WIND RIVER VALLEY — Biologists Tucker Russell and Rene Schell stopped in their tracks. Spooked out of a daybed, a mule deer doe sprung to her feet. She bounded up a gentle, grassy slope amid ...

East of the Bighorns, deer are being stressed and depressed by a dizzying array of factors, from drought to disease to energy development. Now, their numbers are plummeting.

Herds in the Upper Shoshone, Shoshone River and Clark Fork areas have recovered, and there are now more of the iconic Western deer on the landscape.

Tucker Russell fixes a magnet to a GPS collar that fell off a Project Herd mule deer in June 2024. Of the first 40 deer collared for the study focused on chronic wasting disease, only 15 lived ...

Game and Fish commissioners face influential, reluctant parties in quest to designate Wyoming’s first migration corridor ...

Among those 35 herds, some have a prevalence rate higher than 50 percent. “Although high harvest is unlikely to completely eradicate CWD,” write the paper’s authors, “our analysis suggests that ...

POWELL — When Cody District Senior Wildlife Biologist Tony Mong arrived in 2017, area deer herds were suffering significant losses due to harsh winter weather. About eight years later, herds ...

This can make mule deer extremely cagey and hard to approach, as they are on constant alert, making them a significant challenge for hunters. It also makes them an incredibly fun and worthy opponent ...

Tony Mong attaches a metal ear tag to a doe in the Upper Shoshone mule deer herd as part of the Focal Herd study started in 2022 by WGFD. The doe also received a GPS radio collar as part of the study.

The combination of these environmental factors has impacted mule deer herds in southeast Montana so much so that recent surveys indicate the population there is 48 percent below the long-term average.

Elk are known to group together in herds as large as 400 in the plentiful summer months, while mule deer rarely have groups larger than seven. Let’s explore these differences and more, including ...

The 56,000 or so people who hunt mule deer east of the Cascades each year, whether they carry a rifle or a bow, could see a major change in the boundaries of many hunt areas in 2026. This fall’s ...