END OF THE LINE An exhausted pronghorn rests while trying to plow through record-deep snow in northeastern Montana. Desperate to escape tough winter conditions, many pronghorn followed railroad tracks, only to be crippled or killed by trains.
Wildlife (and hunting licenses) hit hard by the tough winter ndrew Jakes has seen many dead pronghorn over the past few years, but nothing like what he witnessed this recent winter. Along one quarter-mile stretch of railroad track between Havre and Malta, he saw where a freight train had plowed into a herd of 170 pronghorn. “The lucky ones got killed right away,” says Jakes, who has been studying the animals’ migration routes as part of a doctoral project with the University of Calgary. Train tracks became death traps for pronghorn across the region. At another site 20 miles northwest of Glasgow, more than 450 pronghorn were killed or injured by trains during January, requiring FWP game wardens to dispatch 100 injured animals. Jakes says pronghorn respond to cold and snow by migrating
A
6
MAY-JUNE 2011
south. “This year a lot of them headed south of U.S. Highway 2 to get south of the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge and locations beyond, where the snow is not so deep,” he says. “Usually they can move along ridgetops that hold less snow, but this year some of the only places they could travel were along highways and train tracks, and that’s where many got nailed.” FWP officials estimate that more than 1,000 pronghorn and deer were killed on railroad tracks across northern and eastern Montana. Bitter cold and record-breaking snowfall combined to make the winter of 2010-11 one of the toughest for wildlife in years. By April 1, Glasgow had received 112 inches of snow, 6 feet more than average. Temperatures
FWP.MT.GOV/MTOUTDOORS
across the Hi-Line dropped as low as -40 degrees F. Even in late February, when temperatures ordinarily begin to moderate, Cut Bank posted a low of -35 degrees and Glasgow dipped to -30 degrees. Pronghorn feed in winter by pawing through snow to reach grasses and sagebrush, but this winter they often couldn’t dig through the deep drifts. “We found they were eating yucca,
We found they were eating yucca, which has no nutritional value at all. It’s like me eating my leather gloves.”
which has no nutritional value at all,” Jakes says. “It’s like me eating my leather gloves.” Brutal conditions were also tough on deer. Kelvin Johnson, FWP wildlife biologist in Glasgow, says ranchers throughout the region reported more depredation damage than usual as whitetails and mule deer crowded into feed yards and whittled down haystacks. Fawns were especially vulnerable to the cold, as were bucks that had burned up calories during the fall rut and entered winter with few fat reserves. In many areas pheasants also took a beating. Some suffocated from blowing snow that clogged their beaks; other died of hunger or exposure. Many ranchers and farmers reported seeing more birds than usual in shelterbelts near homes and in feedlots, says Johnson. Cattails ordinarily provide thermal cover for both pheasants and deer, but the biologist says snow was so deep this winter that sloughs filled up. “I walked along one trail made by deer through some cattails, and
