Mild Winter Gives Muleys A Breather

This year’s relatively mild winter will be good news for north-central Washington’s mule deer, which suffered population losses of up to 50 percent after last winter’s deep snow in Chelan and Okanogan counties.

“We really needed this kind of a winter,” said Mark Quinn, wildlife biologist for the state Department of Fish and Wildlife. “We should be back in the deer business by 1999, assuming next winter is relatively normal.”

Last winter’s severe conditions killed about 85 percent of the mule deer fawns, leaving only 17 fawns alive for every 100 does when the department did its spring survey last April, Quinn said. The agency usually sees about 44 fawns per 100 does in the springtime surveys, and even in a bad winter usually counted 20-some fawns per 100 does, he said.

“Right off, that told us this was a really bad winter,” Quinn said Wednesday. “That was the lowest fawns-per-100-adults we’d observed in the last 30 years.”

But a feeding program enabled the does to carry their unborn offspring to term, leaving the herd with about 72 fawns for every 100 does during December’s survey, about an average number, he said.

“In a really bad winter, it can affect both the fawns and the unborn fawns. When the does are really stressed (by the winter conditions) the fetuses can be absorbed back into the body or aborted,” Quinn said.

Meanwhile, the mule deer in Chelan County have also had to contend with the long-term impact of 1994 wildfires, which left significantly less winter forage for the deer, Quinn said.

“Comparatively speaking, Chelan County’s winter range is like a moonscape next to Okanogan County,” Quinn said.

The department has continued a feeding program for the Chelan County deer that began in November but wasn’t heavily used until after Christmas, when the region was hit with snow.

“When you get 12 inches of snow, there’s nothing left for them to eat, even in a normal winter,” Quinn said.

The Okanogan deer were left on their own because there was plenty of bitter brush for them to forage from, said Scott Fitkin, wildlife biologist in the Methow Valley.

Jim Mountjoy, manager of the Methow Wildlife Recreation Area, said he wasn’t too worried about the deer’s future.

“Mother Nature has the ability to control population size so much more than we do with hunting. But mule deer have a tremendous reproductive potential, so the population can bounce back relatively quickly,” Mountjoy said.