Driven by Hunger, They Face Many Perils : Hard Winter Spurs Idaho Deer Into Fatal Migration

A small herd of 30 chocolate-brown deer lined up behind the barbed-wire fence at the Sun Valley off-ramp of Interstate 84, two miles north of this small city.

Starkly graceful against the white snow, the hungry animals eyed the roaring tractor-trailer rigs and speeding cars that lay between them and a field of sagebrush about 200 yards to the south. Two pronghorn antelope moved up to the fence and joined the vigil.

At last, a fawn attempted to leap the fence to follow in the tracks of animals that already had crossed the interstate. But it caught a back leg on the wire and bleated in pain before it managed to free itself and limp away in temporary defeat.

In the last two weeks, such scenes have become painfully common in south-central Idaho as several thousand deer and antelope have been forced from their usual wintering grounds into populated valleys by the most severe early winter in recorded history.

The results have been tragic, and worse is expected. So far, according to Stu Murrell, regional conservational educator for the Idaho Fish and Game Department, at least 145 deer and antelope have been killed on train tracks and another 30 or more on highways. Many more are believed to have died in areas unreachable because of heavy snowfall.

“I’d guess 200 have been killed in the past two weeks since the invasion began,” Murrell said. “That’s as many as we lost all last year and our winter season hasn’t even begun. If this keeps up, we could lose 25% of the animals coming down into the Snake River Valley area by February.”

If Murrell’s predictions are right, about 2,500 of a possible 10,000 animals reaching the valley by spring could die of starvation, traffic accidents and the poachers expected to take advantage of the animals’ plight.

The deer, some of which have migrated as much as 120 miles, still retain summer fat and are healthy now. But, according to a Fish and Game ecologist, the animals could begin starving by January or February, when their summer fat is gone and snow covers the forage that is left at low-lying levels.

The “invasion” of hungry game animals is not the first. Such migrations have become increasingly common in Western states as four severe winters in a row have sent wild game in search of the low-lying wintering grounds they abandoned as much as a century ago because of homesteaders and livestock. Today those lands, once covered with sagebrush that is the winter staple of deer, antelope and elk, are covered with subdivisions, winter recreation areas and sheep and cattle ranches.

40,000 Mule Deer Died

In the most tragic such migration in recent years, 40,000 mule deer were estimated to have starved to death near Salt Lake City in the winter of 1983-84.

The current problem in Idaho is expected to be nowhere near as bad as that. But it could prove the worst year in memory for the game animals of the state. Moreover, conservationists predict, it may signal far worse problems in years to come, if coordinated efforts are not made soon to restore dwindling winter forage for deer and antelope.

Reports of the migration began on Dec. 4, when 26 mule deer were killed on the main line of the Union Pacific Railroad that crosses southern Idaho.

“The wind blows the snow off the tracks and the trains warm up the rocks, so at night the animals bed down on the tracks,” Dick Tincher, Union Pacific regional spokesman in Salt Lake City, explained in an interview. “You can’t see them until you come right upon them, sometimes a whole herd of them, right on the tracks. And then it’s too late.”

Trains Slowed

He said that 25 trains, including two Amtrak passenger trains, travel the tracks daily. All trains are now being slowed from 60 m.p.h. to about 30 m.p.h. for one particularly hazardous five-mile stretch in hopes of decreasing deer deaths, he said.

Slaughters of 15 and 20 a night are still being reported on tracks near here.

Deer and antelope now can be seen within two or three miles of Twin Falls, a city of 26,000 people. One herd of 200 white-rumped pronghorn antelope, the most common species of antelope in the state, could be seen Friday bedded down in a fallow field just 200 yards from the main highway. A mile away, 200 deer could be seen in another farmer’s field.

One particularly bold herd of about 75 deer walked straight past Murrell’s office in the small town of Jerome northwest of here last week. Other deer had been spotted eyeing the large bridge that spans the 500-foot-deep Snake River Canyon near here.

Local residents in this heavily agricultural belt see the beautiful but unwelcome migrating animals as a nuisance to farmers and ranchers whose haystacks provide them with ready meals.

‘Love the Wildlife’

“Most of us just take the losses of hay because we love the wildlife,” said Tom Prescott, a Jerome rancher and former president of the Idaho Cattlemen’s Assn. Prescott, who ranches 250,000 acres, said he has lost about $2,000 in hay to deer so far this year. But some farmers cannot afford to be so generous. Plagued by complaints from less well-to-do farmers, Fish and Game officers have been dispatched around the clock on what is called “Viz queen duty.”

“Viz queen” is a heavy-gauge plastic that is used in the area to cover haystacks in an attempt to prevent nibbling by wild game. In the past two weeks alone, officers have used up more of the plastic than they did in the entire winter of 1984-85.

At one farm last week near the tiny town of Wendell, a terrified young antelope could be seen cowering in the shadow of a huge haystack as four children, each with a puppy, tried to drive it away at the instruction of their parents. The sides of the haystack had been undermined four feet up by hungry wild animals.

Last month was the coldest November here on record. The average temperature was 12 degrees below normal. More significant, 22.6 inches of snow fell in the Twin Falls area--nearly twice the record for any November since records were first kept. This is the fourth severe winter in a row, and forecasters are predicting that it could be Idaho’s worst ever.

The snow covered much of the low-lying forage in the animals’ traditional wintering grounds to the north. And the much taller sagebrush was destroyed in a series of wild range fires that consumed more than 300,000 acres of land in the high desert area north of here in 1981.

Dependency Feared

Since those fires, wild animals have been coming down to populated areas in increasing numbers. Some came even in the slightly less severe winter of 1982-83, making ranchers and conservationists alike fear that the animals may become dependent on domestic crops and cattle range areas.

Because does are known to lead herds to food, the State Fish and Game Department has authorized unprecedented late-season “antlerless” deer hunts this season. Such hunts are expected to reduce herds by at most 250 animals.

There have been a few calls for food airlifts to hungry game. “It’s so horrible to think so many animals are getting killed,” said auctioneer Keith Carlson of Twin Falls, “that I began to ask businesses to donate fishing poles, ice chests, anything, so I could auction it off to raise money for feed.

“But this is basically farm country and people see this as borrowing trouble when they’ve got troubles enough of their own. I expect we’ll have a farm auction every day for three months come spring because hard times are breaking people’s wallets or breaking their spirits and causing them to give up.”

Gladys Rasco, a Jerome woman who established the town’s only animal shelter two years ago, said that she hopes to get an airlift started anyway--even though she may have to seek money and manpower from out of state to do it.

“Nobody is going to do anything about this here,” she asserted. “It’s simple. If we don’t do something now, animals are going to starve or be shot. I love Idaho. But that’s the state’s solution to problems like this. Remember, it was Idaho that brought you the ‘bunny stomp.’ ”

The bunny stomp was a series of roundups called by angry farmers in 1981 to club to death about 30,000 jack rabbits that they estimated had done up to $10 million in crop damage.

Short-Term Solution

But environmentalists say that even if airlifts of feed do take place, they are at best a short-term solution.

“Winter feeding is like putting people into soup lines,” said William Meiners, a retired Boise range ecologist who once worked for the federal Bureau of Land Management. Meiners is the current chairman of the board of the Idaho Natural Resources Legal Foundation. “You do it sometimes when you get desperate, but you don’t want to rely on it.”

“When I went to church this morning,” Murrell of the State Fish and Game Department said Sunday, “everybody was asking me why I wasn’t out feeding deer instead of praying. A lot of people have been asking me about winter feeding and I think there is enough concern that we’ll have to do some before the winter’s out.”

Because Fish and Game’s budget is almost entirely dependent on fishing and hunting license fees, Murrell said that the department would have to seek donations to underwrite any winter-feeding effort.

Populations Rise

Populations of deer, antelope and elk are up from about 10 years ago, but there is debate about whether there is overpopulation or whether their food supply is too scarce. Meiners contends that his former employer, the BLM, historically has catered to powerful cattle and sheep interests in the state instead of balancing the needs of livestock with the needs of the state’s wild game, fowl and fish, as its federal mandate requires.

A total of 65% of all land in Idaho is public. The BLM administers 12 million acres of it that is not national forest land.

In the BLM’s Shoshone management area around Twin Falls, according to Ervin Cowley, BLM area manager, more than 95% of the grazeable land has been allocated to ranchers for grazing.

Such policies have often pitted state Fish and Game officials, who manage the wild animals, against BLM officials, who manage the wild animals’ habitat.

For example, Fish and Game officials protested after the BLM reseeded only 35,000 acres of the 306,000 acres that were burned in the wild range fires of 1981. More than 28,000 of the acres were reseeded with crested wheat grass used for livestock grazing, while less than 7,000 acres were reseeded with sagebrush for wildlife.

Cowley said the fact that antelope and deer remain in large numbers indicates that BLM policies protect the interests of wildlife adequately. Cattleman Prescott, who also happens to be chairman of the grazing board of the BLM here, calls sagebrush reseeding “a waste of time anyway.”

Regeneration Seen

“Sagebrush comes back after fire like hairs on a dog’s back in most areas,” he said.

Both he and Cowley said they believe that the wild game herds currently are larger than the country can support and that hunting eventually will have to be authorized to cut them back by 10% to 20%.

Meiners said the issue is more complicated. “The public is going to have to face the music one of these days,” he said. “They’re going to have to begin to prepare for constant winter feeding, which can be expensive and undesirable or begin to pay attention to long-term environmental issues like maintaining proper sagebrush forage.”

Murrell, who has been forced to shoot animals caught on barbed wire fences and injured on highways, agrees.

“People used to call this sage land the country that nobody wanted,” he said. “But every little bit of sage counts. Airlifting food to the animals is just a Band-Aid. What we need is long-term support by the public for good land management.”

As he spoke, he watched a small injured fawn hobble back away from Interstate 84.

“She’ll be back,” he predicted. “They’ll all try to cross the interstate sooner or later. That field they’re in was full of sage last winter. But that burned, too. Now it’s as bald as a billiard ball. Nothing to eat there.”