Hunting Big Mule Deer Migration Style

[robby denning]

Congratulations on a great buck along with your horse, Charlie. Not many more fun ways to hunt big game than with a horse or mule. Those mule deer when they get that size are amazing animals.

Only have been around one full scale mule deer migration. Was outside of Pocatello,ID a couple hours ,into WY. We saw about 50-60 deer on the move in a migration corridor , in a short two hour period. All mule deer heading in the same direction down out of the mountains .Within hours we were in a full blown blizzard and our road back to Pocatello was closed by the storm. We ended up spending the night in a hotel until the next morning when the storm ended and the highway department reopened the road. Traveling for work in western WY, over the years I have seen some smaller mule deer migrations of deer all moving in the same direction in one of the well known migration corridors. Unfortunately there was also a pretty good number of road killed dead mule deer along this stretch of secondary highway.

Hey thanks!

Migrations are everywhere. I used to only think of the big ones but now that all this data coming out on collared deer, we got deer migrating a few miles to hundreds of miles, big migrations, little migrations and lots in between.

Glad to see all these states stepping up thier protection and enhancement of these areas. If we lose them, we effectively lose those deer or at least some of their productivity

you mention Pocatello...I've heard one of the old biologists in that region say the the construction of I-15 in the (60s? maybe) really impacted migrating deer from all the units on both sides of the interstate. Now that these studies show all these deer mixing from unit-to-unit & state-to-state, I'll bet he was beyond right.

But I guess we gotta have interstates, just need to know where the bulk of deer cross and fix those areas and add overpasses when we can. Idaho's been late on the overpasses, but they're finally doing a few.