Up and Away! Endangered deer get ride out of threatened refuge
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WAHKIAKUM COUNTY, Wash. – It was moving day Tuesday for some of Washington's endangered white-tailed deer and wildlife officials used a helicopter to help capture them.
They were captured at the Julia Butler-Hansen Refuge near Cathlamet and moved to another reserve near Ridgefield.
While the deer may be endangered, they may be in more danger in the refuge.
A dike alongside the Columbia River is wearing out and giving way. When it breaks – and it won’t last much longer – the river will flow into the refuge, flooding it with five to 10 feet of water.
There will then only be enough habitat for about half the deer, so the other half, about 50 of them, had to be moved.
And fixing the dike won't fix the problem.
"Even if we armored this and protected it, the river would just move down (to either side of the fixed area) and do the same thing again," said Doug Zimmer with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Department.
The river once flowed in the refuge and Zimmer said it naturally wants to flow there again.
So to move the deer, a helicopter crew hazed them Tuesday, scaring them out of the brush and toward volunteers with nets. And if that didn’t work, a crewmember fired a net from the helicopter, capturing the deer. It was then blindfolded, sedated and hauled away by truck to a new home.
Officials tried to keep the stress to a minimum, but not every deer survived.
“Any capture you stand the risk of injured deer, you stand the risk of losing deer,” said Zimmer. “It’s something you worry about. You can’t get around it.”
Out of the 40 deer saved so far, one deer died.
Wildlife managers want to get the moving done before the dike breaks, but also by mid-April. They're worried about the stress it can cause for pregnant does, and that's when they'll start having their fawns.
Man in his infinite wisdom to control and manage everything.
This is a huge waste of money and will not work. This is just more "do something" disease.
Out of the 40 deer "saved" most if not all will be dead of starvation and disease in three months, as happened every time this was tried. Haven't these people seen the results of fate of Angel Island's and Ardenwood's California relocated deer herds?   The books that WDFW put out to teach hunting safety and conservation use the Angel Island example to show why deer cannot be moved.  Â
Deer living in a certain vicinity have in their mouths and stomachs those bacteria which break down foods found in that area. If deer are released in a different area, the introduced animals cannot digest the plants and they starve.
@GoodwinYou're wrong. This is a refuge so there is no hunting allowed. Approximately one quarter of the area is managed for deer forage through haying and grazing so they will not starve. The other three quarters is set aside for woodlands and wetlands for them to forage and raise their young. If an illness presents itself they will take steps to determine the issue and remove the cause.Â
@Goodwin Well since it didn't work out in some instances, they may as well just say screw them and leave them there to die and fester in the water. Give me a break.
I call phooey! They are only moving 50 miles upriver from their current location. They will find the same forage and habitat that they are currently using and I would venture a guess that they have migrated this route on their own from time to time as space & available feed has dictated.
Pilots got some skills.Â