Winter on the 'Horn: Fishing Thru a Bighorn River Waterfowl Die-Off
Words by Greg Thomas
Nature has a way of surprising us, but not always in the most attractive ways. That’s how it was on Montana’s Bighorn River last year), when I joined a group of friends to float the ‘Horn after being away from river for 20-some years. I had high hopes, and the fish did their parts; we caught scads of browns and rainbows, some stretching to 20 inches or so.
We timed our trip by keeping an eye on the weather and we thought we were in really good shape. For the most part we were; we had cold mornings and warm afternoons. But, when we got to Fort Smith, south of Hardin, we found the boat ramps covered in more than a foot of snow and ice. We understood, it would be impossible to even get boats to the river at some accesses. Even with chains we didn’t dare take a truck down the ramps, which forced us to “launch” from the parking lots. We unclipped the safety chains, rolled the boats off the trailers, unclipped the straps, pushed hard on the bows and said, “bon voyage.” And yes, the guys at the bottom of the ramps were in serious harm’s way. But it all worked out and once we had the boats on the water, we were ready to roll down the Bighorn.
As soon as we got on the water we knew something was wrong--we noticed a healthy, beautiful drake mallard in the shallows, a perfectly healthy-looking animal, except it was dead. It struck me as odd, as did the dead hen mallard I saw just down the bank. Soon after, we saw a Canada goose struggle up a bank, thrusting itself forward with its wings, leaving crazy patterns in the snow. Soon after, another mallard drake struggled up the bank and into a patch of brush. Its wings fouled in the limbs; esentially, it had created its own deathbed. There were others, mallard drakes and hens, wigeon, and more geese, some of them with their heads stuck into the snowbanks, like a kid with covers pulled over their heads . . . if I can’t see the monster, it can’t see me . . .
We weren’t the only ones noticing those birds; numerous eagles took advantage of the smorgasbord, ripping into those ducks and geese, some flying by with those birds in their talons, others having landed on the banks to rip off pieces of meat. Clearly, foxes and coyotes had taken advantage of the feast the night before, as some birds were stripped clean.
I asked the other guys, all lifelong outdoorsmen, “You ever seen anything like this?” To a man the answer was, “No.”
We had perfect fishing conditions, with a slightly overcast sky and large browns and rainbows happy to eat a black streamer. Each of us caught a dozen or more trout that day, and we had the river mostly to ourselves, an anomaly on the Bighorn, which is usually littered with boats and bankies. But we also understood why hardly anyone was fishing—those accesses were brutal, if not downright dangerous, and that weighed on our minds during the entire float. All agreed, we needed to be at the takeout before dark because we didn’t know what we’d find when we got there.
And that’s what we did. To get the boats out of the water and up the ramp we had to park one of our trucks at the top of the ramp, run a winch cable to its maximum length, then knot anchor ropes together, attach to the winch cable and yard one boat out at a time.
On the drive to our rental, we encountered a bunch of mallards walking on the highway in the dark, drawn to the pavement for some reason. Some of those birds didn’t even try to get out of the way. By the time we got back to the house I’d already decided to call Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks. I got through and talked to a woman who tracks bird health and avian diseases. She and I agreed: It sounded like an avian flu. She said she’d investigate.
The following morning we were back on the water, but things had changed: dead and dying birds lined the banks. In one shallow area just above a riffle about 20 birds had stacked up on the gravel. I got on the phone again and said, “What I told you yesterday, multiply it by twenty.” What I told her the day before was that we saw a couple dozen dead or dying birds.
She was on it, sent a technician to take samples in the stretches we floated, and a few days later when results came back from the lab, the Billings Gazette reported that the birds starved. Montana Outdoor also weighed in on the event, read the article here: February 2025 Bighorn River Waterfowl Die-Off Linked to Starvation.
Starved? They looked perfectly healthy and strong, northern birds with full plumage. Not emaciated. Perfectly healthy. I’m not saying I believe the report entirely, but I trust that the experts would know.
After a few days of fishing we headed home, and during our drive back to Missoula we agreed, it had been a strange few days on the Bighorn. Yes we caught some good fish. Yes we had some fun evenings cooking, tying flies and watching hoops. But being surrounded by that volume of death was tough. It was just hard to land a good fish and feel like everything was alright when just a few yards away a creature was fighting for its life.
But we’re not quitters so we’d fished from dawn til dusk each day, hammering the fish during a non-stop three-day streamer bite, and we drove away from the ‘Horn thinking, Well, winter isn’t so bad.
I’m not saying that a saltwater trip this January or February is a bad idea, but if you don’t have that in the cards this year, make sure you get out on a big, western tailwater and do a little headhunting. Winter is here and it’s a while before we get out of it. But it will pass, that much more quickly, if you get out and throw.
