SD Game, Fish and Parks May Commission hybrid meeting, in Custer and Zoom

SD Game, Fish and Parks May Commission hybrid meeting, in Custer and Zoom, More details will be posted later, after they publish the agenda in the last few days before the meeting

When close to the date visit this page for agenda and documents presented to Commission: https://gfp.sd.gov/commission/information/

You can testify in person or remotely by Zoom at 2 pm MT.

Written Comments are due  the Sunday before the Thursday, before midnight MT https://gfp.sd.gov/forms/positions/

We will want people to testify in in support of a  moratorium on beaver trapping and hunting in the Black Hills Fire Protection District.  We want them reduce the months of beaver hunting and trapping season outside of Black Hills from 12 months to either 5 or 6 months.

Nov 1st-March 31st stops beaver trapping when river otters having babies and Nov 1st-April 30th, stops trapping when beavers start having babies.

This allows trapping during the period of thick pelts, but  stops when the beaver start breeding in May.  The river otter who are strongly associate with beaver and are incidental take in beaver trap. They  start breeding in April.

State law allows people whose land is harmed by “conflict” beaver to call up GFP and get permission to kill the beaver all year long – so removing the 12 months season does not prevent landowners from removing “conflict” beaver year round.

We want folks to testify in support of northern river otter populations recovering western SD. Otter now only occur east river.  GFP  has no plans to relocate some west river or improve habitat along west River’s rivers/streams to make the riparian habitat better for otters.  While otters are in the Missouri River and good habitat exists for them in the far western part of SD, the eastern part of  western SD has low flow rivers and many degraded riparian areas. Please ask SDGFP to reintroduce otters west River, make this a comment on Northern River Otter Action Plan.

SD Game, Fish and Parks may be proposing increasing the harvest limit on the east river – river otter hunting/trapping season. This should be opposed as various monitoring data indicate a likely drop in the otter population.

You can go to our web site under drop down from Campaigns, Wildlife, Beaver/Otter  – https://phas-wsd.org/beaver-and-river-otter/

or drop down from Alerts, Beaver https://phas-wsd.org/beaver-alert/

One page free standing beaver alert for 2025 – https://phas-wsd.org/wp-content/uploads/BeaverHunttrap-alertF2R.pdf

May 4th, 2025 written comment deadline –https://phas-wsd.org/event/written-comment-deadline-sdgfp-commission-may-meeting/