The Story
A mule deer buck sails over a wire-wrapped fence rail, a foreleg folded under him and forked antlers high, past a camera fixed on the rail itself. Beyond him, snow lies in patches across open Wyoming flats.
This herd was supposed to stay put. Biologists began tracking mule deer in Wyoming's Red Desert expecting a resident herd, one that lived in the same country year-round. GPS tracking said otherwise. Most of the deer walk some 150 miles north to the mountain ranges of northwest Wyoming, across public and private land, and the researchers had no idea.
It has a name now. Red Desert to Hoback runs 150 miles one way, from desert winter ranges to the mountain slopes around the Hoback Basin, a 300-mile round trip. The deer spend four months of every year on the move, and in 2016 one doe, Deer 255, went 242 miles from the Red Desert to Island Park, Idaho.
Why go that far? Mule deer shift between higher summer ranges and lower winter ranges, and this long link is thought to give Red Desert deer the best fat gain over summer and the best fat conservation through winter. Long, snowy winters drain an adult's reserves, and month after month of belly-deep snow can starve a fawn that lacks them.
The country between is not open. Three highways cut the route, plus more than 100 fences, river crossings and several reservoirs. Cameras set at the outlets of a chain of lakes catch the herd swimming through, and the footage comes back full of vocalizations. The deer have opinions about the water.
None of it is improvised. The route passes from mother to offspring, generation after generation, so the deer use the same path year after year. Fawns usually stay with the doe through their first full year, long enough to walk it at her side. The buck on the fence is following that inherited line, and the barbed wire is only the newest thing in his way.
