How Do You Pick A Place to Hunt? Management Units Explained
This post is going to deliver some of the fundamental lessons that are required in order to plan a first hunting adventure, specifically out of state where rules and regulations may differ from what you’re used to back in your home state. We will over simplify in this post and then build more to this foundational knowledge in order to simplify the complexities that come along with attempting to hunt big game, especially out in Western states.
At the start of your hunt planning, it is easy to get overwhelmed with a large amount of new jargon that differs state to state and sometimes even within the same state. There’s Game Units that are sometimes Management Units that are sometimes Zones and then within each Unit, Zone or parcel of land there are various rules for what you can and can’t pursue and how you legally obtain the rights to go after an animal. Even for a seasoned Western hunter, the amount of information and rules that you need to keep track of can become dizzying.
I am going to introduce a made up state, and let’s call that state Box. The state of Box is perfectly square (here’s to you, Wyoming) with two rivers running through it, one perfectly East to West and the other perfectly North to South, as pictured below.
Hello, from the state of Box!
Box is a nice state, with plenty of big game animals to hunt and the two rivers nicely divide the state into four fairly distinct ecosystems. The two most popular big game animals to hunt in Box are Mule Deer and Elk. State wildlife management teams within Box have determined that given the topography, ecosystem and wildlife distribution within the state, that it makes sense to split the state into four different areas to optimize the management of the wild game population in Box.
Here, we will interject our introduction to the state of Box to clarify that each state controls what they actually call these areas. Common terminology for the areas include, Units, Zones or Areas and they may be preceded by Game, Management or even a species name. For example, the state of Idaho is split up into over 70 hunting Units but for elk specifically, these smaller units are combined into groups of 2-5 to create larger Elk Zones. See the picture of the Idaho hunt map below - Elk Zones are named (i.e. “Panhandle”) and consist of multiple Units.
While it may feel like the complexity just ramped up, the principle is the same as our state of Box. The state’s management department decides how to carve up the state’s boundaries. This carve up is usually done with perimeters that consist of major roadways, rivers, mountain ranges or any other large, natural boundary line. In the case of Box, the wildlife management team decided to make the state’s major rivers the boundaries between the different Units. For our example state, we will assume that the wildlife management team has decided to call the different hunting areas Units from here on out. These Units are simply named Units 1, 2, 3 and 4 as pictured below.
Box split up into its four hunting units based on major rivers running through the state.
Now that the state of Box has been cleanly split into its four hunting Units, the state’s game management team can start assessing what the hunting rules will be within each unit. Here is where some of the complexity and confusion picks up for those attempting to hunt for the first time. At this moment, let’s be satisfied with the fact that we now understand that a single state is often carved up into numerous different hunting areas (or zones, units, etc.) and that there’s a reason for this. Let’s not worry about what that reason is right now.
In the coming post, we will get into the details of answering the next important question for the out of state hunter:
“How do I legally obtain or purchase a tag (aka get permission) to hunt the type of game that I desire?”
To answer this question, we will need to understand two important subjects.
How state game management departments determine how many animals can be taken in a specific Unit.
How state game management departments decide who has the legal right to pursue the animals in each unit - what are the rules for getting a tag?
These questions are deeply intertwined, so we will need to address them together. We will stay with our simplified model using the state of Box and continue building out some of the principles behind game management to understand, as hunters, how we can figure out the best places to go pursue our game of choice!
Kyle Zibrowski
