Oh, Deer Big-Game Animals Struggle To Survive As Heavy Snows And Development Hinder Normal Feeding Routines

Deer have become beasts of burden in portions of the Inland Northwest. Struggling to conserve dwindling fat reserves in a rugged winter, they resign themselves to a few trails that have become troughs two- or three-feet deep in the hardpacked snow. Venturing out of these troughs to fill their empty stomachs takes enormous effort.

They have little energy for that.

The grasses and even much of the brush they depend on for food is sealed under a thick snowpack that became boiler-plate hard after the New Year’s Eve rains.

While warmer weather moderated the hardship for deer in the Spokane area and much of the Idaho Panhandle, the situation remains serious in Central Washington.

The situation is no surprise to biologists.

The Washington Fish and Wildlife Department has seen the demand to feed deer steadily escalate in recent years. For example, a feeding program was launched in the Entiat area in 1994 to carry up to 3,500 deer through the winter on range ravaged by the Tyee forest fire.

But fire and snow are not the reasons the department has had to launch the largest big-game feeding program in memory.

“It’s the loss of winter range,” said Capt. Dick Smith, the department enforcement officer who coordinates winter feeding in Central Washington.

“Every where you go, the valley floors have been developed into orchards, recreation property and residences. There are fences that prevent deer from getting to areas with less snow.”

News reports have said the state needs donations of feed to help the animals through the winter because snow has forced the deer out of their “normal” forage areas.

Smith laughed uncomfortably. “Snow didn’t force them out of their normal wintering areas,” he said. “People did.

“Right now we’re feeding deer in the entire Okanogan Valley, the Methow Valley, Palisades, Wenatchee Valley, Entiat, Lake Chelan, Chilliwist, Moses Coulee and it looks as though we may start in northern Douglas County.

“This is the most extensive feeding I’ve done in the 13 years I’ve been here. Every department employee in the region is participating in the feeding program.”

It’s still not clear where the department is going to get the money to pay for the feeding, officials say.

A few quiet minutes of observation is revealing.

A mule deer doe along the Methow River near Twisp was seen last week under an old wild apple tree across from a fenced orchard. Other deer before her had gleaned the easy-to-reach apples, so the doe stretched up, standing only on her hind legs, to pluck a mouthful of nutrition.

Her two fawns tried to chew on the branches of the tree, but the doe kicked at them and shooed them away.

“That’s the type of desperate behavior you see at feeding stations in this kind of weather,” said Mark Quinn, Washington’s regional wildlife manager in Ephrata. “It’s called survival of the fittest.”

Death is swifter for some deer than for others. A man who drove the 42 miles from Pateros to Winthrop at 11 a.m. one day last week saw no dead deer on the road. He returned at 6 p.m. and counted three dead deer that had been struck by vehicles.

“And there still were deer walking all over the road,” he said. “They didn’t have anywhere else to go.”

The desperate deer are bunched up and causing serious damage to some orchards, standing corn crops and haystacks, Smith said. Some landowners are calling for kill permits to reduce the damage.

“That’s would be our last resort,” Smith said. “We feel we’re going to lose enough deer to the winter conditions that we need to carry through as many as we can.”

However, he noted that a herd of elk that had bunched up in the Malaga area near Wenatchee may not leave him any choice but to kill a few animals.

Up to about 20 kill permits a year are issued to landowners in Central Washington to control big-game damage, he said.

Meanwhile, official feeding in the Idaho Panhandle has been limited to the Priest Lake area and north of Bonners Ferry.

“We don’t have a cookbook recipe of criteria for when or where to start feeding,” said Jim Hayden, Idaho Fish and Game Department regional wildlife manager in Coeur d’Alene. “We get a lot of calls to start feeding when people start seeing deer struggling with the winter,” he said.

Warm weather in early January dramatically reduced the stress on big game in much of the Panhandle. Warm winds bared south-facing hillsides. Deer were able to start moving around the bases of trees even in the winter-weary areas of Priest Lake.

Idaho officials sent five tons of alfalfa pellets to the Bonners Ferry area last week, Hayden said: “That should last several weeks.”

March will be the telling time, he said.

“At this point, the deer are still in pretty good condition. They’re moving around. Heads are up. They could be fine as long as people don’t disturb them too much.”

Biologists gauge the health of wintering deer by analyzing road kills. They break a leg bone and look inside. Bone marrow that’s white and fatty indicates a healthy deer. Marrow that’s red and gelatinous indicates a starving deer.

“It’s normal to find deer reaching deep into their body reserves this time of year,” Hayden said. “Overall, these deer are doing pretty well with all this bad weather because they had real good fat reserves going into the winter.”

Predators, which need a more continuous food supply than deer, had tough going around Christmas in the deep powder snow, Hayden said. But hard-pack snow gives them an advantage over prey such as deer and elk.

“The deer are camped out in small local areas to conserve energy,” he said. “In many cases, the predators are camped out nearby.”

Some people in Washington’s Methow Valley are warning skiers not to go on trails alone. “The cougars are right down in the valley because all the deer are down here,” one local skier said. “There’s no sense asking for trouble.”

Wildlife biologists say it’s critical for rural people to keep their dogs from running free.

“One chase in this kind of snow can put a deer over the edge of survival,” Quinn said.

Washington Fish and Wildlife Department officials have been feeding more than 8,000 elk near Yakima - about twice the normal number.

“The elk are probably doing all right,” Quinn said. “They’re more of a herd animal. Their feeding and digestive physiology is different. Elk are much more like a cow. They’re capable of doing well on a low-quality diet of alfalfa hay.

“Deer are smaller. They have higher energy requirements. They can have a belly full of hay and be starved for nutrition.”

Deer rarely concentrate as elk do, Quinn said. Feeding deer is logistically much more difficult and impractical on a regional basis.

“Lots of people were calling wanting us to feed,” Quinn said. “But with our limited resources, the best we can do is look for the largest concentrations.

“Now that we’ve started, we’ll have to continue until the deer disperse. That’s one of the things we evaluate before we start feeding. In some places we could be feeding until late February or even late March.”

Feeding can concentrate deer that might otherwise disperse and survive, he said. “Get them all together and they can cause range damage or starve if the feed runs out.”

Two weeks ago, Quinn counted 200 deer on the Park Lake golf course south of Coulee City.

“That grass isn’t a great nutritional benefit, but at least they were able to forage on their own,” he said.

Survival doesn’t always belong to the fittest in the deer world. “More accurately, it’s survival of the biggest,” he said. “Deer can handle losses of 25-30 percent of their body weight and still re-feed and survive,” he said. “But fawns lose that percentage at a faster rate than adults.’

Grim as this sounds, Quinn said deer are designed to go through periods of low quality feed.

“People tend to evaluate a deer’s condition based on how they feel,” he said. “When a person is cold and miserable it’s normal to assume the deer are suffering too. But it may not be so.

“One thing people can do is realize that deer are concentrated along roads in many areas. If you want to save a deer this winter, slow down.”

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MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: HELP FEED THE DEER Donations are needed to fund the massive emergency deer and elk feeding underway in Washington. Send checks payable to WDFW Winter Feeding Program to Department of Fish and Wildlife General Accounting, 600 Capitol Way N., Olympia, WA 98501-1091.