Unit 281 — Nevada

Tags & season

Fees and draw dates from Nevada Department of Wildlife, 2026, verified 2026-08-15 — past its verify-by date, confirm with the agency. Tag type from the agency's published draw statistics: a unit that appears in none of them has no limited-entry hunt we know of. Source: NDOW — Apply & Buy: hunting licences, tags and application fees · NDOW — Big game application FAQ 2026 · NDOW — How do bonus points work in Nevada? · NBWC CR-26-01 — 2026 Application Deadlines and Draw Result Dates (approved January 2026).

Season conditions — measured, not vibes

Harvest — agency survey estimates

NDOW's per-hunt workbook, the richest single table any agency gives us: one row per hunt class, weapon, residency and unit group, carrying both draw and harvest. Hunter success is published by NDOW and carried verbatim; nothing here is derived. Keyed by UNIT GROUP, not a single unit — Nevada draws many hunts across several units at once ("012-014", "021/022"), and splitting a group across its member units would attribute one hunt's harvest to each of them. Hunt days are converted from NDOW's published average-per-hunter to total days afield, so the column means the same thing it does in every other state. That is a unit conversion between two published figures, not an estimate. FIVE SEASONS, 2021-2025, from two publications of the same table. The workbook only ever holds the current season, so the prior four come from NDOW's per-species "Harvest by Unit Group" reports — the identical columns in PDF form, one file per species per season. The two forms disagree in ways that are invisible if you trust either: the PDFs spell residency Res/NonRes in 2022 and 2024 but R/NR in 2023, publish one applicant column in 2022 where later seasons publish two, and re-lay out their columns on EVERY PAGE so a page of narrow figures sits two columns left of page one — and 2021 both renames Hunter Success to Success Rate and abbreviates the three sheep to "<herd> BHS". Each of those, read naively, produces a complete file of confidently wrong numbers rather than an error. The reader therefore derives columns per page and cross-checks NDOW's published success rate against its own hunters and harvest on every row, failing the build on a mismatch. Source: NDOW Hunt Statistics — Big Game Hunt Data workbook · NDOW Harvest by Unit Group (per-species season reports).