Tag-draw process sheds little light

I’ve given considerable thought to Nevada’s big-game tag draw and became curious about the results. Though the official results aren’t due until June 20, I thought my credit-card records might indicate whether Wildlife Administrative Services had charged my account for the price of a tag. So I went online and took a look, but there was no such record, at least not at this point, so I’ll just have to keep checking.

To some, this quest might seem a futile venture this early, but my guess is that I am not alone. Hunters all over the state, and perhaps in several others, are probably doing the same thing about now — especially given that the draw was held last week at the Wildlife Administrative Services office in Fallon, a process I had the opportunity to observe first-hand.

Through the years, I have spoken with many hunters about the tag draw and have come to believe that most of them have created a mental image of how it’s actually conducted. Those images are likely as individual as the person creating them, but I think they share some similarities. My guess is that most hunters envision a large, spinning drum filled with thousands of tag applications, with someone pulling applications out of the drum.

After observing the draw, I can tell you that there is no spinning drum, and the whole process is rather anticlimactic. At 10 a.m. on May 29, several of us watched as Monte Martin, director of Wildlife Administrative Services, pushed a button on a computer. The draw began. The computer was set on a table where it could be seen by everyone. A projector enabled us all to watch what was happening on a large screen. Once the process began, it was never interrupted.

The observers included an assemblywoman, two members of the State Wildlife Commission, a member of the Mineral County Advisory Board, someone representing the hunting public and a handful of employees from the Nevada Department of Wildlife. Also in the group was Don Cavin, a past member of the Wildlife Commission. Cavin has monitored the draw each year for nearly two decades.

As you might imagine, when some of my friends learned I was going to observe the tag draw, they asked me to keep an eye out for their name flashing across the screen and to bring them back a list of the tags they drew. But the process doesn’t work that way. The only information that appeared on the screen was a list of eight steps the computer goes through in order to complete the draw, along with one of those time-keeping bars that indicate what percentage of a particular step is completed.

Those steps are broken down into three areas — predraw, draw and postdraw.

During the predraw, records are updated, party applications are identified and draw numbers are assigned to tag applicants. Once the draw numbers are assigned, the computer runs an analysis to ensure that those numbers were issued in a truly random manner. That was completed by 1:54 p.m.; nearly four hours after Martin pushed the button.

Then the actual allocation of tags began. By 2:07 p.m., just 13 minutes after it began, the tag allocation process was complete.

I was expecting some kind of fanfare, some kind of “tah-dah” moment. There was none. The computer simply moved into the postdraw phase, where it finalized the draw record and prepared for the issuance of tags. The entire process took a little more than four hours.

The next step involves processing payments, solving credit-card issues and preparing for the distribution of tags via snail mail. While I have no idea who drew tags, I can tell you that the average draw number was 49,987,121. Your place in line was somewhere on either side of the person with that number.

Doug Nielsen is an award-winning freelance writer and conservation educator for the Nevada Department of Wildlife. His “In the Outdoors” column is published Thursday. He can be reached at doug@takinitoutside.com.