conversation below. It has been lightly edited for clarity and flow, and may still contain transcription errors.
Mathew Hunter: Joining us for coffee this morning is Aaron Moses. Here to speak with him is KYUK’s Sage Smiley.
KYUK (Sage Smiley): Good morning. How are you this morning?
Aaron Moses: Good morning Sage, doing good.
KYUK: So we're here to talk about moose, right? What's going on? Where does this upcoming moose hunt fall in the schedule of hunts that happen here in the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge?
Moses: Yeah, this is a relatively new hunt. We've had it for the last two years. In the past two years it's been antlered bull only, but we're happy to say that this year for the Zone 2, RM615 area that's up in the mountains, in federal land, that we are going to be able to hunt any moose, and so that's a big change. We're going to be giving out 140 permits – that's drastically higher than we have in the last two years. Last year we gave out 45 permits. So we're very happy with the counts that we've been seeing up in the Zone 2 area, so we're comfortable enough to be able to allow any moose being harvested.
KYUK: Okay, yeah, awesome. I'd like to go over a bunch of those details in a little more detail. So starting out, this is a permit moose hunt, right? How does that differ from other hunts that happen in this region?
Moses: This is a little bit different. Where it's first come first served. A lot of the hunts that we have around here are just registration hunts, where they could come and just register for them. This one's slightly different. Where there is a limited amount of permits. In the fall hunt for the Kuskokwim, there's normally 1,900 people applying for this, for moose hunt, and we're limiting it to about 140 so it is very drastically lower. But there are so many different opportunities to hunt moose in this area. We are very fortunate for that.
KYUK: So how do the decisions get made? For – last year was 45, this year it's almost 100 permits more than that. How do you make that decision?
Moses: Yeah, we work with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, and we do population counts and composition surveys. Four years ago, when we did a minimum count, we counted 780 moose up in the mountain area. And then this last, I think it was the spring, when Alaska Department of Fish and Game counted, they counted roughly 2,300 moose. So we've almost quadrupled in four years up in the mountains. And so with that, we're very comfortable with a harvest for any moose, not just bull moose.
KYUK: What causes that? How does a moose population quadruple in four years?
Moses: That's one of the things that we're very interested in looking at. We're looking at the amount of browse – how much they're removing from the habitat. We're seeing high twin rates. This year, I flew and did a composition survey, and we found a lot of twins. Roughly about 40% of the cows had twins up in the tributaries. So that means that habitat is very healthy and can allow for more moose to grow and for us to be able to harvest more moose.
KYUK: Interesting. So there is a direct correlation between the habitat, and how well that's doing, and the twin rate?
Moses: Yes. And when there's really good habitat, there'll be more twins. That's what we've seen up on the Yukon. That's why there's so many moose up on the Yukon. And we're allowed to hunt three moose per person, pretty much.
KYUK: Up on the Yukon.
Moses: Yeah, that's crazy, and we're very fortunate to have that.
KYUK: Definitely. So how does it look when a habitat gets better? Like, what is better for moose? How is this habitat changing or developing in a way that allows this population to grow so much?
Moses: I think there's just a lot. Moose here are fairly new, even though they've been around for a long time. High populations of moose have not been around for a long time. So there are a lot of willows and other good habitat for them that they're just recently entering. And so there's a whole bunch of habitat that's been untouched to them, and so they're getting into new habitat and pretty much thriving.
KYUK: So what else changed in the environment then in the ecological system, you know, was there? What was there previously that was keeping this population lower? Is it a warmer climate? Is it a lower population of caribou, like, what else has changed?
Moses: I think the biggest thing that happened is back in the early 2000s we had a moratorium like they did on the Yukon. So that allowed all the moose to be able to breed successfully and just start establishing themselves like they did on the Yukon. Right now on the Yukon there's, from Russian Mission onto the coast, there's roughly 25,000 moose, and so that is an insane number. But here on the Kuskokwim, both on the main river and up in the tributaries, we have roughly 5,000 moose, when probably 10 years ago we barely had 1,000.
KYUK: Wow. So the policies are working, it sounds like.
Moses: Yeah, by having that moratorium and by allowing a limited harvest, it's been everything's been working pretty good, and we started seeing moose in places that we never thought we'd ever see. So like where I grew up, on Nelson Island, I didn't see a single moose growing up. Now they're harvesting upwards of 20 moose a year just on the island. And so it's great to see that everybody has the opportunity to be able to harvest a moose for the freezer.
KYUK: Is there anywhere in the region that's especially productive in terms of harvest? So like, not just looking at the population itself, but when we're thinking about hunts, is there somewhere where people tend to get more moose?
Moses: Up on the Yukon, everybody, pretty much from Bethel, goes to Devil's Elbow upon the Yukon. And everybody that goes up there knows you go up there, it's not really a hunt. It's more like grocery shopping. You're going up there, and you know you're gonna get a moose when you go up there. But we're fortunate here. In the fall hunt on Zone 1, even with 1,900 people hunting, there's still roughly 160-180 bull moose being harvested. And up in Zone 2, we have a quota of 110. We don't get anywhere close to achieving that, mostly because travel to where Zone 2 is in the fall time is really hard. And just like, for example, it's on the Kwethluk, it's above Magic Creek, so it is very time consuming to go up into our hunt area. So we're very comfortable with allowing a winter hunt so that people could use snowmachines and go try to harvest some moose.
KYUK: Okay, yeah, that was gonna be another one of my questions. What makes there be this quota, and then – I marked it on this sheet, 74 antlered bulls out of the 110 moose quota. Like, how do those get left behind in the fall count? And how does that impact how many moose you then decide to allow in this winter hunt?
Moses: Yeah, I work with our refuge manager. His background is in wildlife. So he was the big game biologist, Spencer Rearden, and we talk constantly on how we feel like our area, the Zone 2 hunt should be. Even though there's 2,300 moose, we feel like a lot of those moose move between Zone 1 and Zone 2. So we cut it down to about 1,700. We believe that there really is roughly 1,700 moose in the tributary areas. So looking at that and the leftover quota, if you harvest roughly 2% of the total population, we're comfortable with that. And that came out to be roughly 30, I think it's 34 moose. And so we're comfortable with 34 moose and the leftover quota ended up being roughly 70. And we’re not 100% sure, but we feel like harvesting the winter times 50/50 for cows and bulls. So we were comfortable with having a quarter of 70 moose for the Zone 2.
KYUK: So speaking of that, how do you make that determination of how many cows or bulls? Because this, as you said, wasn't open to cows in previous years, right?
Moses: Yeah. Just because of the boom in population, we're comfortable with a limited antlerless and any moose hunt. So like I said, we think that if a hunter goes out there in the winter time, it's roughly – they'll have a 50/50 chance of harvesting a cow or a bull. So we're comfortable with trying to still meet our quota for bulls, but allow the extra 34 cows, which may not happen. It might be that they might harvest more bulls, or they might harvest more cows, but we're comfortable with that 2% harvest.
KYUK: So the expectation isn't that 140 people go out and 140 mooses come back. It's that you're like, making these calculations based on the allowable upper limit number of cows, and then the leftover bulls and then the population itself, and bringing that all together.
Moses: Yeah, this hunt is actually very difficult because of the time frame it is. We're gonna open it, I believe it's on the 14th of December to Jan. 31. So just in that time frame, hunting around here is pretty difficult because the ice, snow conditions, and trying to make it up into the Zone 2 area is difficult. So that's a constraint we have. We're looking into the future to see what tools we could have to make it more accessible for users. But we've had this hunt for the last two years, but it was only bull only, and only a few people were able to harvest antlered bulls in this time frame.
KYUK: What would that look like? How do you make a hunt more accessible to people when some of that inaccessibility does just have to do with the terrain we exist in?
Moses: Yeah, a lot of it is just the terrain and the time frame. You know, a lot of people wait until there are longer days and more snow to go up to the Yukon. Our constraint is that we can only operate a hunt between December and January. We are going into a wildlife cycle with the Federal Subsistence Board. So there's tools – there's proposals we could put in to extend the season, to make there's a bunch of proposals that we could submit, and we are looking. We're pretty much looking for input from tribes, and people from around here to try to make it easier for people to hunt up in the Zone 2 area.
KYUK: Okay, that makes sense. So to kind of wrap things up and talk about the specifics of the hunt, who can even register for this hunt? Because it's not everybody in the listening area of KYUK.
Moses: Oh yeah, this hunt is only for people that live within the Kuskokwim from Kalskag down to Quinhagak and up to Kipnuk.
KYUK: Yeah, the list we have is in alphabetical order, so we're trying to figure out where that is geographically.
Moses: So yeah, you have to be a resident from those villages that live along the Kuskokwim Basin. I could give some more conditions of the hunt that we're gonna have: We're gonna give 140 registration permits with a quota of 70 moose. We will be giving out permits on Dec. 11 at 9 a.m. The way to receive a permit is, we call it the fish hotline, but in the winter time it becomes the moose hotline. So it is 907-543-1008, and you leave a voicemail on the phone line, just stating your name, your phone number and your village of residence, and it will begin at 9 a.m. on Dec. 11. Once we get your name and number, we will call you back. And get you your permit, and then hunting will start Dec. 14 to Jan. 31. The other conditions are, you are ineligible for this permit if you caught a moose this fall in any other hunt, mainly because of the one, one moose bag limit that we have around here. Also it's any moose. In the last two years we had to have bull – antlered bulls, and in the winter time that's extremely rare. So that's one of the biggest changes that we had. And the moose has to be harvested in the federal lands in Zone 2 on the custom hunt area. And we do have a map on our Facebook page that does show where our federal lands are.
KYUK: Yeah. KYUK will publish a map as well. Is there anything else you want to add about this hunt or how people will interact with it, basically?
Moses: Since this is a brand new hunt, we're just very interested in people's input on how the hunt is going, the time frame, what we could make better. We are looking into the future to still continue having a winter moose hunt. I know the Alaska Department of Fish and Game is going to have a fall antlerless moose hunt too. So we are moving into new territory where there's enough moose that we are able to harvest other than bulls, and so we were able to put more meat in the freezes for everybody.
KYUK: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come and talk to us about this moose hunt. We really appreciate it.
Moses: Yeah, thank you. And there's one more thing, if anybody has any questions, please feel free to call my main line, phone number is [907] 543-1021.
KYUK: Thanks very much.
Moses: Thank you.
