Wallace ? From rancher Gene Bertrand’s vantage point in far western Kansas, it seems likely there will be fewer deer and antelope on the landscape in the months ahead than in a normal year.

For that, and for the lower-than-normal numbers of rabbits and pheasants he’s seeing, Bertrand blames a winter that brought higher-than-normal snowfall, including the blizzard that blasted western Kansas over the New Year’s weekend.

“We’ve lost a lot of pheasants,” Bertrand said. “We’ve lost rabbits.” Bertrand also reports coming across relatively fresh deer carcasses.

But Steve Price, regional wildlife biologist with the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks, cautions against jumping to conclusions about the winter’s toll.

“We haven’t done any surveys,” Price said. “We try to base our assessments on scientific information and surveys.”

The agency is just beginning its pheasant surveys, Price said.

Still, Wildlife and Parks upland game bird biologist Randy Rodgers expects extensive losses.

“We probably have lost in some places 75 percent to 80 percent of the birds that were out there,” Rodgers said, citing reports from biologists.

Rodgers said he hadn’t worried initially about the health of the birds.

“There’s no question the birds that survived were in farmsteads and around feedlots,” he said.

Bertrand did some feeding of his own. For one stretch in January, he put out 30 to 40 pounds of oats every day – 10 to 15 gallons – and saw every kernel consumed.

Still visible on his land is the trail created by deer as they moved from the cover afforded by trees along Turkey Creek, which feeds into the Smoky Hill River on his ranch, to where he put out the grain.

The deer also traveled, he said, to a neighbor’s field, where they ate away at about 20 bales of last year’s feed.

“I’ve never seen deer do damage to a bale before,” he said. “This was their only food source.”