THE RED DESERT, WYO. — As a small group of scientists and volunteers waits by the side of a gravel road here, a helicopter swoops down, carrying two blindfolded mule deer in slings. It hovers for a moment in a furious swirl of rotor-blown snow, detaching the deer slings. As it lifts and turns, the team runs into the stinging cloud.
Team members carry the deer on canvas stretchers to a spot to be weighed and tested. From each animal, they draw blood, pull a whisker, check a GPS collar or put on a new one, take a rectal temperature and fecal sample, perform an ultrasound on the haunches, shoot a local anesthetic into the jaw, and pull a tooth.
Ten minutes of probing and testing later, the deer are freed and dash off, with numb mouths and doses of antibiotics, perhaps wondering what in the world just happened.
The scientists were taking snapshots of the deer’s health and downloading their movements from their digital collars — part of a broader effort to track and preserve their migration route.
Researchers only recently discovered that path, known as the Red Desert-to-Hoback migration, which is as long as any known land migration in the lower 48 states, a twice-yearly, 150-mile journey that has inspired numerous conservation groups to work together to protect the deer’s route from development.
Some conservationists hope the unusual collaboration will serve as a useful precedent that could help protect other species and wild lands. “We think this has the potential to be a model for what state and federal agencies do across the West,” said Leslie Duncan, public lands manager for the Pew Charitable Trusts.
Seasonal migrations in search of food are essential to the survival of many animals. The famous herds of the Serengeti chase the rain. In the West, many elk, deer, antelope, moose and other big game move to lush mountain slopes in the spring and summer, and wait out the winter at lower, warmer elevations.
“Migration is the underlying mechanism that allows this landscape to support the deer populations,” said Hall Sawyer, a research biologist with Western EcoSystems Technology, a consulting firm, who discovered the mule deer route.
Because houses and roads, fences and gas wells, and busy routes for four-wheelers and snowmobiles can pose obstacles to traveling animals, conservationists have long recognized that preserving migration routes is essential to preserving wildlife.
About 500 deer travel the full 150 miles from their winter range here in the Red Desert to spring and summer grounds in the Hoback River basin near Jackson, Wyo. Other herds, totaling 5,000 deer, follow most or part of the path.
The route crosses public and private lands, and scientists say it is extraordinary, given its length, that a relatively clear path still exists for the deer.
But conservationists have recognized that protecting it will require unusual cooperation among public and private groups and a new level of scientific understanding to guide changes in regulation.
The good news, said Steve Kilpatrick, head of the Wyoming Wildlife Federation, is that conservation groups are joining forces to help the mule deer in ways he had not seen. “I think it’s unique,” said Mr. Kilpatrick, whose group has hired a coordinator for the informal coalition. “I don’t know of any other situation in the nation that it’s happened.”
Helicopter Wranglers
The effort to track the Red Desert-to-Hoback migration of mule deer began in 2011. Dr. Sawyer had been hired by the Bureau of Land Management to track wildlife, and he put GPS collars on 40 mule deer in the Red Desert, one of the most open, stark landscapes in a state full of them.
No one really knew what the Red Desert deer did in the spring and summer, although some had been seen there year-round. Most mule deer migrate, but some stay put for reasons that are not well understood. And “unless you collar a herd, it is really difficult to have a sense of whether they migrate or not,” said Matthew Kauffman, a biologist for the United States Geological Survey and a professor at the University of Wyoming who leads the Wyoming Migration Initiative.
Capturing and collaring the animals is a bit like a mule-deer rodeo. New Zealanders developed a technique for shooting nets from a helicopter, in which the pilot flies the way a cowboy rides a cutting horse. The pilot isolates a deer, flying close enough for a gunner to fire a net that traps the deer. The pilot then lowers the craft so the “mugger” — the gunner or another crew member — can jump to the ground.
The mugger runs to the deer, wrestles it into a position where he can blindfold it and wrap it in a sling. The helicopter then swings back so the mugger can hitch the sling to the copter before climbing aboard.
The process can be rough on the deer, and accidents are inevitable. Kevin Monteith, a wildlife biologist at the University of Wyoming who works with Dr. Sawyer, says 1 to 3 percent of the deer die or are injured when trapped by nets, and have to be put down.
But the researchers say capturing the deer this way allows them to study populations in remote areas. And without those studies, the migration route would have remained unknown.
Once deer are collared, the researchers release them and then recapture them each spring and fall to download information from the collars, which record a deer’s location every three hours.
When Dr. Sawyer returned to the Red Desert in the spring after collaring the first 40 deer, he found only a few. It turned out that almost all of them had migrated somewhere, and more than half had made the full 150-mile trip.
Migrations are nothing new to Dr. Sawyer. He discovered the so-called Path of the Pronghorn, a roughly 125-mile migration from the Green River basin to Grand Teton National Park, and helped popularize it with Joe Riis, a photographer and videographer from Wyoming. That documentation led to changes in regulations on public land to protect the route.
Scientists knew that most mule deer migrated to higher ground in the spring and back down in the fall. But until the Red Desert migration was discovered, the lengths of the migrations were not known. Details of their path, provided by GPS collars, were a boon to conservationists.
“Data creates opportunities to do things that didn’t exist before,” said Steve Sharkey, director of the Knobloch Family Foundation, which backs the research.
The researchers are tracking more than a route. They are also mapping behavior, like feeding and reproduction, and working to uncover the connections between the health of the deer and when and where they migrate.
Each test on a deer provides crucial data. Teeth establish age, whiskers provide DNA, blood and feces provide information about diet and metabolism, and ultrasound scans of the haunches establish percentages of body fat.
The body-fat levels can vary tremendously from deer to deer and from season to season. Migrations in the West follow what biologists call the “green wave” in the spring — the bloom of grass and other vegetation that starts at low elevations and moves higher with each day. The deer that fare best “surf” that wave, catching each area’s vegetation at its peak, when it is full of nutrition and still tender.
The mule deer take a couple of months to travel 150 miles. The path connects points where they stop and feed, and those times are studied closely, too. By pooling the data, scientists can connect deer health to the path, and the timing of their movements. They can also map the path to show who owns the land that the deer cross.
The scientists do not lobby for policy changes or conservation action. But they understand their importance. So when they publicized the Red Desert-to-Hoback route, they listed the top 10 challenges to the migration route — something conservationists could work with.
A Migration Coalition
In July, at the prompting of the George B. Storer Foundation, Wyoming conservation groups gathered to discuss the Red Desert route — organizations like the Conservation Fund, which purchases land; the Wilderness Society and the Wyoming Outdoor Council, which focus on regulatory issues; and the Wyoming Wildlife Federation and Muley Fanatic Foundation, which have a strong base among hunters.
The coalition focused on the top challenge for protecting the migration route — a bottleneck near Fremont Lake. The deer cross Pine Creek there at a location where one side is federal Bureau of Land Management land and the other is private. Houses and marinas are nearby, as is Forest Service land.
The route there is about a quarter-mile wide, but sometimes narrows to a single-file path. And the land was for sale. If bought by developers, the migration route would most likely be blocked.
Buying it made sense to the coalition. “This is one of the last, best migrations,” said Luke Lynch, state director of the Conservation Fund, which is in the process of buying the 364 acres for about $2 million. The Knobloch Foundation is providing half of that; the rest will have to be raised.
A longer-term goal of the coalition is to change public-land management to place greater value on migration routes. The Bureau of Land Management is revising plans for land use in an area that includes the Red Desert. If the bureau designates the migration route for protection, that could serve as a precedent for other decisions by the bureau and other agencies.
That, Mr. Sharkey says, is “the big enchilada.”
Meetings with the bureau are continuing. The conservationists have the support of the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, which has jurisdiction over the animals, but not the land. A draft report is due later this year.
The conservationists and scientists will face other challenges in trying to protect the migration route. But more accurate data provided by new technology and the deer themselves — even if they are reluctant partners in the helicopter lifts, teeth-pulling and other tests — are making political and regulatory action easier, mostly by pinpointing the small targets of land that are important for protecting the route.
“It’s not about huge vast landscapes,” said Peter Aengst, senior director of the Northern Rockies region for the Wilderness Society, which is part of the mule-deer conservation effort. “It’s about very narrow but very critical acres.”
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