Touching the Wild

by Joe Hutto

  A dramatic increase in highway traffic with more frequent encounters with cars and trucks is a devastating force impacting mule deer all over the West. There is a single eighteen-mile stretch of road north of the Wind River Canyon that averages well over three hundred mule deer kills a year, or about one every day—year in and year out. In 2007, twenty-nine white-tailed deer, four antelope, and 340 mule deer were killed on that one road. It is estimated that as many or more deer are killed by drivers as by hunters. These numbers, of course, reflect only the individuals who were killed immediately and do not include the vast number of mortally injured deer who made their way off the right of way before succumbing. While attempting to give mule deer mortality actual meaning by putting it in some ridiculous economic vernacular that voters and politicians can understand, someone in government was recently quoted by the Associated Press as saying that “$7 million ‘worth’ of deer are killed in a year on Wyoming roads.” And, of course, the resulting damage to vehicles, including injuries and even occasional fatalities to humans, comes at an enormous price.

  In addition, oil and gas development continues to subdivide the land with a grid of roads constantly rumbling with heavy trucks lacking maneuverability, which increases the likelihood of traffic mortality. And all of this human activity places a multitude of obstacles and obstructions in the path of historical migratory corridors of mule deer, as well as other species such as pronghorn and elk. There are well-meaning people in private, state, and federal agencies, as well as the oil and gas industry, who struggle to find solutions to these escalating problems, but problems arise at a faster rate than solutions.

  As we lose mule deer territory, opportunistic white-tailed deer seem to be willing to irreversibly occupy former mule deer habitat when given any opportunity. The Red Canyon south of Lander during the decades of the 1970s and 1980s represented some of the most ideal mule deer habitat in the state. In those years, while working horseback every day in that canyon and more than fifty thousand contiguous acres ranging from desert to mountain, I never laid eyes on a white-tailed deer. Nor did I see a whitetail in all of Fremont County, although I would occasionally hear of a sighting on one of the river valleys east of Lander. Today, the whitetail is the predominant species of deer in all of our river valleys, and it has become an abundant occupant of former mule deer strongholds such as Red Canyon, largely displacing or at least reoccupying former mule deer range land. The environmentally rich historic Slingerland Ranch, lying at the mouth of the Little Popo Agie River at Red Canyon, historically supports a typical winter herd of fifty or more mule deer, as of the winter of 2013, supported six—six! Disturbingly, the tenacious white-tailed deer has even begun to occupy the high mountain basins throughout the summer—a habitat historically known to support and encourage prosperous populations of mule deer.

  In cases where a species is clearly threatening to saturate or surpass the carrying capacity of a given habitat, doe-fawn and cow-calf seasons are entirely appropriate and one of the best management tools for balancing and sustaining a particular population. White-tailed deer, elk, and pronghorn are flexible species that can reach or in some cases even surpass sustainable population levels in many areas. However, the doe/fawn hunting concept was always strictly intended as a management tool and not an economic or political device to provide more hunter opportunity, revenue for state coffers, or votes for politicians. But, mysteriously, as mule deer struggle and continue to decline, you can still post your nine-year-old daughter’s photo on Facebook, as she proudly holds her first dead mule deer fawn up by its ear for all of us to admire. Do we actually want to pass this message of callous ignorance and greed directly from our highest government officials to our children? Even though I no longer hunt mule deer, I would like to see this tradition continue, based on the continued prosperity of the species, but to allow doe and fawn hunting in the light of the decline of this monumental creature is revolting. Aldo Leopold and Olas Murie have both long since rolled over in their graves. The educated public and wildlife management agencies are bewildered as Wyoming wildlife policy becomes increasingly political and, worse, an economic cash cow.

  Perhaps most disturbing is the flood of ongoing research indicating that the entire web of life in the Rocky Mountain West is being impacted by the effects of local and global changes in soil chemistry caused by atmospheric pollution. As the pH of mountain soil—particularly granitic soil—continues to become dramatically acidified, and powerful nitrate compounds steadily accumulate, life is becoming difficult or even in some cases intolerable for many plants and animals alike. Tree death within forests throughout the Rocky Mountains has currently gone far beyond mere epidemic, with many areas already approaching 100 percent of trees dead or dying. The Medicine Bow forest of southern Wyoming is said to be 90 percent dead, but a recent twenty-mile drive I took through the forest indicated that there were, in fact, no survivors. Mountain ranges all over the West are now experiencing tree mortality of 50 percent and greater. As pH cascades into more acid ranges and nitrate accumulation skyrockets, bark beetles find the weakened trees easy prey, so beetles proliferate by the trillions as our forest trees succumb by the billions. Climate change and drought are certainly contributors, but this intensively studied global trend began in eastern Soviet Europe in the 1950s with the complete destruction of many northern European forests from the unconstrained discharge of dirty industries, primarily in the environmentally unregulated Soviet Union. Trees began dying in epidemic numbers in eastern North America with the death of the boreal forests of Appalachia during the 1960s and included the sterilization of many lakes throughout eastern Canada. Global and local pollution from urbanized and industrial areas to the west arrived in the northern Rockies in the 1970s but became truly catastrophic starting around 2000. Now these effects are reverberating up and down the chain of life, until many plants and animals from the largest to the smallest are in decline—from ground squirrels, marmots, pikas, and bighorn sheep to mice, moose, and mule deer—from the high alpine tundra to the river drainages and basins. Both state and federal agencies tend to avoid acknowledging the hard science that has verified this phenomenon from hundreds of different research approaches for nearly half a century—failing to mention the underlying causes—merely focusing on the more economically and politically palatable secondary factors such as drought, “climate change,” and bark beetles.

  For decades, universities and institutions have studied the effects of acid rain, nitrate deposition, and now extreme levels of ozone on wildlife and forests throughout the West. Even researchers in Yellowstone Park recently admitted that the primary culprit in tree mortality was the effect of atmospheric pollution in the form of nitrate deposition and resulting free nitrogen in an ecology normally defined by limited availability of nitrogen. Soils of higher elevation and colder temperatures are always characterized by slow decomposition of organic matter, resulting in a predictably low availability of nitrogen. Sudden introduction of high levels of nitrogen can become outright toxic to plants normally growing in ecologies defined by slow nitrogen exchange. The effects on the soil’s micro fauna and flora are far-reaching and complex.

  Our problems are in essence global, and have been occurring in every mountain range in the world for more than half a century. Tree death in the Rocky Mountains is entirely predictable and merely follows a pattern that began in earnest fifty years ago but actually had its genesis with the Industrial Revolution. The problems began to be identified and understood by scientists all over the world in the middle of the last century. These tragic phenomena have been explored and documented globally, producing a veritable mountain of the finest research exploring cause and effect. The causes are clear, and the effects are obvious and well known. However, our own Department of Agriculture still fails to acknowledge any correlation between air pollution—in particular fossil fuel pollution and the resulting acid rain, composed of nitric and sulfuric acids in the form of nitrates—and the death of forests in the West. S
cientists, both in the West and in a multitude of ecologies around the world, continue to illuminate these problems with ever greater clarity as they pertain to issues of the effects of worldwide and source-point pollution. To suggest that our problems in the Rocky Mountains somehow differ from the identical problems that have been occurring in mountain ranges all over the world for more than half a century reflects a neglect of good science and common knowledge that is difficult to explain.

  One effect of acidification that has been studied worldwide in ecologies suffering similar problems is the sudden absence of certain obscure minerals that have bonded with elements such as iron and oxygen in the soil. These elements—often vital trace minerals, such as selenium, become chemically bonded—sequestered—in a form unavailable for uptake by plants. While studying the decline of bighorn sheep, my colleagues and I spent many years exploring the causes of nutritional deficiencies in many of our resident species of the northern Wind River Mountains, particularly those species living at high elevation and on more granitic soil.

  After years of relative prosperity, suddenly, bighorn sheep began a steady decline in populations throughout the West during the 1990s, resulting in formerly successful herds suffering drastic reductions in numbers, or in many cases, declining into complete extinction. This perfectly followed a correlating rise in nitrate deposition and cascading pH values due to acid rain. Mark Williams of the University of Colorado at Boulder has followed this trend in excruciating detail for more than two decades.

  Here in the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming, lambs appeared to be suffering from various ailments, which could be caused or exacerbated by possible mineral deficiencies that occasionally result in a form of nutritional muscular dystrophy known as selenium responsive disorder. Our evidence gathered over a ten-year period suggested a clear correlation between the high annual rainfall that was accumulating in the very wet years of the late 1990s and 2000 and low lamb survival. The wettest year of 1999 correlated with a complete collapse of the bighorn sheep population of the Whiskey Mountain herd, and, in essence, no lambs survived from a herd that was estimated to number in excess of 1,500 individuals. This herd saw a 50 percent drop in overall population in about five years. Then, as this same ecology began to suffer from one of the most severe droughts in recorded history, starting around 2005, the lamb population predictably began not to prosper but stabilize. As of 2012 this herd of bighorn sheep has not yet begun to recover, and the disturbing correlation exists—the less polluted rainfall accumulates in mountain soil, the better the survival rates of bighorn lambs as well as various other species of plants and animals. But there is no doubt that we have clearly reached that point in human history where our precious rainfall may now cause living things to die.

  Deficiencies in selenium may ultimately manifest in some degree of selenium responsive disorder, fostering a complex of progressive pathologies that leaves any young animal predisposed to health problems, including poor neuromuscular development and a damaged immune system. Death often results from predators because of impaired mobility, as well as secondary infections such as pasteurella-born pneumonia and necrotic infections of the mouth and cranium caused by an endemic bacterium—Actinomyces bovis. Pasteurella and actinomyces are both part of the natural oral, nasal, and upper respiratory flora of many ungulates, much like streptococcus bacteria in humans. It is only when the immune system becomes compromised that these bacteria finally establish a foothold and at last become truly pathological. Even though these various infections may become the final agents of death, in most cases they are still secondary to more insidious primary causes. There are, however, differing genetic strains of pasteurella peculiar to domestic animals that can be more virulent and consequently devastating to wild populations.

  One important study of particular relevance to mule deer was conducted by biologist Werner Flueck, in conjunction with the University of California at Davis. The close genetic relative of the mule deer, the black-tailed deer, was in a catastrophic decline in the area of Shasta County in northern California, with doe-fawn ratios at an all-time low and populations plummeting. Flueck had strong suspicions that, just as in so many other places in the world, years of heavy atmospheric pollution with acidic characteristics could be to blame. He then set out to conduct an unusually exhaustive and rigorous study to determine whether changes in the availability of certain trace minerals due to changes in soil pH could be the problem. Flueck published his seminal report in the Journal of the Ecological Society of America, titled “Effect of Trace Elements on Population Dynamics: Selenium Deficiency in Free-Ranging Black-Tailed Deer.” The research revealed that black-tailed deer were suffering from a nutritional deficiency in selenium, which appeared to have seriously limited fawn survival rates for several years. Flueck’s team trapped and implanted nondigestible boluses in 1,695 female deer estimated to be of breeding age, several months prior to the spring birthing season. The boluses were designed to release 1.3 mcg of selenium per day as a supplement, and each deer was marked with a radio transmitter for future observation and then returned to the wild. Of 1,695 deer sampled, blood tests at the time of capture revealed that 80 percent were deficient in selenium, according to official livestock standards. Another 15 percent showed at least a marginal deficiency. The study group and subsequent fawns were carefully monitored throughout the spring and summer and into fall. The test results on recaptured deer indicated that selenium supplementation had dramatic effects on fawn survival rates and on blood levels of selenium. On average, selenium blood levels were 3.1 times higher in females when compared to levels measured prior to treatment. Flueck writes, “Productivity (fawn survival rates) due to Se supplementation was increased by 2.6 times … over un-supplemented deer (a staggering 250 percent increase) and resulted in an additional 51 fawns per 100 females” (italics added). Flueck further reminds us of the growing body of data that now strongly suggests that “anthropogenic manipulation of ecosystems, in the form of acidic atmospheric precipitation, has now been widely demonstrated to reduce the bioavailability of selenium in free-ranging herbivores.” References were also made to several authors who have “described a world-wide increase in the incidence of selenium responsive diseases in animals.” In this same study, Flueck points to research substantiating our suspicions regarding the relationship of the acidification of soils by atmospheric pollution and a corresponding reduction in plant selenium concentrations. Flueck concludes his discussion by warning, “This implies that the impact of large-scale anthropogenic activities may alter Se or other trace mineral cycles in remote areas, which would reduce the effectiveness of small, isolated areas (i.e., Wilderness Areas, etc.) for protection of biodiversity.”

  It is important to note that the capture of even thirty large ungulates and the installation of radio collars is an expensive, labor-intensive, and even dangerous effort that could be considered a heroic accomplishment in any wildlife study. To capture, take blood samples, install boluses and tracking collars, and then attempt to recapture 1,695 deer is an accomplishment of a magnitude almost unprecedented in wildlife biology. The result, of course, is a truly definitive study with overwhelming scientific and statistical acumen, leaving biologists everywhere humbled and with little room for the grumblings of the Monday morning academic. Hats off to Flueck and UC Davis! At the time this book went to press, Flueck was conducting similar research near Bariloche, Argentina, where he has been studying the conspicuous role of selenium-iodine deficiency in the twenty-year decline of the endangered Patagonian huemul deer.

  Considering the overwhelming body of evidence suggesting that plants and animals are being uniformly harmed by anthropogenic effects of pollution in mountain soils, it would be illogical to suggest that the conspicuous and unexplained nutritional problems plaguing our mule deer are not in some measure the result of these same effects. However, it’s not merely through “game management” but only through the funding of legitimate research that these problems can be illuminated. And clear
ly it is only the loud and persistent voice of an informed and caring public that can stir a political environment ensconced in the very industries that create the toxic substances that ultimately rain down on the land. Only by intensive studies provided by significant funding will answers and solutions emerge. Our window of opportunity is rapidly closing on the mule deer.