As I stand motionless in my favorite woodlot I am watching a fat first year deer jumping, running and playing with her sibling. Mama doe keeps an eye on all things around them while occasionally pawing up another acorn to munch on. The sun is out and the temperature is in the mid thirty’s this afternoon.
This sounds like a great fall day to be out in the forest. However this is the last week in January. There is only about four inches of fresh snow on the ground and that too is melting.
Welcome to central Minnesota in the middle of winter. You should be expecting four feet of snow and a week straight of ten below zero….cold enough some years to make you wish you lived south of the frost line. However, we choose to live here and have even thrived in this frozen tundra. We ski, snowmobile, fish and even build great castles out of ice. I guess it’s easy to go out for a few hours every day when you know you can come inside to warm up and have a nice hot meal.
Our whitetail deer do not share in our comforts. They must make a living the hard way. Out in the elements all day and night never guaranteed of a meal. Most winters can be cruel and hard on them with mortality from starvation, predation or exposure a real threat to them and their young.
Not this winter. This year our whitetail are enjoying one of the mildest winters on record. A check of my weather records show at this time last year we had a 55 inch snow fall with several below zero nights and days. This makes it very tough for our deer herd to travel and find a meal. They have a hard time finding enough calories to just make it to spring. This year we have had a total of 14.5 inches of snow and most of it has melted shortly after falling. I can’t seem to recall more than one day below zero and remember several days of temperatures that broke record highs. Both the deer and I are enjoying this winter. I don’t ski or snowmobile, all I do is shovel snow.
The deer I was watching are in great shape. They should have been hunkered down conserving energy and slowly burning up whatever fat reserves they had put on in the summer and fall. Instead they were eating high protein acorns, and burning excess calories without a concern for their next meal. This has been an almost non-winter for our deer herd in central Minnesota so far. We should see them come out of this winter in great shape. Low snow and warmer temperatures means a greater diversity of food available and higher calorie food sources with less mortality from predators. After last year’s winter our wonderful whitetails are doing just fine.
This also means that shed antlers can drop anywhere. Usually deep snow funnels them to trails or south facing slopes, but not this winter. Classic winter bedding areas may not hold as many bucks as they would have last year. So when you are out shed hunting this spring, be sure to look in all four corners of your deer woods.
Enjoy our woodland treasures, and take care of our natural resources.
Jim
