Each year, the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources captures big game animals to perform health assessments and gives them GPS collars to watch migration patterns and survival rates. This winter, a record 1,901 big game animals were captured, providing critical information about their herds across the state.
The captures are typically from November to March, when the animals have migrated to lower elevations and are easier to locate. Typically, a helicopter crew with a net gun captures the animals, which are then safely released after health testing.
According to the DWR news release, they are also caught because big game animals have a hard time regulating their body temperatures and the cold weather helps them recover quicker.
“When we do capture work, we make a concerted effort to minimize chase times and to keep all capture-related stress to a minimum,” said DWR Big Game Projects Coordinator Kent Hersey in the release. “It’s a short one-time event for those animals and doesn’t have the same impact as repeated disturbances that cause them to use important fat reserves. The information our biologists get from capturing a relatively small sample of deer provides very valuable data that is used to manage the entire deer population.”
The big game animals captured for this work include deer, elk, moose, bighorn sheep, mountain goats, bison and pronghorn. During the 2024-25 winter, the following were caught, assessed and released:
- Bighorn sheep: 107
- Deer: 1,130
- Elk: 195
- Moose: 52
- Mountain goats: 54
- Pronghorn: 363
During these captures, biologists collect and analyze crucial information about the animals. They do this through:
- Measuring body fat and overall nutritional condition, entering and exiting winter
- Sampling and testing for disease
- Checking pregnancy rates in the doe deer
- Inserting transmitters into pregnant deer that alert biologists when a fawn is born so researchers can locate it and analyse health, survival rates and the cause of death if it didn’t survive
Included in this year’s capture efforts was the relocation of 310 pronghorn sheep from the herd in Parker Mountain in Wayne County and transferred to other places throughout Utah to help the sheep populations in those areas. It was the first time these pronghorn translocation efforts had taken place since 2014.
“We have been conducting these captures and collecting data for over a decade in Utah,” Hersey said. “We have learned a lot about deer and other big game animals during that time, which, in turn, has informed our management decisions. The amount of fat a deer has going into winter influences how well they survive the winter. The amount of body fat a female deer has coming out of winter can impact the weight of the fawn at birth and how fast the newborn fawn grows. Those things, in turn, help the overall population.”
Click here for the original release and more information about the captures and health assessments.
Author: Maddi Munro
Photographer: Gannon Lovisa
Editor: Chevy Blackburn
outdoors@suunews.net
