And I don't mean Mr. Nosler or Mr. Speer. The groundsquirrel population in central Idaho is dropping at an alarming rate and nobody knows why.
Twenty years ago it was no big deal to burn 100-200rds. a day shooting squirrels. Nowadays if you fire 20-30rds. in a days shoot you've had a good day. True, the pressure is somewhat greater but not that much. I seldom run into another shooter in the field.
About a month ago a friend and I spent the entire day driving around looking for new squirrel shooting spots. This was south of Lewiston, around Cottonwood, Nez Prece, and almost to Grangeville. Without exception every framer and rancher said the same thing: "Used to have hoards of the of the little critters, but they've all disappeared".
No one seems to know what's killed them off.
I still have a few select spots but an careful not to over shoot them. Used to be squirrel areas within 5-10miles of Lewiston but they are completely gone. I don't believe they've been shot out. Most farmers think somekind of disease came through and cut the numbers down. To the south down around McCall, Ida. they have placed one type of groundsquirrel on the endangered list! Will ours be next?
Pedro

That is too bad, ground squirrel shooting is great sport. Due to their gregarious nature and often overpopulations ground squirrels are indeed subject to massive die offs from desease some times.

We experienced it here in Central California about 5 years ago. Ranches that had gobs of squirrels quickly had NONE. There was a complete kill on some ranches by desease. Not sure if it was the plague or what, but it killed the hell out of ground squirrels and rabbits around here. We have been very carefull not to shoot the few squirrels that have managed a come back on some of these ranches, but their numbers are still quite low.

In Wyoming a couple of years ago they had a massive die off of prairie dogs in the Thunder Basin National Grasslands. Where there had been lots of dogs there were suddenly damned few.

A friend owns a ranch in New Mexico that had a reasonable colony of prairie dogs on it. Last year desease totally eliminated the colony, not one animal left.

So, if the process going on in Idaho is similar to what happened here, I am afraid you are looking at a long time before squirrel numbers rebound.

R F

That happened in western Oregon about 13 years ago and they still havn't recovered to anywhere near where they used to be. I think the land owners are spraying them. We used to see about 10 deer every trip but same deal with them. Did see on set of tracks but nothing on the hoof.



We HUNTED diggers 8 hours yesterday and got 3. No babies anywhere. Just a few old mossbacks. This was our best hunt in years. Well try them again in about a month. Back in the day we were knocking off 50 each a day and young ones were everywhere. We now call it varmint hunting rather than shooting.

Had the same thing happen on our ranch, North of Bakersfield Ca. We started seeing dead one laying beside holes and nothing would eat them. They would lay there until they just melted back into the ground. We called fish and game,they came out and collected a few. We later found out it was a cousin to bubonic?? plague that was not transferable to humans. Our population never returned as heavy and this year there are very few in our area.