Elk Heart

Reflections on an unsuccessful mule deer season.

Just after sunrise - Gerry is an orange spot on the hill in the upper left.

 Deer season came and went this year without putting any venison in the freezer.  I've killed 9 deer in the past 11 years, all bucks, some small ones, a few nice ones and a real trophy.  Last year was the first year I didn't kill a mule deer since I've been eligible for a resident Wyoming hunting license.  I wasn't counting last year as a failure because I was hunting elk during during the general deer season and so was not concentrated on deer.  This year I tried and still I  didn't get one.

Gerry sighting in his self-made 257 Roberts built on a Mauser action.

Gerry came out to hunt again this year having drawn a general mule deer license this year.  Unlike last year when we got eight inches of snow the night before the season opened, this year we had extraordinarily warm weather throughout the entire season.  Temperatures were up near 70°F some days.  October is one of the best months in Wyoming but it has not been this warm this late since we've lived here.  The only snow we say was a few flurries one day when we hunted the Platte River valley.

Gerry's 257 Roberts (left) and my 270 Winchester (right).

 We were not the only ones having trouble finding deer this year.  News out of the West Laramie Flyshop was that very very few deer were coming through.   There was some bitter complaining at the gas station/convenience store in Encampment WY too and some blame laid on Game and Fish.  They said they'd only seen a couple of very small bucks come through.  Because of the lower deer populations in the area G&F dropped the doe season this year (maybe they should have done this a few years ago).  For many years now, during the first week of the two week season here int he SE part of the state, licensed hunters are entitled to shoot any deer, doe or buck. During the second week only bucks can be taken.  A doe season is a population control measure, canceling it shows there is some concern about the population in this area.  I took the complaints against G&F heard in Encampment to mean that G&F is lagging and should have not had an open doe seasons for a few years now.

Gerry Cox

There are a lot of pressures on mule deer. For one, I have no doubt that the extraordinarily warm weather which held throughout October was throwing off the normal seasonal patterns for the mule deer.   Locally, the rut takes place in late October or early November.   The bucks typically come out of hiding (wherever it is that that disappear to) and start to herd up with the does by the third week in October.   This year it was not until mid-November that I started to see bucks running with the local herd.  I suspect that this late grouping has something to do with the weather.

It's tough to say how it is affecting the mule deer but the pine bark beetle infestation must be having an effect. The infestation  has impacted 3.6 million acres in Colorado and SE Wyoming.  One theory I hear from a local rancher (Al) is that with so many trees dead now and with the grasses and forbs growing up under the old canopy that the deer have less reason to leave the more protected space.  Al spends a lot of time out in the woods and  even more thinking about the deer and elk populations so I am inclined to think this might make a lot of sense.
 
Predator populations are up. We heard more coyotes this year than I think I ever have.  On one dawn hunt we heard three different packs in a relatively small area. Mountain lion populations would seem to be up. At the  Mountain Lion Foundation they complained about the liberalized hunting seasons for mountain lions in the state.  This was a move by G&F to try to keep the predator population down.  With fur prices so low, ($10 for a coyote pelt in good condition) there's not as much incentive for coyote hunters to make the effort.  With predator numbers so high I am more open to hunting them.  For many (including me) this is a topic fraught with ethical dilemma and I may discuss it in a future posting.

ATV use has had a significant impact on deer behavior, this I know.  Studies show the effect of ATV noise  on mule deer is negligible though it is significant for elk.  The problem with studies is that you can find a summary of studies compiled by the NOHVCC (an offroad vehicle lobbying group) that argue that off-road vehicle use is even beneficial to wildlife (snowmobiles provide trails for animals to use in winter) and is far less disruptive to wildlife than hikers are.  The thing is, ATV use has exploded and while the number of hikers has grown, it is not so much.  One number I've seen (lost the citation) is that between 1992 and 2002 the ATV use went up by  a factor of 7. On  public lands outside of wilderness areas (and even there too)  there is virtually nowhere you can go on foot that you will not end up crossing ATV paths.  During hunting season, I have frequently hunted up a steep ridge only to find overweight and out-of-shape hunter on an ATV's atop the hill.  The ATV has afforded easy access to places  the previously required significant effort to get to.  No matter what the studies say, it is common sense that a landscape crawling with ATV's has an effect on mule deer behavior in their preferred habitat.

In some states (Utah?) I've heard that ATV use is severely restricted for hunting.  There is a midday period when ATV use is permitted to allow hunters to use them to retrieve an animal.  Otherwise they are not allowed. I wish Wyoming would adopt a policy like this though I am sure they never will.

Dwindling habitat.

For populations overall, dwindling habitat may be the biggest issue and here I am personally culpable in a rather serious way.  We just built a house smack dab in the middle of textbook mule deer habitat (we're surrounded by them.)  There really is no way to justify that choice.  I rationalize it to myself by noting that the land had been subdivided and if I hadn't built a house here, someone else eventually would have.

September Motorcycle Ride

Perfect day, new tire, 310 mile ride.

Top of Rabbit Ears pass - before the descent into Steamboat Springs.

This was a ride I'd planned last year and then didn't get around to before hunting season started in earnest and the weather got too bad to ride. It took seven hours to ride this route, about 40 miles of it is on gravel. North of Steamboat Lake, route 129  is gravel to within a couple of miles where (as WY 710 - Snake River Spur Road)  it intersects WY 70.  Also, Fox Creek Rd. from Albany WY to Woods Landing is dirt as well.  The entire ride is spectacular, but the ride up and over Battle Pass (elevation 9,955 ft.) on the way to Encampment from Baggs is just about the most perfect winding mountain road for a motorcycle.


View Motorcycle Ride in a larger map

Seen in Walden CO - bow season is open.

In Walden.

Looking back south into CO from the Snake River Spur Road.

Near Lake Marie and the top of the pass over the Snowies on WY 130.

Home again - at the new house.

New Motorcycle Tires

I've been needing new tires on the motorcycle for some time and more recently, the rear tire was so worn out it has been keeping me from riding as much as I'd like. I finally bit the bullet and ordered a set of Dunlop K70's. The front tire is back-ordered until mid-October, but the rear tire is what I really needed so I had Barry Messenger in Fort Collins mount it and balance it for me.

Barry with the SR in his shop.

I spent a lot of time trying to figure what the right tires for my riding would be. A big part of that decision was the kind of roads I ride. Many of my local roads here are dirt and gravel and although the motorcycle isn't really a dual-sport, out of necessity, I ride a lot of unpaved roads. I like the looks of a vintage tire and the K70's certainly are that. The were popular with flat-track racers in the 1960's and early 1970's. I was having some trouble figuring out if the 3.50-19 would fit under the stock front fender when I ran across a blog called Contemplative Motorcycling.  That blogger rides similar roads in Australia and he'd just put a set of the K70's on his bike.  I could see that the wider front tire fit and he is enthusiastic about them.

Final Adjustments.

Barry does great work at a reasonable price and is a font of knowledge about vintage motorcycles, his specialty is restoring older BMW's, though he has some SR spares tucked away in his shop too.  He managed to get my SR running reliably when it was way beyond me and everyone else I talked to.

Slip indicator fishing.

Netting a rainbow that took a chironomid pattern. Photo Chris Knight

Old Flyfish@ mailing list friend Chris Knight passed through Northern CO in late July on a western roadtrip and we arranged to meet at one of the more famous plains lakes in North Park.  Chris and I have fished before in the early 1990's on Skaneateles Lake in upstate NY, mostly we've been email correspondents for a long time.  It was great to see him after many years and to catch up on the doings of other former (and some still current) @Flyfish members and it was a chance to fish a lake I've been wanting to fish for  a few years.

Chris with the ubiquitous fishing cigar.

A few years ago, at the University of Wyoming Flyfishing Symposium, I saw Jack Dennis give a talk about lake fishing.  He showed a video of Brian Chan demonstrating his rather technical methods of fishing chironomids that Chan and others have developed for lakes in British Columbia and eastern Washington.  The plains lakes here in WY and CO have incredible midge populations so the tactics should work here as well, though I  do not known of of anyone who has really figured out how to adapt Chan's methods for the local lakes (and neither did Jack Dennis when he gave his talk.)  Seeing the video Jack showed was impetus for me to buy the Spring Creek Pram I've been using for lake fishing since.

Admiring the effective slip indicator.

The basic technique is based on the slip indicator.   It allows the use of long leaders (30' or more); when you hook a fish, the indicator slides down the line to the fish so you can land them.  Imagine trying to land a fish if you have an indicator preventing you from bringing the fish in closer than 30'.  These long leaders can be necessary to get the fly down to the level where the fish are feeding.

These slip indicators are hard to find and hard to figure out.  In fact, it's been down right frustrating to find any concrete information on them at all.  Check out this video with Brian Chan that claims to show how to use them.  See if you can figure out how to rig one based on his description ( between 18 - 30 seconds in the video); I can't.  Joni, The Utah Fly Goddess has  the only really clear explanation of how to rig one of these that I've seen - it took me a long time to find this. Thank-you Joni.  She also sells them on her web-site.    If you don't know exactly what you're looking for it's hard to find.  Neither flyshop in Laramie has slip indicators nor does the fly shop at Gray reef.  The guys working in those shops "have heard of them" or "had some once" but don't have them now. On our way to the lake to meet Chris, we stopped at the North Park Anglers in Walden.  They had something called the plumbbobber].  It's not the same type of slip bobber Brian Chan or Joni use, but they did come with instructions and I stocked up on these overpriced bobbers in various sizes.

Chris called on the cell phone just as we stopped at the shop and said to "Hurry up!", that the Callibaetis were coming off and the fish were rising everywhere.  When we arrived, Chris was out in his float tube.

Dry fly purist Chris Knight.

  

The lake we were fishing is known for extraordinarily large brown trout and I was hoping to hook up with one. It took me quite a while to rig up and get the pram in the water, and by the time I did, the hatch was over. No matter, I'd come to fish midges deep. I rigged up with two midge pupa patterns hanging fourteen feet below the slip indicator, they were rigged with a small  split-shot to help them get down. I did manage to hook four fish and land three, all nice rainbows, but not the big brown I was looking for. They were all around 15"-17".  Garrett wandered down the bank and hooked up with a few similar sized rainbows, also on a midge pupa pattern fished deep.

It turns out that Chris is what is known as a dry fly purist; apparently he takes after Fredrick M. Halford.  There aren't many left. As far as I can tell, they mostly hang on the Henry's Fork at Harriman Ranch or on the Beaverkill in NY.  Chris had decided before heading west not to taint his tippet with a nymph of any kind.  One of his custom rods is inscribed "Death before strike indicators."  Chris' main objective for the trip was the small cutthroat streams (all apparently named Frenchman's Creek) in central Colorado and northern New Mexico.  I was sorry he wouldn't take the midge and slip bobber I offered and rig up to match the hatch, even if it was 14 feet below the surface. To each his own.
 
After lunch, Garrett took off in the pram.  Chris and I  fished until the wind came up in float tubes; no luck. Chris did catch a nice fish on a dry in the late afternoon after we moved over to the Michigan River to get out of the wind.

Garrett takes off in the pram, the fish are always bigger on the other side of the lake.

When Garrett got back he told us the story of the one that got away, a state record for sure.

Sheds on the Winter Range

From Antelope and Deer of North America by John Dean Canton Hurd and Houghton, NY 1877

After the rut in late October the mule deer herd up on the winter range until spring. In mid-February the bucks drop their antlers and, by the time the velvet covered antlers really start to come in, they'll have disappeared to where ever it is that hide until the rut of the following year.  The land all around us is winter range for these large herds of mule deer. It is textbook mule deer habitat. Some of the range is protected. No vehicles are allowed from November until April in the National Forest to the south of us and on the Sheep Mountain preserve, where vehicles are never allowed, access is generally prohibited. In an attempt to preserve winter range there are covenants on the property we own and  on adjacent lands which disallow recreational snowmobile use in winter and ATV use in summer.  It is something.

In January I started seeing two large bucks running with a herd of does the live in the sage country on the ridge to the south of our house.  In the mornings I see them down low, coming to drink from the creek, and by mid morning they browse their way back up toward the ridge tops. Some evenings I see them dramatically silhouetted on the skyline. On February 6th I photographed the deer bedded down on the ridge through the living room window.  I hand held my Canon G-10 to get a shot through a Swarovski CT-75 spotting scope at 35X.  The bucks were bedded down on a hilltop about a half a mile away.

A week after I took the photos Andy stopped by. He passed by the house while he was out scouting elk in anticipation of collecting antler sheds later in the year.   Andy feeds his family almost exclusively on elk, goose and grouse.  He spends much of the year following the elk, whether it's hunting season or not. In the spring when they drop their antlers he's right there to collect them.  More than once he's told me the story of glassing a herd with some nice bulls, driving on and passing back by later in the afternoon and noticing that one of the bulls had dropped his antlers.  This makes for easy pickings, but you need to be out there every day, watching and waiting. 

Shed hunting has become such a popular (and competitive) pastime that the state of Game and Fish department in Wyoming have passed regulations to try to give the animals on winter range a break.  The new regulation makes it a violation to collect antlers on public lands from January 1st to April 30th west of the continental divide (we're east of the divide).  When he stopped in, Andy told me the mule deer had already dropped their antlers. I protested showing him the photos I'd taken just the week before.  "Well, soon." he said.  The next day I saw one of the bucks sitting up on the ridge top with only one antler. I tried to get a photo, but he moved by the time I got the scope, tripod and camera set up.

I've been meaning to walk up there ever since. We've had a series of spring snowstorms that have kept the ridgetops under snow.  With the snow disappearing on the east and south facing slopes on Sunday P and I hiked up to the top of the ridge on Sunday.   I doubted we'd find anything, when they're undisturbed the range of this herd is an area of about 500 acres of mostly heavy sagebrush country. We really didn't have time to scour the whole area but it was worth a look, and I wanted to go up to the spot where they'd been bedding during the afternoons.   As we walked up the hill we pushed a large part of the herd in front of us. I shot some crude video of them.  If you watch it, pay attention to the middle of the image at the beginning.  The herd is so well camouflaged they are virtually invisible, and then when they start moving the  landscape just comes alive.

I started looking in earnest when I got to the place where I'd seen the buck with the missing antler bedded down.  We spread out a bit and I found an antler almost immediately, as far as I can tell, it was the exact spot I'd seen him in.  There was another antler, partially buried in the snow, ten yards away.  These were clearly the antlers from one of the two bucks I'd photographed.  And then, on the other side of the ridge, I found another.  This was clearly an antler from the other other buck I'd photographed, the one with shorter but much thicker antlers.

I searched for the other one of the pair but the wind was blowing and the sun was dropping and we did not find it (yet.) 

The antlers have been sitting on the dinning room table for a few days now.  There is a thread that stretches from the antlers on the table back through time to the memory of those bucks bedded on the hill above. That same thread connects me  to the animals that I saw on the ridge this morning and see every day.  Without their antlers the bucks are indistinguishable from the does now, the does are carrying the next generation of deer that are the offspring of the two bucks whose antlers sit on my table.

Merguez, Sausage and Chorizo making with Carlos

Carlos and I occasionally hunt together; he is a pheasant/grouse/duck fanatic and is generally obsessed with gathering wild meats.  When he sees a deer or antelope or elk I can almost see the little cartoon bubbles floating up from his head with images of steaming roasts and other dishes.   His regular hunting partners are named Teal and Lola;   Teal is a Pointing Griffon, and Lola is an accident, a mix of Pointing Griffon and a German Wirehair that turns out to be a great bird dog.

Carlos and I made sausages and chorizo last Sunday at his house.   I took a fresh loaf of no-knead bread, a bottle of Rioja and 7 pounds of elk meat.  Carlos provided a large pork shoulder, back fat, spices and the fermentation agent and nitrites for the salami.  While we stuffed sausages, Martha cooked us a nice linguine with shrimp and truffle oil.   It certainly is more fun to undertake a sausage making project with a friend, good food and a bottle of wine (a Rioja).  We made a spicy Italian sausage and a Merguez using a mixture of elk and pork. The recipes were adapted from Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn's book Charcuterie

I should have paid more attention to recipes, ratios  and ingredients but that's part of the pleasure of working in someone else's kitchen, you're not in charge.  You can just relax and do what you're told.  As I recall, and I know that we didn't write it down anywhere but maybe Carlos remembers,  we made the Merguez  following the recipe except that we substituted elk for the lamb.  The Italian sausage was a mixture of  about 2/3 elk and 1/3 pork.   The chorizo, which is cured with nitrites and salt and fermented salami is not cooked but aged for a couple of  months and we made it following the recipe in Ruhlman.

This the first attempt for either of us making a dry aged fermented salami. Carlos is a real scientist, he labels himself  a physiological ecologist, so I was quite content to following his lead on this somewhat more technical form of charcuterie.  In my incomplete understanding, you add sodium nitrite as a preservative to prevent the growth of botulism and add a fermenting agent to get the curing process going.  I don't own a copy of the Ruhlman book and now I can not recall if is it sodium nitrite, sodium nitrate or possibly a mixture of both. I really should have been paying more attention.   The Chorizo recipe  is one point where I understand the Ruhlman/Polcyn book contains a rather serious typo regarding the amount of fermenting agent  to add.  There is an explanation buried somewhere here.

On all sausage blogs there are such fine photos of the salamis hanging to cure.  They often are hanging on metal racks in white tiled rooms.  It turns out to be a more difficult than you might imagine to find a clean, cool, dry  place to hang a salami to cure.  Carlos put his in the crawlspace under his house, not as bad as it might sound, but still not a white tiled room.  I hung mine in the utility room which does stay cool, but which is open to the kitchen.  A few days after hanging them I discovered that the dog had uncharacteristically nipped of the bottoms of two of the links; so much for sterile conditions.  Matt Wright who writes the Wrigthfood Blog has some really interesting  plans for an inexpensive home curing setup.

I used some of the Merguez in a paella and it was great.  Haven't tried the finished Italian links yet and we're still waiting for what's left of the chorizo age.