Most of the day was spent with harvest quotas for elk.

That's right. The past year's hunting season is barely done, and we're already trying to figure out how many elk we want to kill in 2002.

Elk hunting is a big thing here, for both residents of this state and nonresidents. And for outfitters who make their living off providing transportation and guides for nonresidents. And most of these nonresidents need to plan well ahead to get vacation time for the trip. And many of them would also like to hunt deer and/or antelope, but not if they're not also going to be allowed to hunt elk.

So the nonresident elk licenses need to be issued first, and the earlier the better. Our outfit will issue the nonresident elk licenses in mid-February, so they need us to tell them how many licenses they should issue, and soon. As in this week.

This is without knowing how successful our seasons were last fall. Without having most of our winter elk counts flown (ours are not), without having most of our herd ratios. And without knowing what the rest of the winter will be like.

Fortunately, elk survival through most of our winters is pretty high. The big questions really are: what did last fall's hunt do? and what was calf production like? Make some reasonable assumptions on those, and you can get a fair idea of how many elk will be on the ground next September.

So most of today was spent doing those calculations, figuring out the necessary harvests, and asking game wardens what they want to do, and where we should get the kill we want.

Knowing that the final quotas will not be set until April. This effort is just to decide how many nonresident elk hunters there will be. Real long conversations about whether we should have 30, 35 or 40 licenses, when that will make the difference of only one or two nonresidents (they get 16% of the total).

A fair amount of effort to benefit or affect few people. And we're just about half done.

And got a ton of other work pending. Need to identify and map all the fences in my area that block big game movements for a task force, need to summarize the field checks from last fall, combine the sage grouse lek data for our region (we're (read I) holding up the statewide summary) and get a bunch of paperwork caught up.

Not to mention running to the Seminoes to retrieve the two wing barrels I left up for blue grouse season. Left them too late, so now the posts will be frozen into the ground again, and I'll have to jack each one out. But hey, it'll be field work. If I can just get all this paperwork done so I can get to the fun stuff...

Oh, yeah. Had warm chinook winds the past two days. Temps in the low 40s. Nearly two-thirds of our snow is gone. Heeler mom went out into the yard to do her business, and paused with her front foot in the air.

"Ewwww! The lawn is poopy!"

Must have been more of those "scat showers."