ST. LOUIS – Our extreme winter pattern is not only harsh for us but also for wildlife, which tends to take treacherous routes to find more suitable environments. How does such weather affect animal movement and influence human success for hunting and gaming?
“The weather has a humongous impact on animal behavior because they literally live in the weather even more than we do,” Dan Zarlenga, Missouri Department of Conservation, said.
Changes in our weather often warrant a change in strategy and certain tactics for those who endure hunting deer.
“A lot of times, you’ll see more activity among wildlife as well. They might be out foraging more aggressively to get food. They may be seeking shelter if they sense a storm coming,” Zarlenga said. “In the winter, if they suspect or feel a snow coming, you’ll see a lot of birds congregating around bird feeders a lot in anticipation of a snow coming.”
Other weather conditions, including the wind, benefit animal movement. Animals heavily rely on their sense of smell, leading to deer becoming more cautious and seeking shelter. Our extreme temperature may be the result of decreased animal activity.
“If it’s really, really warm, sometimes animals don’t move around that much; they don’t feel the need to do that. Or if it’s excessively cold, they may be hunkering down. Or if the weather is severe rain or snow, they may be hunkering down,” Zarlenga said. “So, when it’s kind of cool, kind of seasonally cool like it normally would be in fall, that’s when you do see a lot of deer activity.”
Even during freezing precipitation, it’s common to see animals grouping together on the sunny sides of slopes or where snow has thawed for better access to food. Heavier snowfall may warrant changes in an animal’s survival strategy. This could force some deer to share trail systems to better conserve energy.
The Missouri Department of Conservation administers more than 900,000 acres of land throughout the state and tracks migrating animals through observations.
“We do things like spotlight surveys for deer where we go out at night and look for deer using spotlights in this case to count the deer. And we can get some ideas. We have population models; we can put those numbers into and get an estimate of how many deer are out there,” Zarlenga said.
“We also can do things like waterfowl surveys, where we may literally fly in helicopters and count waterfowl or observe them from the ground and make an estimate of how many waterfowl are on the move. We do that at our wetland areas to get an idea of what ducks and geese may be using those areas at a given time and how many.”
The MO Outdoors app can help you find conservation areas to explore by yourself or with others. It’s free to download on your smartphone.
“It has a lot of different functions. It uses your smartphone’s GPS technology to help locate where you are, and it’s able to feed you areas that are close by to tell you where you can go hiking, fishing, and various other activities like bird watching,” Zarlenga said.
“The other thing it can do is cache information; a lot of our areas are in remote locations that don’t have good cell phone connections. So, you can pre-cache these things on the phone before you go so that way when you get to the area, that information is there, and you don’t have to worry about connections.”
For hunters and anglers, the MO Hunting and MO Fishing apps may be better used to plan your next trip, manage your permits, or track your managed hunt preference points.