Hunters who have been using cooperator agents, telephone calls or registering their deer harvests through the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission’s Deer Management Assistant Program may see changes in the future.
The Commission is considering dropping cooperator agents, phone reports and DMAP as techniques to compile harvest data and instead may use on-line reports.
Evin Stanford, the Commmission’s supervising big-game biologists, said the costs are high to maintain the telephone-reporting system, and paper big-game reports, especially from “mom-and-pop stores,” are notoriously slow in being returned to him by cooperator agents and often have errors.
Although telephone call-ins (1-800-I-GOT-ONE) of deer kills are fast, the Commission is looking for savings.
“It costs $42,000 annually just to operate the phone call-in system,” Stanford said, “It costs $41 per (DMAP) hunt club (to gets harvest cards printed and delivered), and we have 80 clubs participating.”
Stanford said it costs 16 cents to report one deer to a cooperator agent, 31 cents per deer by telephone and 83 cents in paper.
If every deer taken during 2011-12 had been registered by cooperator agents, the cost to the Commission would have been $27,768.48.
“In 2011, (the Commission) also spent $25,000 on paper services, And we have 527 (cooperator) agents and 80 DMAP (club) participants,” Stanford said. “It amounts to a good deal of money that could be used for other things, especially if we have a better, faster way to compile this information.”
On-line big-game harvests require more care, and the system won’t allow duplicated information — a common problem.
Stanford said resolving issues with on-line reporting of deer harvests would allow him to compile final season harvest data four months earlier than now.
“I’d really like to do away with the use of paper (big-game reports),” he said.
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