Clover Trapping Mule Deer in Northwest Montana: Lessons Learned in a Unique Environment

Mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) populations are in decline in many parts of western Montana, and in 2017, harvest in Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks (MFWP) management region 1 (R1) reached an all-time low. This prompts a need to better understand mule deer habitat selection behaviors in a range of ecosystems. Using resource selection functions (RSFs), we will compare how GPS-collared mule deer select nutritional resources and hiding cover at large scales (home range level) and fine scales (within-home ranges) relative to forage quality in 3 distinct ecosystems throughout western Montana. In February of 2017, we successfully captured 30 mule deer does along the Rocky Mountain Front using helicopternet-gunning, but were unsuccessful in the Whitefish Range and Fisher River drainage of R1 due to dense canopy cover. From December 2017 to present, we have relied on a crew of graduate students, MFWP game wardens and biologists, technicians, volunteers, and private citizens to scout for and clover-trap mule deer in R1. Here we present our capture success rate thus far, though trapping efforts are ongoing. We wish highlight how creative methods and recruitment of help from across a state agency can be pooled to initiate rigorous research in a thickly forested environment on a scarcely seen ungulate

The demographic consequences of partial migration among woodland caribou in fragmented landscapes

Partial migration behavior is common across taxa despite evolutionary logic that differential demographic consequences could fix for particular strategies in each system. Woodland caribou in the Canadian Rockies exhibit genetic evidence of mixed lineages of diverged Beringian-Eurasian migratory caribou and North American sedentary caribou subspecies. While both behaviors remain in Canadian Rockies populations, the selective balance between sedentary and migratory strategies may be subject to recent alteration by anthropogenic habitat fragmentation, as mediated by predation. We used Cox proportional hazards modeling to assess the relative impact of migratory behavior, genetic signature, and habitat fragmentation on survival of a sample of >300 radio-marked caribou from 1998-2008