Sampling the work day of a CWD technician

HELENA – If you ask Yvette Bonney to describe the grossest thing she’s seen during her job, she talks about the time she removed an abscessed lymph node from the neck of a mule deer, which Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks staff occasionally sees in deer.  

“All this green stuff oozed out,” Bonney says.   

She’ll also tell you about other times when she examined tick-infested heads, deer with injuries or heads that were no longer fresh but still sampleable.  

The job of a wildlife technician who samples dead animals for chronic wasting disease (CWD) isn’t always a glamorous one. But Bonney says she likes it. She arrives at her job site, which is an old Globestar camper with a folding table outside, before 8 each morning, takes out her tools and waits for the first hunter of the day.   

When he or she arrives with a deer, elk or moose, Bonney works with the hunter to get the sample information, such as the location of the kill, and taps it into a tablet that sometimes freezes when the temperature drops. She then starts cutting and digging into the neck to find the animal’s retropharyngeal lymph nodes, which are needed to test the animal for CWD.  

She performs the dissection quickly. On a busy day, Bonney collects samples from about 30 animals. If a hunter brings in a frozen head, she can’t take samples until the head thaws.  

When she locates and removes the nodes, she puts them in a small, sealable baggie along with a piece of the animal’s neck muscle and a tooth. The tissues are then shipped to the Montana Veterinary Diagnostic Lab in Bozeman, where they are tested for CWD. The teeth are sent to another lab where they are aged. Hunters are notified of the CWD results about a week later.  

As she does her work, Bonney hears all kinds of hunting stories, which she might find more interesting if she wasn’t a vegetarian. If she did eat meat, she says she’d rather eat something that was hunted.  

Still, Bonney says she enjoys chatting with the hunters who stop by. Sometimes they give her a chuckle.   

“One guy brought in a deer head, and on his first shot he shot off one of the antlers,” Bonney says and laughs. “He joked that it would have been a really nice buck, too.”  

Another guy stopped by to ask Bonney what all she needed to take a sample. She told him the head and a few inches of the neck. He told her he’d be back. She didn’t expect to see him for a couple of days, but he returned in a couple of hours.  

“He said, ‘I ran in to get this,’” Bonney says. “He comes back with this huge head and the whole neck! His wife had timed him. ‘It only took him 10 minutes,’ the wife said.”  

“I respect that dedication,” Bonney adds.  

She also hears from hunters about the reasons they want their animal tested. She says it’s about a half-and-half split between those who want to know if their meat is CWD positive before consuming it and those who want to help FWP collect data on CWD.  

Bonney is one of about 40 CWD technicians across the state this hunting season. The number of technicians has increased each of the last four years as FWP works to get more animals sampled. The techs start two weeks before the general hunting season and wrap up their work the week after Thanksgiving.  

So far this season, about 6,743 samples have been collected. That’s significantly higher than the 4,769 samples collected last year during the same time frame.   

“These technicians are so important because they are the main ones across the state collecting these samples,” says Sam Treece, FWP’s wildlife technician supervisor for CWD. “They provide us a majority of the data we need to be able to know what is going on with CWD, and they provide a public health service by allowing hunters to be knowledgeable about the CWD status of their animal. They are also very important in conversing with the public on how important this testing is to the entire state and encouraging hunters to get animals tested.”  

According to Treece, being a CWD tech is the first step in a wildlife career for some people. For many of these technicians, this is their first wildlife job, and they hit the ground running, excited to expand their skills, such as species identification.   

“These techs can move on to work other jobs that they now qualify for after working with us,” Treece says. “We have a few folks each year that move up to the CWD coordinator positions, which is extremely useful for our program.”  

Bonney, 23, has a degree in environmental science. She has experience in forestry and fisheries and says she wanted to expand that to wildlife.  

“The research studies I did before were great; I had fun,” she says. “But the data I collected wouldn’t be useful for about a decade later. CWD is an active disease. Based on what they find, it can help with management decisions for next year.”  

Tips for hunters 

Hunters play an important part in helping FWP learn where CWD is and how it spreads. When hunters have their harvested deer, elk and moose tested for CWD, they provide key insights into the effectiveness of CWD management, the disease’s prevalence and its presence.   

Hunters can have their animals tested at CWD sampling stations or most FWP offices. It’s best to call ahead to check on availability. Hunters can also take the samples themselves, fill out the online hunter submission form and mail the samples to the Wildlife Health Lab in Bozeman.  

To submit a sample at an FWP regional office or CWD sampling station, bring the following items:  

- Animal’s head: Leave 2 to 4 inches of the neck below the lower jawbone and base of the skull to ensure lymph nodes are present and not inadvertently left with the carcass. Samples cannot be collected from frozen heads.    

- Location of harvest: GPS coordinates (lat/long) of where you harvested your animal.  

Testing is voluntary, except for in some HDs near Libby, and free. There are CWD testing requirements in HDs 100, 103 and 104; please review the 2024 hunting regulations to determine if testing requirements apply.   

If an animal tests positive, public health agencies recommend that people do not consume the meat. If the hunter chooses not to consume the meat, they can request a new license for this year or next year. 

To request a new license and coordinate next steps, hunters should call the local FWP regional office or the licensing call center at 406-444-2950. The carcass will need to be disposed of in a Class II landfill and antlers will need to be turned in to FWP.  

For more information on how to take your own samples, or the location of sampling stations visit fwp.mt.gov/conservation/chronic-wasting-disease/get-your-animal-sampled.