Last winter’s massive snowfall was a mixed blessing for Utah’s flagging mule deer herds, whose numbers have chronically lagged below state wildlife officials’ population targets.
Hammered by record drought in recent years, deer in Utah’s northern counties are now emerging from one of the harshest winters on record. Many didn’t make it and others are in rough shape.
The tough conditions took a particularly hard toll on fawns, whose survival rates are substantially lower in places this spring than in previous years, according to Dax Mangus, big game coordinator for the Division of Wildlife Resources (DWR).
“It depends on what part of the state you’re looking at. Maybe the picture is not as cheery looking through this winter. It’s also not the end of the world either,” he told the Wildlife Board at a recent work session. “We’re seeing some really crummy adult doe survival on a few of these units. The flip side of that, on some of our desert units, like the Book Cliffs, the Zion, Paunsaugunt, Pine Valley, we’re seeing super high adult doe survival and really high fawn survival.”
While snow totals were far above average in southern Utah, they were not high enough to harm deer and have revitalized land ravaged by extreme drought.
“So this is one of those years where average doesn’t really mean that much,” Mangus said, “because things can be so extremely negative in some parts of the state, and at the same time, we’re looking at record highs in other parts of the state.”
Still, there will likely be fewer hunting opportunities for Utah’s signature game species this year. DWR staff propose a steep drop in the number of general-season deer tags issued for the northern regions, while bumping up tags issued in the southern regions, where deer fared better.
Overall, the agency recommends a statewide total of 71,600 this year, a 2% drop from last year. It would also be the fourth year in a row that deer tags are reduced.
The WildlifeBoard makes a final call at its meeting Thursday.
“For several years, we have had more demand for deer hunting in Utah than we have the supply for,” Mangus said in a news release. “The most important factors that drive deer population numbers are the survival rates of doe deer (since bucks don’t have babies), fawn production and fawn survival after the winter. The way we hunt buck deer in Utah doesn’t drive deer populations, but what happens with deer populations drives how we hunt buck deer.”
The deadline to apply for a big game permit expired last Thursday, with 557,320 applications submitted for all species. Meanwhile, DWR is not proposing significant adjustments for elk, pronghorn, bighorn sheep and moose tags. Currently, Utah’s elk numbers exceed the statewide population objective of 80,000 animals.
On Monday, Utahns get a belated greenlight for gathering shed antlers and entering several wildlife management areas, WMAs. To reduce stress on wintering big game, officials closed public access to these spots and barred people from scavenging for elk antlers anywhere in the state until May 1.
For four WMAs in northern Utah, however, the closure has been extended until May 14. They are the Swan Creek, Woodruff Coop, Middle Fork and Kamas WMAs.
“We were hoping enough snow would have melted by now that the animals would have left the WMAs and headed to higher elevations, but that hasn’t happened yet,” northern region wildlife manager Jim Christensen said. “The animals are still at lower elevations and are still struggling. ... We’d like to prevent any unnecessary disturbances to the deer during this sensitive time of year. Not having people force the deer and pronghorn to move will help them save what little energy they have left.”
Normally, antler gathering season begins Feb. 7. Officers detected 328 violations of the closure as of April 17, resulting in more than 100 citations, according to DWR.
The agency determines overwinter survival rates by rigging electronic monitoring devices to hundreds of deer and other big game. For deer this year, 1,000 does and few hundred fawns. Data from these animals indicate an 85% survival rate for does, and just 57% for fawns.
In contrast, elk and pronghorn showed survival rates of 96% and 91%, respectively, Mangus told the wildlife board.
Cache, Weber, Summit and Morgan counties are where deer really suffered this year.
“Fawn survival is more of a mixed bag. All the collared fawns we had on the Cache unit have died,” Mangus said. “It doesn’t mean there’s not a single fawn alive on the entire unit, but it’s pretty representative of what’s going on.”
Weather conditions became so severe in places that DWR deposited 488 tons of feed at 49 sites over the course of winter on five hunting units, according to Kent Hersey, another DWR big game program manager. The feeding program benefited 5,800 deer, about 12% of all the deer on these five units.
Hersey used the emergency program to conduct an experiment to determine whether feeding actually benefits the deer. By comparing the changes in body fat levels in fed and unfed deer, his team was able to determine that the fed animals had, on average, 1 percentage point more body fat than if they had not been fed.
That might not sound like much, Hersey told the Wildlife Board, but that amount of extra fat reserves can mean the difference between surviving a long winter and perishing.
Besides making life hard, deep snow also pushed big game out of the mountains onto highways and subdivisions where they created problems for motorists, homeowners and farmers.
“The Urban wildlife situation was unprecedented. We had 2,452 calls this winter,” Mangus said. “Major elk conflicts across South Slope [of the Uintas], coming down eating feed for livestock.”
Last year, Utah mule deer numbers had climbed by 30,000 or 10%. But after the tough winter, the state has about 335,000 deer, well below the population target of 405,000.
“This is really telling the story of what’s driving our deer populations in the state,” Mangus said. “When we had good conditions, we have good habitat, we’ve done the work, we can grow deer. When the weather doesn’t cooperate, it’s a lot harder.”
