Hi Wiz. That buck was less than a 100 yards from where those elk crossed the road in front of us last December, when there was 2 feet of snow, a 30 mile an hour wind and -15. You could drive a Ferrari on the dirt, at 11,000 feet right now. We need moisture here.
You want to talk option 2, Broadside, I'm your Huckleberry. Dial 435-979-5521. Don't hold back son, pick up that phone, make that call.
BobCat, we lost our fawns in 2015-16 and again in 2016-17. Back to back killing winters. Course we sold doe tags here his year, too many deer, they said. Very, very few yearling bucks on our winter range again this year. Same for yearling does, very few out there. Here's the big mess we're looking at right now. The mule deer scientists from Utah State and Brigham Young Univ. tell us, their Utah mule deer research tells them, the average age of our female mule deer is 4.5 years old, in Utah. That means, if we've lost two years of fawns, we haven't replace the females that have died during the last two years, via natural mortality, so our over all doe numbers are down. Does are not there to breed or give birth next June. So we've lost nearly half our herd, again.
Now........ consider this.
What happens if we have a third killing winter this spring? What if last June's fawns die again this year? Three years of extremely low recruitment, back to back. If we had 25,000 deer on the Fish Lake we could make a fairly rapid recover, like we used to do when we had 25,000 deer. Now we have 7,000 0r 8,000 deer, with two back to back years of low fawn survival and facing a third uncertain winter. You know how slow our recover rates have been, since the mid 1990's, because of State wide low mule deer densities. You don't need to be a biological scientist to know what's going to happen. Hell, it's already happened and they are just starting to see it on their winter counts.
When you operate next to the brink, be it mule deer management or any other business, you can loose it all with one bad stretch of bad luck. One day you're in business, the next day you're gone.
We've seen this with other species, like upland birds, one year we had them, the next year and every year there after, they were gone. We lost our critical mass of mule deer in the early 1990 an we've be operating on the tipping point every since. With the predator mass we now have, there is no way in hell we'll every get mule deer numbers back. It's exactly like pheasants, without the critical mass, the foxes, raccoons, hawks and owls ate the surplus.
My personal opinion, based on watching mule deer numbers for the last 40 years, we have spiraled down to a new low the last two years and even if we get a short term increase, will never gain back to what we had in 2014-15. Simply can not get there from here.
Oh well, people kept hunting for pheasants around here for ten years after 99% of them were gone, so folks will keep hunting deer, whether we have deer or not. I told you, after setting on that Mule Deer Committee, I'm done. Haven't attended a single public big game meeting in over three years. Will not waste another minute beating a dead horse in those meetings, there are other places to go and other things to do.
Browning - That's why I'm a such typical mule deer bigot, love those symmetric features. Even though this buck would not score much, I think he's a beauty.
You have good taste!!!
DC
