Byline: Ed Dentry
ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS
Growing addled and cross-eyed as the April 1 deadline for big-game hunting applications approaches? Are you sprouting a migraine over all that fine print?
Sorry, there is no hope. Over the years, an increasingly complex web of licensing rules with seemingly infinite footnotes and clauses of inclusion, exclusion and confusion has created a licensing tar pit for Colorado hunters, some of whom actually have quit hunting as a result of paperwork burnout.
It's all in the interest of fine-tuned hunting regulations to suit Colorado's diverse wildlife management needs. But it's all very confusing.
In the future, the regulation brochure doubtless will be a bound law book that only gifted lawyers and accountants can decipher.
The Division of Wildlife, which brings us this migraine each year, knows its regulations can be complex and hard to fathom. The agency has conducted workshops - I think of them as group therapy sessions - for befuddled applicants. Its customer service center, (303) 297-1192, answers questions about filling out the forms, if you can get through.
Answers to frequent questions also are posted on the agency's Web site, www.wildlife.state.co.us.
Recognizing the complexity of its license frameworks, the division this year has added something like flow charts to help us navigate the big-game brochure. The charts - for elk, deer, pronghorn, moose and bear - aim to help us sort out the intricacies of multiple licensing.
Gone are the days when one hunter bought one license and was allowed one critter. Now it is possible to bag two elk or deer, or even more. With obscure licenses such as the Leftover Antlerless Private Land Only license or Either-sex Plains Elk license, a resourceful hunter legally could fill boxcars with game.
The charts divide licenses into List A types, which are old-fashioned licenses allowing only one critter; List B types, which allow a second critter; and List C types (the obscure ones), which you could buy and use until the money runs out.
An observant fine-print scholar might notice this year that the B and C lists replace ``additional'' licenses. The division retired ``additional'' just when hunters (and some newspaper editors) were starting to understand its redundant cousin, the ``additional additional'' license (see List C).
Hunters aren't the only ones going cross-eyed trying to make sense of the big-game license jumble. The thicket of rules is so bewildering that the wretches charged with writing the brochure made at least a dozen mistakes.
The errors include forgotten game units, wrong hunt codes, wrong dates and a reference to cow elk as ``does.'' The corrections can be viewed on the division's Web site in a March 11 press release titled 2003 Big Game Application Deadline Approaches.
One mistake (on page 31) omitted the fourth rifle season as one for which hunters may buy over-the-counter antlerless elk licenses for units 25 and 26 north of Dotsero.
For the first time this year, cow elk tags are being sold over the counter for those units and for four units (3, 4, 301 and 441) north of Craig. Two thousand cow licenses are available for Units 25 and 26 for the second, third and fourth rifle seasons.
Another 2,000 cow tags will be sold over the counter for the units north of Craig. They are first-come, while they last.
The rifle hunting seasons for elk will run Oct. 11-15, Oct. 18-26, Nov. 1-7 and Nov. 8-12. The first rifle season is limited to elk. The last three seasons are combined seasons for deer and elk.
Hunters who prefer the second rifle season for its relatively tame weather and first shot at an unlimited number of bull tags will notice that two days have been added to that popular season this year. In response to hunter complaints, wildlife commissioners lengthened the season to offer hunters two weekends instead of one.
Those who wish to hunt deer in a separate rifle season also can extend their hunting time this year. Restrictions confining hunts to deer and elk in the same season have fallen. Under new rules this year, you may hunt elk in one combined rifle season and deer in another.
How simply understood. There must be a catch.
