Touching the Wild

by Joe Hutto

  I have accidentally stumbled into the lives of these remarkable creatures and made many discoveries that were unforeseen. And, for what it is worth—and regardless of its probable irrelevance—I must say this at least once: the mule deer is without question the most sensitive, affectionate, and imminently lovable creature I have ever been associated with. But I can’t simply remain standing on this mountainside watching them disappear into oblivion.

  And so, now, with almost overwhelming regret, I must somehow find the means to return to a life that in a perfect world would not be of my choosing. Sadly, I would argue, I have not lost my perspective—my grasp on reality—but, rather, gained it. Emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually, it seems as if the darkness defining the lives of these animals has now overtaken my own. I find that I must retreat for lack of strength and courage and the simple wisdom to know how to proceed.

  If I could be their voice, I would say, where are the allies, where is the refuge, where can they find some respite? How can we as ethical humans admiringly gaze up the picturesque mountain so oblivious, and not see the oblivion that quietly resides there, as so many species gasp in our suffocating wake? Can you not see them among the rocks and sage brush and see the wounds, the scars, the shrunken hide stretched across the barren ribs, and the burden of their quiet disposition of insignificance? Their sadness and disappointment has become my own.

  Ironically, ubiquitous in the human ecology, mule deer are the ones who, by their conspicuous presence, become to our eyes invisible. However, the unfortunate reality is that all the deer we see near our roadsides, our agricultural areas, and our urban ecology in winter months are, in essence, all the deer. This is the large mammal that can be seen along any roadway, in any hay meadow, lounging around the city park, or wandering through your yard on a winter morning. The mule deer has not chosen our urban and rural habitat because of safety or convenience—we have selected theirs—and, for them, this habitat is neither safe nor convenient. It is the misfortune of the mule deer that humans have a preference for the identical ecology in which this animal is biologically obligated, and that will be their undoing. The illusion of an abundance of mule deer is facilitated by the fact that they are a predictable feature on what has now been redefined principally as the agricultural and urban human landscape. Elk, moose, and even the antelope in many agricultural and urban environments often represent a novel sighting and a rare treat for the human inhabitants. The sight of a herd of elk or the lone moose wandering through most mountain towns in the West, although not extraordinary, is still always cause for a moment of intense interest and perhaps even a photo in the local newspaper. With the exception of that rare surviving mature buck, the mule deer receives no such celebrity and rarely invites even a disinterested glace from a passerby.

  The general population of human inhabitants has no concept of how many individual elk exist in their area because elk do not, in general, choose to live in the same habitat as humans. As elk numbers have soared in recent decades, mule deer have been in a steady state of decline. Where we saw one hundred deer ten years ago, now we see fifty. That seems to most casual observers to be plenty of deer, but applying a steady, ten-year logarithm to that simple equation amounts to no deer in the blink of an eye. Mule deer numbers are down all over the West—declines of 50 to 70 percent are not uncommon—and when mule deer have altogether vanished from a location, their disturbing statistic vanishes along with them—they are no longer a part of anyone’s equation. Bighorn sheep and moose are in similar catastrophic declines, but as some interest and regard gain a foothold concerning these more exciting and economically significant species, the mule deer seems to languish in relative obscurity. I am constantly shocked as I relay population statistics to otherwise intelligent, well-informed citizens—including sportsmen—who are completely unaware of a dramatic decline in mule deer numbers that has been underway for thirty years. Their decline does not in general appear on the radar of consciousness, either by common citizens or even state governments that ultimately have been charged with the responsibility of monitoring and protecting all wildlife populations.

  This is not a resilient species like elk, pronghorn, or white-tailed deer, which have seemed to readily recover from drastic fluctuations in populations in the past caused by habitat destruction, catastrophic weather events, disease, or overhunting.

  Wild sheep are typically well defined by the distinct geographical isolation of individual herds. Many of these herds have not simply declined in the last ten to twenty years—they have completely ceased to exist. Those are clear cases of extinction, and red flags should be going up everywhere. A formerly viable herd of hundreds of individuals reduced to complete nonexistence in less than twenty years is not a part of some “natural cycle,” especially when these are unrelated herds that are dispersed over wide geographical areas of the Rocky Mountain West. Like bighorn sheep, mule deer across the West are faring poorly in the midst of the “new” Western landscape, and once any wild population slips into a steady and persistent decline, it can be mysteriously difficult to reverse.

  Having lived almost every day with this species for many years, I have learned things I could never have imagined. Their memory is impeccable, and their brilliant awareness—their consciousness and keen sensitivity to the workings of their world—is a trait that far surpasses my own tendencies toward awareness and wakefulness. A mule deer is a creature that is wide awake on this planet, and I feel safe in saying that the human organism by comparison is a creature asleep at the wheel. The human brain is developed around a highly complex, language-based representational system, and we are proficient at collecting and organizing large quantities of information, but there appears to be little correlation between the acquisition and accumulation of these vast amounts of information and the achievement and expression of a corresponding wisdom. It must be bound up in the complexity of the human brain, but, ironically, we are creatures who find it exceedingly difficult to simply pay attention.

  While struggling with my specific difficulty remaining conscious, I have attempted to pay attention to the mule deer and, at least, have regretfully learned that these deer are not well. The most important single effect of the mule deer’s many problems in technical terms is poor recruitment of new fawn-bearing does, and, naturally, the reproductive success of the many surviving does with chronic health problems has also been impaired. The quality and duration of the reproductive life of the mule deer doe has grown shorter. Many does are returning from their lush mountain pastures in frightfully poor condition at a time when they should be in their annual prime. Inspection of these high mountain ecologies reveals that habitat degradation does not correspond and account for the degradation of the animals living there. Relatively young does who have survived winter in relatively good condition return from their summer range displaying a decline in their overall health and appearance that can be shocking. Young deer whom I have known every day of their lives come into their winter range after a brief summer and are almost unrecognizable. That these deer could fall into such a state in four brief months on ranges that in summer are still relatively lush and bountiful seems impossible. A catastrophic die-off occurred in the fall of 2012 as starved does and fawns returned from their summer range. By the middle of October and the onset of hunting season, the creeks and drainages on this mountain were already littered with the remains of dead does and fawns. I documented more than twenty individuals within a one-mile radius. An adjoining rancher with his finger on the pulse of his land correctly observed that returning deer were emaciated and that many had not properly shed their summer pelage. He voluntarily closed thousands of acres to hunting as he clearly recognized a crisis that was already underway.

  If I were to direct a study in an effort to reveal possible underlying causes, my focus would be not on the multitude of differing maladies that are clearly plaguing this animal, but on exploring those factors that may be contributing primarily to an inability to assimilate plant
nutrients and, more fundamentally, to a uniformly compromised immune system within the overall population. But, whatever the causes, the stress of bearing and supporting twin fawns by these gravely impaired does often represents a death sentence for the entire family. Upon returning from summer ranges to the lower rangeland slopes of the mountains, they find that cattle have heavily grazed their winter range, which, along with drought and insect infestation, has left them to starve, unless they rely on the relative abundance of the irrigated ranch lands below. Most ranchers are more than respectful of the right of wildlife to share and exist on land that has been sequestered by human agriculture, but I have heard the few who suggest that mule deer and antelope are worse than a plague of grasshoppers.

  In the past seven years, bucks have begun to display an increasing tendency toward poor development in overall body proportions and poor antler development. It is now common for three-, four-, and even five-year-old bucks to have an antler configuration that would be typical of a two-and-a-half-year-old deer, and even the most trained observers would have no reason to suspect they were seeing an older animal. Had I not known many of these individuals since they were spotted fawns, I would have never guessed this myself.

  Like much of the state, it is suspected that mule deer populations in this area of the southern Wind River Mountains are down 50 percent in the past ten years, although no one knows the exact figure, as census data on deer in this area have been cursory at best. By direct observation on the ground, I know for certain that this immediate area, including a ten-mile length of mountainside running from north to south along the southern Wind River Range, composed of former ideal mule deer habitat, has declined more than 30 percent in just over six years, and three winter herds have completely ceased to exist in our immediate vicinity in the last four years. This is also the heart of one of the smallest designated “general” hunt area in Wyoming. In 2011, three hundred doe/fawn tags were issued in this area, which surely constitutes a significant percentage of the entire population of does.

  Most hunters rely on the wisdom of wildlife managers, presuming that common sense and good science have prevailed, and they infer from doe/fawn permits that mule deer must be overabundant, and they naturally wish to participate in the effort to eradicate the excessive numbers and bring populations into equilibrium with carrying capacity. Furthermore, it is legal for does and fawns to be taken with bow and arrow, as well as by youth under eighteen years of age in bow and rifle season. At this time in history a live mule deer doe should be considered an incredibly valuable commodity.

  There has been a crisis underway for decades, and it is continuing to develop and worsen. The limiting factors for mule deer are complex in nature and legion in variety. In recent years, ironically, the only outcry that seems to be heard has come from many older, concerned hunters who are aware of an almost complete lack of mule deer in habitat that in recent memory virtually swarmed with them. And, of course, there are the concerned ranchers and landowners who actually spend their days on the land and even on occasion get out of sight of the pickup truck. These ranchers count the dead deer accumulating around their stack yards in winter, and correctly observe that does returning in fall with fawns are malnourished and that there are indications of disease, heavy parasite load, malnutrition, or a combination of all of the above.

  The Mule Deer Foundation, like Ducks Unlimited and the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation—organizations that have perhaps protected more wild land and aided the recovery of more species than have all other conservation organizations combined—is an organization of caring hunters in partnership with other concerned citizens who share an admiration and love for this phenomenal species.

  Now, perhaps, the mule deer may have an ally and an advocate who can carry enough political weight to help tip the balance of responsible management in this troubled deer’s favor. For clearly it is only the political weight of many caring individuals that will force the hand of governments and their various wildlife agencies, causing them to yield to the virtue and ethics found in good science and common sense, and not to the selfish politics of big money. Godspeed the Mule Deer Foundation, for they have taken on a heavy load.

  The balance has tipped—there is no question about that—and for many reasons the magnificent mule deer is losing its fight for survival. This faltering animal needs to be quickly recognized as one of our precious species that receives our attention and our special concern. I can foresee a day when this familiar deer is a rare sight in its once bountiful and prosperous ecology.

  This is not prophecy or conjecture, as this dreadful day has already arrived in much of the West. I’ve had the advantage of a thirty-five-year observation of the mule deer and a continuous perspective through time in one general geographic area. In November 2011, while traveling from Interstate 90 in southern Montana north along Flathead Lake to Kalispell near the Canadian border, and back south through Swan Valley, I drove on a loop that included the eastern boundary of the entire Bob Marshall Wilderness and crossed vast expanses of Montana ranch lands. This was a transection of hundreds of miles of Montana’s most productive wildlife habitat and in a season in which mule deer should be highly visible at lower elevations. I saw many dozens of whitetails, numerous elk, and one lone moose in that long, two-day drive, but, incomprehensively, not one mule deer—not one! Thirty years ago I would have seen hundreds.

  If this current decline continues unabated, we may soon see a time when a once-abundant creature has slipped unnoticed from our grasp—all but vanished from our midst. This cataclysm is, at this moment, well underway. We may in fact lose this creature before we have come to understand and know who it is and what its special relationship to the landscape might be. For this animal is far more complex and interesting than all of our present understanding.

  The mule deer is not unique in its apparent dilemma, as so many creatures large and small within the Rocky Mountain landscapes are also suffering. Iconic creatures such as moose, bighorn sheep, and mule deer are species whose very presence has always defined this ecology and are now all rapidly slipping into obscurity with vanishing populations. As go the mule deer, so goes the entire ecology of the Rocky Mountains. As go the Rocky Mountains, so goes the health of our entire planet. Nothing lives or dies in a vacuum.

  It would appear that our collective vision of preservation, which was fostered in the middle of the last century by visionaries such as Aldo Leopold and Olaus Murie, has also largely slipped into obscurity as our needs steadily overtake our consciousness and our conscience.

  The concepts of “growth” and “development” have become embedded in our contemporary thinking with a strange moral authority and righteousness, ascending to a cultural significance that is patently religious. There has never been a more culturally infantile concept than the suggestion that “growth” can be sustained and perpetuated indefinitely. Without this most basic understanding of our position as fellow organisms on the planet, it seems that the catastrophe for this ecology and the creatures living on it—and, of course, for us—is assured.

  Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines civilize as follows: “to bring to a technically advanced and rationally ordered stage of cultural development” (italics added). It appears that we have achieved the advanced technology but clearly without an accompanying measure of rationality.

  Humanity was endowed with the extraordinary gift of reason that has, in part, catapulted us to a unique pinnacle of biological success. Reason allows us to merely imagine wisdom—we can postulate the definitions and describe the possibilities that wisdom might afford a creature, we can even strive to attain wisdom, and, to some extent, we can serve wisdom—but we are seemingly helpless as a species to possess it.

  Of all the creatures that have made their appearance upon the stage of life and been catapulted into apparent dominance, our peculiar challenge might be to make some extraordinary leap, not in fundamental intelligence, not in technology, but in simple conscious awareness of
our trajectory as a living organism on the planet. Without some fundamental change in the way in which we envision ourselves and our relationship to all that sustains us, we may become the ultimate evolutionary flash in the pan—a truly extraordinary organism that now seems to have become a biological projectile speeding toward the windshield of reality. And we’re taking so many other living organisms with us on this collision course.

  If there is perfection in nature, it is defined not by rigid universal dogma, but rather by a system based on the pursuit of the ideal through a universal dialectic of trial and error—an exquisite and elegant negotiation of physical and biological possibilities. Indeed, nature has always been defined more by developmental failures than successes. Failure is, in fact, built into the system. However nature does not lament failed experiments; it thrives on them. As in the methodology of all good exploration, all failed experiments are by definition successes. It is equally important to know what works and what does not—what has functional validity and what is inherently dysfunctional. This symmetry is the driving force of all existential agency. Balance can be sustained only by polarity—the dichotomy of opposition. On which side of this negotiation will our humanity ultimately reside?