06/28/2025
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Migration Tracking Week 4🦌🦌🦌🦌Deer 665 left her stopover in Hoback Basin after seven days, trekking 18 miles further through the Gros Ventre Mountains. She has migrated 147 miles in 31 days of migration, spending 17 of those days foraging in stopovers.
Deer 665’s fourth week of migration started at the Raspberry Ridge stopover from May 28-31. She was likely eating wildflowers like sticky purple geranium, arrowleaf balsalmroot, lupine, and mules ears (wyethia), before she started migrating again on June 1st.
By June 2nd, Deer 665 had climbed to a location 1.5 miles north of US 191 where it enters the east side of Hoback River Canyon. This spot is very close to where Deer 665 was born in June 2021, a story we are excited to share in the coming weeks thanks to a stroke of scientific luck by PhD student Luke Wilde, who leads this study.
On June 3rd, Deer 665 crossed Granite Creek and headed up into the Little Granite Creek drainage where she finished the week of migration on June 4. In the coming days or weeks, she’ll have her fourth birthday.
Deer 665’s 18-mile path from June 1-4 closely tracks her fall migration through this area on November 8, 2024 heading the other direction. Back then, she followed the same ridges north of the Hoback River less than one mile from US 191 and the town of Bondurant.
Amazingly, on November 8 last year, Deer 665 covered this entire portion of her June 1-4 route — and a few miles more — in just 24 hours. (See last fall’s map in the comments.)
The difference in pace between fall and spring migration through the same terrain has to do with the food she’s finding in spring, which encourages a leisurely pace. The conditions contrast with last November 4-5, when she saw snowfall in the Tetons, and felt the early-morning chill on November 6 when the temperature dropped to 8 degrees above zero Fahrenheit in Jackson Hole.
These wintry conditions launched Deer 665 into a frenzy of migration, and she covered 87 miles dashing from the Snake River to Pinedale in a single week-long push.
This June, however, Deer 665 is showing us that spring migration means moving much slower, and actually staying put more than half the time.
From south to north, she took three-day stopovers at Steamboat Mountain, the Prospect Mountains, and Boulder Lake, then seven days at Raspberry Ridge. These are places where she finds abundant, newly-sprouted plants with supercharged nutrition to restore her strength and fitness after winter.
The stopovers help her prepare for giving birth to twins, which could happen any day now. We know she is pregnant because the Monteith Shop team did a pregnancy checkup using field ultrasound this past March in the Red Desert.
With Deer 665’s due-date rapidly approaching, what do you think her next week of migration will look like? Will she A) give birth near where she was on June 4th, B) keep pushing the final 25 miles to Teton Pass summer range of 2024 and 2023, or C) stretch her migration 50 miles into Idaho, as she did in 2022? Let us know your guess in the comments!
The data for this map is thanks to collaboration between our team at the University of Wyoming and biologists with the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, Monteith Shop, Bureau of Land Management - Wyoming, and USGS Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Units.
Cartography by WMI's Ian Freeman, based on maps by our Wild Migrations atlas partners at the Department of Geography, University of Oregon.
The Red Desert Mule Deer Study is generously supported by many partners and funders, including:
Knobloch Family Foundation,
George B. Storer Foundation,
Safari Club International Foundation and 100 Hunter Legacy Endowment Fund,
Muley Fanatic Foundation Headquarters,
Muley Fanatic Foundation – Southwest Wyoming Chapter,
Muley Fanatic Foundation Upper Green Chapter
10 Country Chapter of The Muley Fanatic Foundation,
Mule Deer Foundation of Wyoming,
Mule Deer Foundation Headquarters,
SITKA Gear,
National Science Foundation,
Biodiversity Institute of UW – Don and Judy Legerski Fellowship,
Wyoming NASA Space Grant Consortium Graduate Fellowship,
the UW Science Initiative Graduate Fellowship,
USGS Wyoming Landscape Conservation Initiative,
Wyoming Governor's Big Game License Coalition,
Teton Conservation District,
Wyoming Game and Fish Department,
Bureau of Land Management – Wyoming,
The Nature Conservancy,
The Pew Charitable Trusts,
and Sweetwater Royalties, Ghost Town of Superior Wyoming, and Wildcat Coal (for private land access).
