By the calendar, spring is only about five weeks away.
But for some of Minnesota’s farmland wildlife, the next five weeks might be their lifetime.
One only has to glance out the car window while driving across southern Minnesota to understand the kind of challenges Minnesota’s farmland wildlife are facing this winter.
Save for the occasional farmstead grove, a fenceline here and there, most farm sections are an expansive, unbroken sea of crusty, deep snow.
And it’s pretty much been that way for nearly two months.
Department of Natural Resources Regional Wildlife Manager Ken Varland said that these are the worst conditions he has seen since the winter of 2000-01 and before that, the winter of 1996-97.
While it’s a certainty that the wintery conditions have claimed some pheasants, actual numbers are difficult to quantify.
“To actually find dead birds is not that easy,” he said, noting that birds that perish in storms are quickly covered up by drifting snow.
“But there’s no doubt there has been some mortality ... there’s some woody cover, some cover around homesteads but otherwise, most of the available cover is filled with snow,” he said.
Randy Markl, a DNR area wildlife manager stationed in Windom, said pheasants tend to be mobile in their search for food and cover during severe winters.
“The birds have shifted a lot since Christmas,” he said. “Right after Christmas, we were seeing them all over the place.” The birds then became less visible, an indication they probably discovered better sources of food and cover elsewhere.
But Markl said the birds once again have become more visible along roadways, suggesting that even those food sources no longer are available.
Fortunately, more unharvested cornfields than is customary at this time of the year in some parts of the state’s pheasant range, along with feeding stations maintained in strategic locations, have lessened winter stress levels for some birds.
But Varland said winter mortality for pheasants isn’t so much from starvation as from exposure to the elements during storms and especially, vulnerability to predators while moving from roosting sites to feeding sites.
Markl said he found one dead hen encrusted with ice that presumably died from exposure, but otherwise, he has found clear evidence of significant predation of pheasants by hawks and owls.
Farmland deer thus far have weathered existing wintery conditions pretty well.
While young fawns may be suffering some winter mortality, deer are better able to handle deep crusty snow conditions better than pheasants.
“They can paw pretty well through the crusty snow to get to food,” Varland said. A bigger issue in recent weeks, he said, is the depredation complaints wildlife managers have fielded as the opportunistic deer discover unharvested stands of corn and decorative shrubbery around homesteads.
Ironically, while an unharvested cornfield can be a windfall of food for hungry whitetails, it also can be their downfall.
Varland said a buck was found dead recently in southern Minnesota. “It looked healthy but it may have been that its diet was too rich in corn,” he said.
Noting that deer are browsers, Varland said a diet exclusively of corn is not a balanced diet for white-tailed deer. “They can die with a full stomach,” he said.
Not surprisingly, what farmland wildlife needs right now is a stint of thawing weather to beat back the deep snow.
With a little luck and some nice spring weather for successful nesting, the winter of 2009-10 could become just a bad memory.
But even with an impending spring, disaster can strike. In 1965, on St. Patrick’s Day and a few days before spring, a late-winter blizzard swept across the region.
During that two-day blow, half of Minnesota’s pheasant population was lost.
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John Cross is a Mankato Free Press staff writer. Contact him at (507) 344-6376 or jcross@mankatofreepress.com.
