Colorado wildlife are starving to death after massive snow season and now hunting licenses could be restricted

What should be amazing silver-cloud news for the bone-dry northwest corner of Colorado is coming with its own dark lining: wildlife are unable to reach the grass and vegetation under the massive snowpack and are starving to death. 

"We're looking at Craig, Mabel, Rangeley, those areas, even though technically it's spring, winter just keeps holding on for them," Rachael Gonzales, Colorado Parks and Wildlife Northwest Region spokeswoman explained.

In a detailed report, Gonzales illustrates the issue at hand, and the efforts to try and keep wildlife from stealing from ranchers who are trying to feed their livestock, as well as efforts to keep the animals off the roadways where there's less snow so it's easier to travel, but cars are now hitting and killing animals. 

"It is kind of that unfortunate perfect storm in a sense," Gonzales said. "They're trying to conserve every calorie that they have, they're trying to conserve that fat, but in an area when you're talking, sagebrush is like two feet and that's buried underneath snow. It's very difficult."

They've seen enough death that CPW is recommending a cut in hunting licenses. 

"This is specifically going to be in deer and pronghorn licenses for that area. But you will also see we're recommending reductions in elk as well. I say recommendations because we won't know the final answer until May, when our Parks and Wildlife Commission approves or doesn't approve our license setting recommendation," Gonzales said. 

If approved in May, these reductions will impact 1st, 4th and late season/leftover rifle tags for bull and cow elk tags. They will not affect archery and muzzleloader seasons, or OTC tags. Where hunters could see the biggest impact is in deer and pronghorn tags. Hunters will need to submit an application for the primary draw for one of these tags. Unfortunately, with the reduction to these tags many will not draw a tag, so we are encouraging hunters to look at other options before the close of the draw application period on April 4.

Still the tragedy of mother nature is hard to watch, especially since this is during many animals' pregnancy period, where extra food is needed to survive and give birth, but locked under crusted snow. There's little they can do at that point. 

"Kind of pawing at it, you know, with their horns and stuff like that or kind of nudging around with their noses to kind of get to it. But again, when you're talking 30 inches of hard crusted snow, they just they can't break through, unfortunately."