Spring thaw showed severity of winter deer losses in Michigan’s northern Lower Peninsula

Emmet County, Mich. — If the number of dead deer that people found this spring in Michigan’s Emmet County is any indication, winter losses were probably high throughout the region.

Many of the dead deer are believed to have died due to terrible snow conditions. The spring melt revealed the remains.

Aaron Keiser, of Levering, made the following Facebook post: “In Emmet County this spring, four of us found around 100 dead deer while doing spring scouting. Most of the dead deer were fawns and the majority of those were button bucks, but we found a number of adult bucks that died, too. The deer moved into their wintering areas and then got stuck there with the depth and consistency of the snow.”

The dead deer that were found are assumed to be only a fraction of those that perished. The people who found them weren’t doing searches – they simply stumbled on their remains while engaged in other activities such as turkey hunting, looking for morels and scouting for this fall’s deer season.

A large percentage of the dead deer were found near Wycamp Lake in northwest Emmet County, close to the shore of Lake Michigan. There’s a hunting preserve by the lake and a large swamp that’s approximately two miles long by one mile wide.

“Deer pack in there during the winter,” Keiser said during a telephone interview. “We had the worse snow conditions last winter that I’ve ever seen. The snow was over knee deep in a lot of areas by mid-December. Due to the deep snow we had in December, 90% of our bucks lost their antlers by late December. We had two feet of snow on the ground and then it rained, which froze. Then we got three feet of powder on top of that. It was hard to walk in the woods due to the snow conditions. For two to four weeks, deer couldn’t go anywhere.”

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One of the dead deer Ken Ford found was curled up underneath his elevated deer blind, Ford reported, acknowledging the rough winter for most wildlife.

Keiser called it a perfect storm in terms of creating tough conditions for deer to survive.

“We already had a deep snowpack when we got a terrible storm during mid-March,” Keiser said. “That sealed the fate for a lot of deer. There were a lot of acorns on the ground in some areas. Deer that were attracted to that food source got stuck there. The snow got so deep that they couldn’t get at the acorns anymore.”

One of Keiser’s buddies that lives near Wycamp Lake found the first dead deer during late February. One of those was an adult buck that was stuck in a creek. At least six of the dead deer that were found were adult bucks.

Few of the dead deer that were located were adult does.

Keiser said there was a four-foot browse line on the pines in the yarding area this spring. Deer ate everything they could reach.