Deer/pronghorn decline

[npaden]

When you really look closely at most of the graphs there is a timeframe in the early 2000's where the harvest wasn't curbed quickly enough to react to the population decline. The graphs for D-1 are a good example.

The population had declined to 1,400ish in 2001 and 1,100ish in 2002, but the harvest was still a little over 250 animals both years. Over 20% of the population harvested on a declining population is pretty aggressive.

Fawn recruitment is the critical number that needs to be addressed and focused on and would allow biologists to set the harvest numbers much more accurately. A population of 1,500 with excellent fawn recruitment could sustain a harvest of 400 - 500 animals. A population of 1,500 with poor fawn recruitment could struggle to sustain a harvest of 50 like the population in the D-1 example.

If the fawns aren't making it then something needs to be done quickly to help out or the population is going to struggle. If you can get fawn recruitment up to 50% of better the population will take off in no time.

Of course there are a ton of scenarios to fawn recruitment including poor health of the doe coming out of the winter, habitat, traffic mortality, predators, etc.

Mule deer are so much more difficult to study than whitetails!

 

[Oak]

I find it ironically amusing that the auther put quotes around "mitigation plans".

Deer and antelope in Colorado's northern mountains declining, study warns​

By Bruce Finley
The Denver Post​

Deer and antelope populations in Colorado's northern mountain valleys have declined sharply over the past 30 years — pronghorn by as much as 64 percent in some areas, mule deer by up to 36 percent — according to a new National Wildlife Federation study.

Colorado Division of Wildlife officials on Monday confirmed declines in the area from the Medicine Bow range west to Vermillion Bluffs — a target for energy development.​

The NWF study concludes that herds across Colorado and southern Wyoming "may not be able to fully recover" unless federal and state agencies initiate larger-scale planning to protect their habitat.​

The veteran biologists who did the work relied on data supplied by state game managers and attributed the drop-offs to a combination of factors: drought, invasion of weeds, residential construction and the acceleration of oil and gas drilling that has brought well pads, pipelines and roads.​

"What we've learned is that the business-as-usual approach cannot work any longer. We're starting to see some consequences of our actions," said Steve Torbit, NWF's regional director, who beginning this week will run federal research for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.​

Federal land managers' current approach to leasing lands for energy exploration, using project-by-project environmental review, is leading to "losing the herds," Torbit said.​

Colorado Oil and Gas Association officials warned against associating correlation with causation. Energy companies have spent millions on "mitigation plans" required by regulators to protect more than 350,000 acres of mule-deer habitat, said David Ludlam, COGA's Western Slope representative...........​

Read more: Deer and antelope in Colorado's northern mountains declining, study warns - The Denver Post

 

[Oak]

WyomingNews.com

Future is grim for deer



Mule deer populations are dropping. It's so bad, in fact, some question whether the animal will even be a part of the Wyoming landscape further on down the road.

By Shauna Stephenson
[email protected]

In a carpeted room in the back of the River Rock Café in Walden, Colo., Steve Torbit posts a graph of the downward slide of mule deer populations in southern Wyoming and northern Colorado.

"What's the future look like?" he asks the crowd, which sits quietly, arms folded, legs crossed. "We're demanding a lot more of the landscapes in the West. We're demanding so much you can't really look at those (impacts) in isolation anymore."

The graph, a product of the report "Population Status and Trends of Big Game along the Colorado/Wyoming State Line," by the National Wildlife Federation, shows a 30-year decline in both mule deer and pronghorn in the region. As a side note, elk, which tend to use different habitats, are seeing rises in population.

"The tricky thing about this is we can't absolutely tie this to one or two specific occurrences," says Torbit, who retired recently as regional executive director of National Wildlife Federation.

He likens the pressures of drought, development and loss of prime habitat to the over-stretching of a rubber band. If natural variations such as weather are already stretching the band, then added pressures like energy development might be the breaking.

"We've gotta relax the rubber band," he says. "We can't continue to assume that it can take this kind of development.

"It's going to snap because we overextend it. Or we let loose a little bit and give critters a little bit of a break."

Just south of Rock Springs, mule deer herds have declined about 38 percent since 1986. Following that trend, hunter harvest has fallen from a high of 1,200 in 1987 to less than 400 in 2008.

To the south of that, herd deer populations in the northwest corner of Colorado also have plummeted by 66 percent. Hunter harvest also has dipped. In the late 1980s, more than 800 deer were harvested in there. Some 20 years later, only 48 were harvested.

"That deer population information really hit us between the eyes," Torbit says. "We knew it was tough over there. But we didn't really realize how severe that decline was."

Perhaps just as problematic are rates of recruitment, or how many young animals survive to adulthood each year. This tends to be tricky since there are so many factors that can influence it: weather, drought, quality of habitat, predators or disease.

For pronghorn and mule deer, those rates need to be about 70 young per 100 to maintain robust populations.

But five-year averages of pronghorn in southern Wyoming flirt at the mid-50s, dropping as low as 39 per hundred in the herd near Baggs. For mule deer, those numbers are in the 50s, for the most part.

"If we want deer and antelope to be huntable in the future, we've got to do something different," Torbit says. "Hunters need to wake up. If they don't speak up, they're going to experience declining opportunity."

A tipping point?

While pronghorn certainly have challenges, it's mule deer that seem poised to bring about a revolution in game management.

Currently, Wyoming Game and Fish is investing time and money into not only understanding what is going on with herds but it also to figure out how to reverse the trend.

They are working on initiatives in both the Wyoming Range and Platte Valley, asking residents for problems and solutions. A meeting for the Platte Valley Mule Deer Initiative will be in Cheyenne at 6 p.m. on Aug. 25 at Game and Fish headquarters.

But to understand why mule deer are seeing such declines, it's important to take a step back and look at the bigger picture.

As equal opportunity residents of a multitude of environments, deer seem as though they would be hearty and easy to manage.

Unfortunately, it is quite the opposite. Deer are finicky. They require specific nutrition, stemming from the way their digestive system is made up.

Deer have specialized microbes in their guts that break down the food they ingest. Take a deer from Casper and place it in Cheyenne, even in a habitat with identical food sources, and it's likely that deer won't survive.

Historically, deer have seen cyclical highs and lows. Early accounts from trappers show deer were not overly numerous.

But that started to change as the 1940s rolled around. Game laws had been enacted and large swaths of lands were being settled for ranching and farming, furthering the call for predator control. Wet weather moved through, creating good habitat.

In short, mule deer flourished. In fact, according to some experts there were too many deer.

Then, as droughts came and went, land got more settled, migration corridors became impinged on, fire suppression became the norm and energy development began cropping up, those numbers began a cycle, plummeting then recovering, plummeting, then recovering again.

The problem was they never recovered fully, meaning the highs of later years were stair-stepping down in a gradual decline.

Today the numbers are far below those of the 1950s. Habitats have seen great change, and not for the better, says Daryl Lutz, wildlife management coordinator for Game and Fish.

"Those same shrub communities that flourished (in the '50s) are the same ones we have today, by and large," Lutz says. "Literally, the same plants."

But the question of how to fix it - if it can be fixed - remains unanswered. Without a solution, many biologists question whether mule deer will continue to be a part of the landscape in the long term.

"What I tell people is we need to start focusing on what we've got," he says. "If we can sustain the number we've got today, we're going to be doing good."

A habitat in crisis

Dressed in a navy blue Hawaiian shirt, Bill Rudd with the wildlife division at Game and Fish looks over numbers detailing conditions of habitat in the Platte Valley.

The charts, which show glimpses of how much wildlife uses certain plants across large areas, is filled with red numbers, signaling areas of concern.

The link between quality of habitat and quality of wildlife herds has long been established: Good habitat generally equates to healthy herds. The opposite is also true.

"We've been in a long-term downward trend for deer," Rudd says. "Whatever changes occur, or whatever combination of changes has been occurring, they are not positive for mule deer."

Today, suitable habitat for wildlife seems to be disappearing at an alarming rate, and not just because of the rise in drilling.

According to the State Engineers Office, nearly 100,000 acres of land were subdivided into lots of 35 acres or less between 1998 and 2006. At that rate, 80 percent of new development in Wyoming will be on lots of 10 to 40 acres by 2020, and 2.6 million acres of ranchland will be turned to residential development.

Populations are increasing and the West is housing much of that rise. Fourteen of the fastest-growing counties were in the Rocky Mountains in 2006, and four of the eight states in that region saw double-digit population increases between 2000 and 2005.

Energy development also plays a role in habitat disturbance. In Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming, Montana and Utah, about 27 million of acres of wildlife habitat have been leased for energy development, according to the Bureau of Land Management.

Between 2001 and 2007, more than 15,000 wells were drilled in Wyoming, Colorado and Utah. Compare that to just over 4,000 between 1996 and 2000.

And while permitting has slowed, the future of development in southern Wyoming and northern Colorado looks busy. More than 15,000 wells are set for the coming decades.

And it's not just oil and gas. Renewable energy will be taking up a footprint in southern Wyoming as well.

Near Saratoga, two wind farm projects - the Chokecherry and Sierra Madre Wind Energy Project - are set to go in adjacent to mule deer and pronghorn habitat. Combined, they are expected to have 1,000 wind turbines spread out over almost 100,000 acres plus the addition of about 500 miles of roads.

Managing herds around such projects is going to be tricky. While BLM can put stipulations on construction, once the turbines are up it's hard to limit activity. At the moment, studies on how wildlife reacts to wind farms are slim.

With that in mind, Torbit says agencies like BLM need to take cumulative impacts into account when issuing reports on potential impacts from energy development.

But doing that can be difficult, says Dennis Saville, wildlife biologist for BLM's Wyoming State Office.

"We certainly try to always consider cumulative impacts when looking at any given activity," he says. "It's a really tough hill when you're talking about this big of an area and when you're talking about things like climate."

Regardless, there are still many who think development has little effect on habitat. Industry maintains its requirement of reclamation keeps herds from being negatively impacted.

"In Wyoming, the first oil well was drilled in 1884," Bruce Hinchey, president of the Petroleum Association of Wyoming told the Associated Press in July. "We've been here 127 years, and we've got lots and lots of wildlife. They continue to thrive."

But Torbit disagrees.

"We can't keep fooling ourselves that all this development is having no effect on our wildlife and expect to have the same kind of wildlife we've had over the last 25 years," he says.

"I don't tell the oil and gas industry what kind of oil or gas the geological formations hold. I don't tell them where the best location is for a well. They don't tell me what's best for wildlife.

"But for some reason, they seem to think they know it all."

 

[the nikster]

Oak,
Thanks for posting the updates- I like to know what's happening. Good/bad decisions made now could effect us for decades.
Idaho has gone to roadless areas in an attempt to reduce harvest and spread out demand-this could work-time will tell. I sometimes think a drastic change such as no hunting for 1 or 2 years could have a positive impact but if there is no winter range then deer could starve and we could end up with FEWER deer. I sure do not know the solution but I am willing to investigate all options and help provide a solution.
Thanks again for the updates.

 

[Oak]

I sometimes think a drastic change such as no hunting for 1 or 2 years could have a positive impact but if there is no winter range then deer could starve and we could end up with FEWER deer.

Drastic changes come in many forms. How about a moritorium on new drilling permits? How about redirecting the focus of the BLM to wildlife and habitat instead of mineral extraction? How about mandating landscape scale habitat work by the energy companies when they apply for permits?

Not directing this at you, nikster, just throwing out some ideas. As a hunter, I'm getting tired of being the one that is expected to give more and more and more. Look at the graph of deer hunter harvest I posted. Harvest is 6% of what it was 25 years ago. Why should hunters continue to be the ones to give?

 

[the nikster]

Well, I think we know why they keep asking us to give more. Too many folks from distant locals have too much say in what's happening here.
It sounds as if all could give some. Perhaps not only a moritorium but reduction in old permits as well. Does the BLM have a scope or something written down I could research as to what they are charged with beyond 'land managenent'?
In Florida mitigation is required. A company has to either reclaim lost habitat or manufacture new. It must be in their state constitution or it might apply to other states as well.
On another issue, do you see the corner to corner tresspass issue(as mentioned in another post) changing anything anytime soon? This could increase hunter access which would likely be good news for me shortterm but bad news for animals long term.

 

[Oak]

Does the BLM have a scope or something written down I could research as to what they are charged with beyond 'land managenent'?

Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976

In Florida mitigation is required. A company has to either reclaim lost habitat or manufacture new. It must be in their state constitution or it might apply to other states as well.

Pretty hard to "manufacture" habitat out here. States don't have much say in how federal lands are managed, either.

 

[Oak]

Think hunters and the WY G&F could demonstrate "recognizable injury", considering the mule deer population has declined 60% between 2001 and 2009 in the Pinedale Anticline area?

CHEYENNE, Wyo. — A judge on Friday threw out Obama administration rules that sought to slow down expedited environmental review of oil and gas drilling on federal land.

U.S. District Judge Nancy Freudenthal ruled in favor of a petroleum industry group, the Western Energy Alliance, in its lawsuit against the federal government, including Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.

The ruling reinstates Bush-era expedited oil and gas drilling under provisions called categorical exclusions on federal lands nationwide, Freudenthal said.

The government argued that oil and gas companies had no case because they didn't show how the new rules, implemented by the U.S. BureauofLandManagement and U.S. Forest Service last year, had created delays and added to the cost of drilling.
Freudenthal rejected that argument.

"Western Energy has demonstrated through its members recognizable injury," she said. "Those injuries are supported by the administrative record."

An attorney for the government declined to comment but Kathleen Sgamma, director of government and public affairs for the Denver-based Western Energy Alliance, praised the ruling.

"She completely discounted the government's argument that the harm was speculative," Sgamma said of the judge.

The Energy Policy Act of 2005 allows the BLM and Forest Service to invoke categorical exclusions and skip new environmental review for drilling permits under certain circumstances.

The circumstances include instances where companies plan to disturb relatively little ground and environmental review already has been done for that area. A categorical exclusion also can be invoked when additional drilling is planned at a well pad where drilling has occurred within the previous five years.

Categorical exclusions were widely used throughout the West — especially in the gas boom states of Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico — until last year.

In Wyoming, the BLM invoked categorical exclusions for 87 percent of the new gas wells drilled in the Upper Green River Basin between 2007 and 2010. Those drilling permits added up: Close to 3,000 over those three years in the basin's Jonah Field and Pinedale Anticline gas fields.

The Jonah Field and Pinedale Anticline ranked fifth and sixth for gas production in the U.S. in 2009.

Federal land agencies adopted new rules for interpreting the Energy Policy Act last year in response to an environmentalist lawsuit over the use of categorical exclusions. The Western Energy Alliance sued over the new rules last fall.

Copyright 2011 The Associated Press.

 

[Oak]

More on the Anticline...

HCN - March 21, 2011
by Emilene Ostlind

Mule deer wintering near Pinedale, Wyo., rely on the sagebrush habitat of the Mesa, a 300-square-mile plateau between the Green and New Fork rivers. Part of the Pinedale Anticline natural gas field, where nearly 2,000 wells have been drilled to tap the nation's third-largest reserve, it once hosted 5,000 to 6,000 wintering deer. As winter range goes, says Dan Stroud, habitat mitigation biologist for the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, it's always been "the best of the best."

In 2000, the Bureau of Land Management, which manages the Anticline, set up a landmark adaptive management plan -- its first for oil and gas -- intended to help protect deer and other resources as drilling proceeded. In theory, it would allow managers to "learn while doing," adapting in response to on-the-ground impacts.

Then, in 2008, the BLM permitted 4,399 more wells and lifted the winter drilling restrictions imposed in 2000, in exchange for measures that would "afford superior crucial winter range," such as directional drilling and concentrated phased development, which clusters wells to reduce habitat disturbance. Operators built a pipeline to transport fluids from the wells, eliminating up to 165,000 truck trips per year and reducing disturbance to wildlife, and agreed to leave 64 percent of the area alone for five years. Meanwhile, the BLM established thresholds that would trigger "serious mitigation efforts" and hired contractors to monitor for declines of deer, other wildlife and water and air quality.

Despite such measures, Mesa mule deer numbers have plummeted 60 percent; only about 2,000 used the plateau over the winter of 2009-'10, below the agency's threshold. This should have prompted the BLM to solve the problem by adapting its management policies, as promised. But a decade after resource managers and conservationists celebrated the new Anticline plan's flexibility, it appears the BLM has no intention of changing course.

On Feb. 23, the BLM presented its mitigation plan for the deer at a public meeting in Pinedale. Rather than require drilling changes to stem the decline, the agency proposed vegetation treatments -- applying fertilizer, thinning sagebrush mechanically and seeding new vegetation -- to enhance deer habitat both on the Mesa and in surrounding areas, a continuation of ongoing efforts. Operators Shell, Ultra and QEP voluntarily put money in a $36 million monitoring and mitigation fund meant to last 25 years, but half has already been spent, and conservation easements to protect habitat on surrounding private land are now considered too expensive.

"Now you're telling us you're not going to do anything different even though this has been proven not to work," says Rollin Sparrowe, a wildlife biologist and founding board member of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership.

The conflict comes down to differing interpretations of what mitigation should achieve. The White House Council on Environmental Quality defines mitigation as avoiding, minimizing, rectifying, reducing or compensating for impacts.

"What you don't hear on discussions from CEQ is that mitigation is a tool to reverse an impact," says Pinedale Field Office manager Shane DeForest. "It is not a guarantee that there would be no impacts. It is a tool to lessen the impact."

But adaptive management only works when managers set specific ecological objectives, such as hard numbers for how many deer should be maintained, says Sparrowe. DeForest says there is no target population for deer wintering on the Mesa, and he's promised not to stop winter drilling until all other mitigation treatments are thoroughly tested.

"Mitigation is not adaptive management," says Richard Whitley, former executive liaison for community stewardship and adaptive management for the BLM and a member of the Collaborative Adaptive Management Network. "You can't call it adaptive management if you reach indicators and refuse to change."

Wildlife advocates fear that as development continues, deer will be pushed into even less suitable habitat where they are more likely to succumb to harsh weather, turning the Mesa into a wildlife habitat "sacrifice zone" like the densely drilled neighboring Jonah natural gas field. And by the time the BLM works through the shortcomings of its adaptive management plan, the Mesa's herd may be in serious danger. The lesson to take from this project, says Sparrowe, is that it is an example of failure.

Whitley says the BLM faced a number of challenges to adaptive management on the Anticline, though nothing that couldn't have been overcome with adequate planning. For example, federal laws can make flexible management and stakeholder participation difficult. Officials also faced political pressure, especially after the Bush administration relaxed energy development oversight. It's hard to apply adaptive management partway into a project, Whitley explains. "They've issued permits and leases in the past with very few restrictions on them." As a result, they're "in a tough spot."

Meanwhile, wildlife advocates aren't sure what to do next. "The things that should have been done to prevent this weren't done," Sparrowe says. And this winter, as the drilling continues, the Mesa is enduring the coldest weather and deepest snow in 30 years. The already-stressed deer are struggling to survive. "The future of this herd is actually in doubt now."

 

[1_pointer]

States don't have much say in how federal lands are managed, either.

IME, this is not true. State agencies can be quite well heard, especially once they start putting some skin in the game and working with the federal agencies. This group (http://www.utahpcd.info/6.html) was started by the state and I know that BLM funds it to the tune of $10mil for projects on BLM land. Often times those projects are brought forward by a state agency or other stakeholders.

 

[Oak]

Please, please forgive my poor choice of words once again. 1_p is always quick to catch a general statement in reference to a specific issue.

I should have said that states don't have much say in how the BLM develops federal minerals on federal lands.

 

[Ben Lamb]

IME, this is not true. State agencies can be quite well heard, especially once they start putting some skin in the game and working with the federal agencies. This group (http://www.utahpcd.info/6.html) was started by the state and I know that BLM funds it to the tune of $10mil for projects on BLM land. Often times those projects are brought forward by a state agency or other stakeholders.

Maybe it's my bias, but being a little bit involved in what happened in WY during the 2002 - 2007 years, it was clear the WYGFD wasn't listened too very well. Citizens were routinely ignored in the NEPA process and a lot of the issues raised were summarily dismissed (cumulative effects of Ozone, habitat degradation, etc). I've seen the same thing under different admins in terms of grazing issues, minerals development and recreational use.

Maybe a lot of it is budget issues, but a lot of it is top down directives depending on the admin.

 

[fiveptbill]

When you guys start hunting in priuses and heating your houses with your own gas you can bitch but I would rather drill in Wyoming and Colorado then buy more oil and gas from the Saudis, Brazilians or Russians.

 

[Ben Lamb]

It's not an either-or proposition.

 

[1_pointer]

Please, please forgive my poor choice of words once again. 1_p is always quick to catch a general statement in reference to a specific issue.

I should have said that states don't have much say in how the BLM develops federal minerals on federal lands.

No worries. I guess I still find myself "riding for the brand" sometimes. Regarding minerals alone, I don't think I would disagree with you.

Maybe it's my bias, but being a little bit involved in what happened in WY during the 2002 - 2007 years, it was clear the WYGFD wasn't listened too very well. Citizens were routinely ignored in the NEPA process and a lot of the issues raised were summarily dismissed (cumulative effects of Ozone, habitat degradation, etc). I've seen the same thing under different admins in terms of grazing issues, minerals development and recreational use.

Maybe a lot of it is budget issues, but a lot of it is top down directives depending on the admin.

I definitely think the majority of any 'steam rolling' of locals comes from DC! I'd like to see the cumulative effects analysis of Ozone. That'd create a whole new pulp wood market just to supply the printers! I would really like to hear the screaming and hollering from the O/G companies if they had to follow the same NEPA rules as the grazing program. Believe me, they are not the same for all programs.

I attended a sagegrouse habitat connectivity meeting for a national level project in Rock Springs. I think all of the BLM biologist there felt that they were listened to as much as the WYGFD. The office in RS is pretty fancy though....