A swing from drought to heavy snow and rain has been a mixed blessing for the West’s plants and animals.
Excerpt from this story from The Revelator:
[California's] heavy winter rains at lower elevations and dozens of feet of snow in the Sierra Nevada mountains took more than 20 lives, cost billions in damages and prompted 47 counties to declare a state of emergency. Many still brace for flooding as one of the largest snowpacks on record melts out of the mountains and rushes downstream.
Other states like Wyoming, Colorado and Utah also received above-average snowpacks, which has helped to ease drought across the West. But for wildlife throughout the region, the rain and snow has been a mixed blessing.
The impacts to wildlife — both positive and negative — vary widely, says Caitlin Roddy, environmental program manager for the North Central region of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.
In many places ungulates suffered significantly.
Wyoming saw deep snowpacks at lower elevations that proved deadly. Mule deer and pronghorn starved to death by the thousands. The Wyoming range mule deer herd, one of the state’s 37 herds, lost half its numbers.
News Extinction Countdown Investigations Wildlife Climate Change Oceans & Clean Water Pollution & Toxins Public Lands & Protected Spaces Sustainability Ideas Voices Editorials Op-Eds The Ask Podcasts Culture Reviews Book Excerpts Arts About Subscribe The superbloom can be seen from space. California’s wet winter — bolstered by a torrent of atmospheric rivers — has yielded a bumper crop of colorful, knee-high wildflowers cascading across hillsides in the region.
It wasn’t all roses — or purple phacelia — earlier in the year. The state’s heavy winter rains at lower elevations and dozens of feet of snow in the Sierra Nevada mountains took more than 20 lives, cost billions in damages and prompted 47 counties to declare a state of emergency. Many still brace for flooding as one of the largest snowpacks on record melts out of the mountains and rushes downstream.
Other states like Wyoming, Colorado and Utah also received above-average snowpacks, which has helped to ease drought across the West. But for wildlife throughout the region, the rain and snow has been a mixed blessing.
The impacts to wildlife — both positive and negative — vary widely, says Caitlin Roddy, environmental program manager for the North Central region of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.
The Bad In many places ungulates suffered significantly.
Wyoming saw deep snowpacks at lower elevations that proved deadly. Mule deer and pronghorn starved to death by the thousands. The Wyoming range mule deer herd, one of the state’s 37 herds, lost half its numbers.
Deer and elk herds in Northern Colorado were also hit hard by the deep snowpack, which made finding food more difficult. That forced the animals to roadways where they could move more easily but were exposed to threats from vehicle collisions.
It was a similar story in northern Utah, where record-breaking snow falls also made it difficult for mule deer to find food, leading to expected losses in one area of 70% of adults and 90% of fawns.
“What you’re seeing in other states with ungulates, we’re expecting the same issues, but we don’t have our data yet to give hard numbers,” says Roddy. California is likely to see lower pronghorn and elk numbers, she says, but deer, which can move to lower elevations where snowpack wasn’t as heavy, should fare okay.
Fewer pronghorn and elk could cause problems in the months and years ahead, including changing the behavior of one their predators: mountain lions.
“When there’s limited forage for the ungulates, then they don’t have a good reproductive year and there’s fewer of them,” she says. “Then the mountain lion population, you’d expect it to decline after that, and you hope that they don’t switch to alternative prey, which is livestock.”
