“To date, I’ve handled more than 3,000 mule deer over many years and conditions, and I figured animals would be in bad shape, but I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Monteith, a professor at the University of Wyoming. “To see a whole segment of a population not have anything left is distressing and sad. Adult females are weighing like a bag of bones.”

The winter could be considered a crisis for a herd that draws hunters and wildlife viewers from across the country and even overseas. But for Wyoming biologists like Monteith, the die-off represented a unique opportunity rarely if ever afforded in wildlife research. Because research on deer in the Wyoming Range began a few years ago, the scientists will be able to answer several critical questions: What factors led to the die-off? What, if anything, can be done to bring them back? And could this, in the long run, actually benefit the herd?

“When things become severe enough that we see adult survival drop, you know things are bad,” Monteith said. “We have a once-in-a-lifetime or many lifetime opportunity to study the effects of a bad winter.”

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