DNR’s third annual collaring of the fawns research project

MANKATO, Minn. (KEYC) - Summer season is in full swing and with it comes new life.

We’re here at the Taylor Wildlife Management Area as we followed along with the DNR as they actively did their third annual collaring of the fawns research project. Ladies and gentlemen, you’re going to want to see this one.

“We’re out capturing fawns monitoring survival and causes of mortality, so right now we just got done capturing a fawn,” said lead PI, Tyler Obermoller.

The whole reason of capturing fawns, to use this small GPS tracking collar for roughly the first 12-18 months and help better understand the early stages of a fawns life.

“One of the main things we’re looking at in the study is cause specific mortality. So essentially, what’s killing it and then what we’re trying to figure out is why. Is it something to do with habitat, is it something to do with genetics, or are they pre-stressed when we get there? We’re finding lots of those questions with the blood work,” said field tech, Sam Overfors.

“So we’re using drones with thermal imaging, it’s never really been done before to locate fawns for capture, this is a completely novel method. It really allows a lot of opportunities, ya know we’re finding fawns in different landscapes, historically what you’d do is you’d get as number of people, 30 people and you’d walk through this whole area, just searching for fawns ya know, but now we’re using this drones, we’re covering this area a lot quicker,” said We’re getting precise locations of where the fawns are at so we can to where exactly where they were. Just a lot quicker. So after we kind of figured out that method, then we began GPS collaring in 2021, 2022 and this year and so far we’ve found a number, a pretty high proportion of mortality are coyote predation, roughly seventy percent of predations are coyotes.” said Obermoller.

So what does the DNR hope these studies show by tracking these cute little guys? Tyler gave us an idea of what he hopes to see in the future with these studies

“Learn a lot more about movement and habitat selection, we know we’re going to get a lot of great survival and mortality information. We’re already getting that but when we started to get these locations coming in, cause we needed to retrieve the collar before we can get all those locations so then we’re hoping to get a better idea of where they’re moving, what they’re selecting, and that can better help us how we manage the landscape, we know we live in a heavy agriculture area but is there anything we can do to move throughout the landscape better, ya know we’re not going to agriculture, it’s here to stay. and we need that land but is there anything that wildlife biologists, like us, that can manage for both in conjunction with agriculture,” said Obermoller.

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