Fall migration in full swing as ungulates hoof it for winter grounds Buckrail - Jackson Hole, news
A group of cow elk cross the Snake River in Grand Teton National Park in this photo taken October 9, 2017. Elk are beginning their migration from high elevation areas surrounding Jackson Hole. Many of them will winter on the National Elk Refugeadjacent to the town of Jackson. (Diana Robinson/Flickr Creative Commons)

WYOMING – It’s fall and animals are on the move. Where are they all going and why? At Buckrail, we can’t stop studying informative maps put out by the Wyoming Migration Initiative (some of them using ancient data) that show where deer, elk, and antelope disperse every autumn to find more hospitable winters.

In the spring, ungulates “surf the green wave,” moving and munching with new growth into the high country.

Fall in Wyoming means the mule deer migration is starting. Mark Thonhoff with BLM was out along the Red Desert to Hoback corridor recently. He snapped this nice photo of a group of mule deer moving along the foothills of the Winds. They had just squeezed through the Fremont Lake bottleneck near Pinedale. (Mark Thonhoff)

Now, in fall, elk have mostly traded their longer, historic migration to more southern climes like the Red Desert for a shorter run to the grocery store at one of the more than 20 feedgrounds in and around the Jackson Hole region.

Mule deer and pronghorn still hoof it quite a ways—most headed down the Hoback Canyon for the Pinedale/Rock Springs region.

Wyoming Migration Initiative is a Wyoming-based collaborative of biologists, photographers, mapmakers, and writers working to research ungulate migration. Their mission is to advance understanding, appreciation, and conservation of Wyoming’s migratory ungulates by conducting innovative research and sharing scientific information through public outreach.

A field technician uses a radio antenna to locate a mule deer in the Upper Hoback Basin during the 2016 field season. Modern GPS collars also broadcast radio frequencies so that biologists can easily locate animals in the field, where they don’t have access to realtime GPS location data. (Samantha Dwinnell)

For those who can make it:

Sheridan Stationery, Books and Gallery will host a book signing with Joe Riis and Emiline Ostlind on Saturday from 11am to 1pm.

Riis is a National Geographic contributing photographer and photography fellow at the Wyoming Migration Initiative. He has been working in the Greater Yellowstone area since early 2008, focusing primarily on wildlife migration.

He and Ostlind will sign copies of the book “Greater Yellowstone Migrations” at the downtown bookstore.

This year’s poster for Wyoming Archaeology Awareness features a historic image of Chief Washakie’s band in the midst of moving camp from the Green River Basin to the Wind River Basin in pursuit of buffalo. This image is a window into an indigenous culture that evolved from the pursuit of seasonal resources, including plants and migratory ungulates. Photographer William Henry Jackson captured this scene in September 1870.
In the 1930s, anthropologist Dimitri Shimkin interviewed pre-reservation Shoshones who told him they followed a yearly round that took them across all of western Wyoming as the seasons changed. We recreated Shimkin’s map of these movements for our “Atlas of Wildlife Migration: Wyoming’s Ungulates” due out in 2018. As the map shows, WMI’s modern ungulate migration data suggests that Shoshone travel routes may have coincided with movement of migratory game in Wyoming’s in the Green River Basin, Wind River Range, Absaroka Range, Big Horn Basin, and Yellowstone. The fur trade rendezvous of the Upper Green in the 1830s (right along today’s Red Desert to Hoback Mule Deer Corridor), and late summer trading at Fort Bridger in the 1850s (near modern mule deer corridors), all fit in with the Shoshone’s seasonal travel patterns for food resources, trade, and visiting Shoshone relatives from the Fort Hall area. The Shoshone also traveled to the Bear River Divide and the Uinta Range in southwest Wyoming during late summer harvest times for plants. It’s possible that’s where they were coming from when this photo was taken.
Jackson Hole area has long served as summer and winter range for migratory elk. But historically, many elk that summered in the Jackson Hole area likely migrated southeast to winter ranges in the Green River Basin and even as far as the Red Desert. That was before they altered their migrations due to development, livestock grazing, and supplemental feeding by managers. Remnants of some of these elk migration corridors still exist, like the migrations into the Wind River Basin, and pronghorn and deer still make similar migrations from the Hoback and the Gros Ventres to the Red Desert. (Map from Atlas of Wildlife Migration: Wyoming’s Ungulates, Oregon State University Press © 2017 University of Wyoming and University of Oregon).
Elk migrate through Jackson Hole during their fall migration down from the high country. (Map from Atlas of Wildlife Migration: Wyoming’s Ungulates, Oregon State University Press © 2017 University of Wyoming and University of Oregon).