With 8009 records, the mule deer is among the most thoroughly documented mammals in Utah’s atlas. Zion National Park alone contributes 1601, and records reach every corner of the state, Washington and Salt Lake counties leading, from the pinyon benches of Bryce Canyon and Capitol Reef National Parks to the grasslands of Antelope Island State Park and the high forests of the Cache and Uinta national forests.
A browser between desert and alpine
Utah’s mule deer are Rocky Mountain mule deer, and the state gives them the full arc of their habitat. They are browsers rather than grazers, built on a diet of shrubs like sagebrush, bitterbrush, and mountain mahogany, and their large mule-like ears and stiff-legged bounding gait are unmistakable on open slopes. Most Utah herds are migratory, summering on high mountain range and walking down to lower shrubland each fall, so the same deer may stand in an alpine meadow in July and a snowy sagebrush flat in January.
The calendar of rut and fawns
Records come in every month, with the strongest counts from May through August, when deer crowd the summer range and fawns, born in early summer, begin traveling with their mothers. The rut peaks in November as bucks move into open country to contest does, and winter herds bunch on lower ground where wind strips the snow from feed.
Status in Utah
NatureServe ranks the mule deer S5, Secure, in Utah, and the species is native to the state. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
