By Mike Koshmrl
The first out-of-the-ordinary sighting came last October as Cat Urbigkit herded sheep.
A swift fox appeared amid the brush. The longtime Sublette County writer and rancher had seen the species once before, but this marked the first such sighting near her home in Big Sandy country south of Pinedale along the western flank of the Wind River Range.
“Western Wyoming is a great place for stuff like that,” Urbigkit told WyoFile.
“The more you pay attention, the more you’re going to see.”
There’s plenty of truth to the adage. But western Wyoming folks can look with intention for swift foxes and never catch a glimpse of one. The smaller cousin of the more common red fox is largely absent from the sagebrush-studded western half of the state — the fringe of the species range, according to the Wyoming Game and Fish Department.
Urbigkit’s run of unusual furred and feathered sightings kept on.
On the phone with her husband, Jim, one day, the photographer, former newspaper reporter and statehouse candidate was alerted to an “interesting” bird in the yard around the time of the swift fox sighting.
They were chukars, another first by their Green River basin abode.
“By the first week of November, they started coming to hang out in the yard,” Urbigkit said. “There were about 30 of them and they were in two groups, but I’ve got these nine that come into the yard almost every day.”
The sighting, again, can be classified as odd. Chukar, a nonnative partridge species, are well distributed on the east side of the Wind River Range and even down by Flaming Gorge Reservoir, but they’re uncommon to absent along the higher, colder, less cheatgrass-infested west side of the mighty mountain range — though Urbigkit later learned of off-and-on sightings in the nearby Prospect Mountains.
The finale of the string of uncommon critter sightings came just the other week.
Cat and Jim Urbigkit were headed home when they spotted a herd of deer in the highway right-of-way.
“One of those butts is not right,” Urbigkit recalled thinking.
They turned around and snapped some pics. Sure enough, a whitetail deer, or perhaps a hybrid, was hanging tight with a herd of mule deer.
Whitetails are found in the Green and New Fork river bottoms, but Urbigkit had never seen the species intermingle with mule deer. Tension dominated the interaction. Repeatedly, the whitetail doe was aggressively “raring up.”
The muleys, meanwhile, wanted to “stay the hell away.”
“They weren’t happy about it,” Urbigkit said. “She would start [raring], and they would move away. They weren’t comfortable with the way that she behaved.”
It’s a safe bet that Urbigkit will be on the lookout for other unexpected critters. The new sightings, like the swift fox, are cause for joy.
“I was pretty thrilled,” she said.
This article was originally published by WyoFile and is republished here with permission. WyoFile is an independent nonprofit news organization focused on Wyoming people, places and policy.
