airrow's Link
typical political answer - dance around the facts and never answer any questions.
If nothing else they may take a more thoughtful approach to this issue as a result of your efforts. At least we can hope.
great point. Maybe they'll take our comments a bit more seriously in the future. We can only hope!
True then and true now very sad....
While it refreshing to see that Mr. Hyatt recognizes there are "biases" in survey methodologies it would have been much better had he followed this train of thought all the way through to its conclusion. For example, Mr. Hyatt should have acknowledged that the DEEP aerial transects that only cover 10% (or less) of the towns in FF County should never have been extrapolated out to be reported as town-wide densities of deer.
Mr. Hyatt should also have done his homework on the respective technologies of the FLIR and IR surveys and would have determined the former (Vision Air) to have had a much greater likelihood of reliability due that contractor employing state-of-the-art equipment that had been validated to perform to design specifications on the airplane as opposed to the CAES' IR survey using outdated equipment that was retrofitted to be mounted to the fuselage of an airplane (it is designed and sold as a hand-held unit).
Mr. Hyatt would have also uncovered that Vision Air has "validated" their accuracy by flying surveys in areas with radio-collared deer; the CAES contractor does not appear to have performed a similar validation to establish the validity of his accuracy.
Lastly, Mr. Hyatt should have been especially cautious about the obvious bias involved when a prior working reliationship was ignored in hiring the contractor to cull the deer in Redding. There are reasons many reputable companies, agencies and government services have conflict of interest policies; this is a textbook example of why those policies are put into place and the consequences of ignoring them.
I firmly believe the Deep long range goal regarding deer management is to reduce the herd state wide to nothing.
