LoH
FNG
- Joined
- Feb 15, 2024
- Messages
- 72
So parts of this have been discussed elsewhere (Cheatgrass vs. Mule deer) but my original inspiration for posting was to share an interesting excerpt from a recent WGFD article on big game migration.
Some years back I declared war on cheatgrass on my 1 acre property here in Utah. I enlisted a friend and we put a few tens of hours into pulling them before their seed heads matured in the spring. Some folks tried to dissuade me by pointing out that the seed bank is like 8 years deep with cheatgrass. So, that may be true, but what I found is that putting pressure on cheat grass allowed everything else to gain an advantage, and once they had the upper hand, they were off to the races. Plus I ordered bulk seeds from Stevenson's Intermountain Seed company, a phenomenal resource, I highly recommend you look into them if you own property in the Intermountain West. https://stevensonintermountainseed.com/
Things like: Sandberg bluegrass, globemallow, Bottlebrush squirreltail, Lewis's flax, sagebrush, coneflower, Antelope bitterbrush. (Chosen based on a printout my friend gave me derived from the USDA/NRCS database from our particular elevation/plant community and what is native / well-adapted) And I scattered these seeds in areas where I had recently pulled all the cheatgrass. They outcompeted the cheatgrass so it never came back in any quantity. It's been five years at least. This was encouraging to see. Don't know if it's coincidence, but the deer sure do love my property...
Anyway, on to the excerpt from the article:
...In the spring, it is all reversed. As the snows melt, the animals head out, triggered mostly by what biologists call the green wave, an almost literal chasing of greening grass on the warming landscape. Pregnant does gain tremendous nutritional value from Sandberg bluegrass, also known as alkali bluegrass, which is the common early forage found throughout the sagebrush steppe.
Mule deer utilize an underpass under U.S. Highway 789 north of Baggs. (Photo by Chris Martin/WGFD).
Equally important are the stopover areas where herds pause in their migration and key in on greening slopes. In an area of abundant alkali bluegrass, animals might hold up for several days before making a big push to another area of abundant feed for another couple of rest days. Heavily pregnant does — pronghorn and mule deer — depend upon this burst of nutrition for healthy fawns. Feeding in the crepuscular hours, bedding, moving, feeding. Onward as their kind has for thousands of years.
So habitual are these movements that Randall and others have documented the young of known deer having their own fawns where they were born themselves.
Then there’s the case of mule deer doe 665, whose mother was 512, another research deer. Both wintered in the desert north of Superior in southwest Wyoming, but 512 summered in the Bondurant country where she gave birth to 665 in June 2021. The next year, 512 basically ghosted her daughter and made her way north. The daughter, also wearing a GPS collar, followed behind, retracing the migration route she’d been carried over in her mother’s belly the previous spring.
“She was two, then six, then 11 days behind her mother,” said Greg Nickerson, who runs WMI’s social media efforts and is currently working on a book about another remarkable deer, 255. “She followed along the same route into the Hoback Basin into the same summer range within two miles of her mom, and then she just kept going.”
Deer 665 crossed one of Wyoming’s busiest highways, U.S. 20/191 which sees about 10,000 vehicles a day. Then she swam the Snake River, skirted some subdivisions and a golf course, made her way up Teton Pass and popped into Idaho above Kelly Canyon where she summered. Then she returned to her winter range. The next year, she did it again, but for some reason, Idaho was not to her liking so she stayed on Teton Pass in Wyoming. She did it again in 2024 and again this spring, taking the month of May including stopover and travel days, to migrate back up to Teton Pass, 173 miles in all, before giving birth to twin fawns.
While it is the epic-long migrations that are the most remarkable, they all matter, said Nickerson. “There are all kinds of migration strategies, and they all matter. Some are short, some medium, some long. They all matter.”
Some years back I declared war on cheatgrass on my 1 acre property here in Utah. I enlisted a friend and we put a few tens of hours into pulling them before their seed heads matured in the spring. Some folks tried to dissuade me by pointing out that the seed bank is like 8 years deep with cheatgrass. So, that may be true, but what I found is that putting pressure on cheat grass allowed everything else to gain an advantage, and once they had the upper hand, they were off to the races. Plus I ordered bulk seeds from Stevenson's Intermountain Seed company, a phenomenal resource, I highly recommend you look into them if you own property in the Intermountain West. https://stevensonintermountainseed.com/
Things like: Sandberg bluegrass, globemallow, Bottlebrush squirreltail, Lewis's flax, sagebrush, coneflower, Antelope bitterbrush. (Chosen based on a printout my friend gave me derived from the USDA/NRCS database from our particular elevation/plant community and what is native / well-adapted) And I scattered these seeds in areas where I had recently pulled all the cheatgrass. They outcompeted the cheatgrass so it never came back in any quantity. It's been five years at least. This was encouraging to see. Don't know if it's coincidence, but the deer sure do love my property...
Anyway, on to the excerpt from the article:
...In the spring, it is all reversed. As the snows melt, the animals head out, triggered mostly by what biologists call the green wave, an almost literal chasing of greening grass on the warming landscape. Pregnant does gain tremendous nutritional value from Sandberg bluegrass, also known as alkali bluegrass, which is the common early forage found throughout the sagebrush steppe.
Mule deer utilize an underpass under U.S. Highway 789 north of Baggs. (Photo by Chris Martin/WGFD).
Equally important are the stopover areas where herds pause in their migration and key in on greening slopes. In an area of abundant alkali bluegrass, animals might hold up for several days before making a big push to another area of abundant feed for another couple of rest days. Heavily pregnant does — pronghorn and mule deer — depend upon this burst of nutrition for healthy fawns. Feeding in the crepuscular hours, bedding, moving, feeding. Onward as their kind has for thousands of years.
So habitual are these movements that Randall and others have documented the young of known deer having their own fawns where they were born themselves.
Then there’s the case of mule deer doe 665, whose mother was 512, another research deer. Both wintered in the desert north of Superior in southwest Wyoming, but 512 summered in the Bondurant country where she gave birth to 665 in June 2021. The next year, 512 basically ghosted her daughter and made her way north. The daughter, also wearing a GPS collar, followed behind, retracing the migration route she’d been carried over in her mother’s belly the previous spring.
“She was two, then six, then 11 days behind her mother,” said Greg Nickerson, who runs WMI’s social media efforts and is currently working on a book about another remarkable deer, 255. “She followed along the same route into the Hoback Basin into the same summer range within two miles of her mom, and then she just kept going.”
Deer 665 crossed one of Wyoming’s busiest highways, U.S. 20/191 which sees about 10,000 vehicles a day. Then she swam the Snake River, skirted some subdivisions and a golf course, made her way up Teton Pass and popped into Idaho above Kelly Canyon where she summered. Then she returned to her winter range. The next year, she did it again, but for some reason, Idaho was not to her liking so she stayed on Teton Pass in Wyoming. She did it again in 2024 and again this spring, taking the month of May including stopover and travel days, to migrate back up to Teton Pass, 173 miles in all, before giving birth to twin fawns.
While it is the epic-long migrations that are the most remarkable, they all matter, said Nickerson. “There are all kinds of migration strategies, and they all matter. Some are short, some medium, some long. They all matter.”
