Just like the news clipping says, I have never seen anything like this before. I am glad to see that he made it across, he's a pretty impressive looking buck to say the least.
A whitetail buck floats on the ice down the Yellowstone River at Miles City in Montana. It's not every day ... well, any day actually ... that you see a whitetail buck floating down the river.
But on the morning of Dec. 22, Jason Ramirez's excursion to the Yellowstone River west of Miles City provided an unusual sight: a four-point whitetail buck casually riding an ice chunk downstream as if it were a normal thing to do on a Monday morning commute.
"I've never seen anything like it," said Ramirez, 29, a manager at Riverside Marine and Cycle in Miles City. "I was in my vehicle driving, and I just happened to have my camera. It was definitely odd."
When he first saw the deer, Ramirez said, it was stranded on an anchored piece of ice in the middle of the large river, near where the Tongue River joins the Yellowstone. In that section, the river measures about 300 yards wide in some places.
"It was just looking at the river," he said.
Then the buck decided to try to hopscotch its way across, traveling from the north bank south, by bounding onto a chunk of ice as it floated past.
"He kept moving and falling in and getting onto different pieces of ice," Ramirez said. "He jumped onto two pieces before he made it onto shore."
It's pretty unusual for deer to attempt to cross the river in such conditions, said Howard Burt, Fish, Wildlife and Parks biologist in Glendive.
"Obviously you'll see them crossing on the ice," Burt said. "But you don't see them crossing a lot when it's slushy. That's pretty dangerous. They'll get sucked under pretty quick."
He said whitetail don't mind swimming the river when it's ice free, even when the air temperature is downright chilly.
"When the river's open, and even when it's real cold, they'll go back and forth to the islands quite frequently to feed and bed down," he said. "It may be getting down to zero at night, but it doesn't seem to bother them much. They're pretty well insulated."
Deer and their relatives stay warm in frigid weather thanks to fat they build up in the summertime as well as their thick fur, which includes dense, fine hairs underneath larger, hollow hairs. The hollow hairs are valued by fly anglers for making flies that float. But they also provide an insulating layer for deer, providing loft much like the air spaces between down feathers in coats that keep skiers and ice anglers warm.
"It always amazes me when we have cold spells like this - when it's 30-below at nighttime - how well deer survive," Burt said.
In his winter surveys of deer populations, Burt said, he's never seen any deer floating on the ice, dead or alive. But he once spotted about 40 cows that had congregated on the river ice looking for fresh water. Their collective weight must have broken the ice and they all drowned.
But the buck Ramirez saw and photographed seemed to be adept at ice walking. As the action unfolded, Ramirez snapped about 25 photographs and shot video of the deer. He estimated he spent a half an hour watching the buck, during which it floated about a half-mile downstream.
Ramirez, who is a hunter, said it was a lot bigger buck than the one he shot during the season.
After he e-mailed photos of the floating deer to friends, it went viral, shuttling from person to person across the nation. He also posted three video clips on YouTube.com.
Ramirez said he got a phone call from a Bozeman insurance agent who managed to track him down, wanting more information about the photos.
"Yeah, it's pretty cool," Ramirez said.
BY BRETT FRENCH
BILLINGS GAZETTE
Gloria Montgomery of Madison is a staunch advocate of bowhunting whitetails -- or, at least, she was. 
