The first mule deer to become famous was named Jet, after the University of Wyoming graduate student who MacGyvered her tracking collar. The name fit an animal that walked, bounded and sometimes ran 150 miles north every spring, chasing greener pastures, and then trekked 150 miles south each fall to escape deep snow.
Thousands of people followed Jet’s seasonal journeys on Facebook and Twitter, and mourned when she died of exposure in December 2016.
The following year, a deer that researchers named Mo for her momentum caught the public’s attention. Julie Legg, a 49-year-old woman living in the almost-ghost town of Superior, Wyoming, was so inspired by Mo’s long migration that she’s spent the last seven years driving two-track roads and hiking hillsides and creek bottoms, photographing and videoing deer for a growing online audience.
Deer 255 didn’t need a name. Between 2019 and 2022, four animated videos of her 240-mile annual trek from southwest Wyoming to central Idaho — the longest one-way mule deer migration ever recorded — racked up almost 4 million views online. Her collar number became synonymous with marathon feats.
“Oh! A celebrity!” chirped a University of Wyoming student as scientists weighed a 2.5-year-old female deer on a frigid day last December near Superior. Like 255, Deer 665 had acquired a reputation for epic walkabouts, migrating more than 220 miles in the spring of 2022. Researchers captured her, using a net shot from a helicopter, then blindfolded her to keep her as calm as possible while they drew blood and measured her body fat, all part of an ongoing effort to understand why some mule deer travel so far.
It’s no wonder that deer like 255 and 665 fascinate us: Despite migrating almost 500 miles over multiple mountain passes in just six months, they finish the year fatter than deer that stay home. But this story is about more than just a few celebrity cervids. Countless mule deer, pronghorn and elk have made such long-distance journeys, year after year, for thousands of years, from sagebrush steppe to alpine meadows and back again. Paradoxically, these grueling trips help sustain herd numbers when conditions are harsh and food is scarce. More and more, however, the West’s migrating ungulates must navigate a treacherous human landscape.
Deer, pronghorn and elk leap over or crawl under fences and dodge highway traffic. They skirt rural subdivisions and race across oil fields, often with offspring in tow. They time their movements to avoid deadly trudges through crusty snow. But the fact that many ungulates still survive their long and increasingly dangerous journeys doesn’t mean they always will. Many of their routes have already been blocked by roads, subdivisions and industrial development. All this stymied movement — combined with chronic wasting disease, drought-diminished food supplies and loss of habitat — is taking a toll: Colorado’s mule deer population plunged from 600,000 in 2006 to about 433,000 in 2018, while Wyoming’s dropped from about 578,000 in 1991 to about 330,000 in 2021.
“I am significantly concerned about mule deer,” Brian Nesvik, Wyoming Game and Fish Department director, said in November.
Yet efforts to conserve migratory routes are also struggling to move forward, facing pushback from critical lawmakers, wary landowners and skeptical industry leaders. Meanwhile, deer like 255 and 665 still follow the ancient pathways they likely learned from their mothers, headed for the best food they can reach.
HALL SAWYER documented the longest migration of land mammals in the Lower 48 somewhat by accident. Sawyer, a wildlife biologist, lives in southeast Wyoming, where he studies deer, pronghorn and elk for government agencies and energy companies. In December 2011, he collared dozens of deer in the southern end of Wyoming’s Red Desert for a Bureau of Land Management study. He knew the animals moved around but wasn’t sure how far or where they went, so in early 2012, he hired a pilot to track the collars’ radio signals.
The pilot flew in widening circles over the sagebrush, covering much of the Red Desert, but heard nothing. Then, on his way north to refuel, he dipped toward the base of the Wind River Range. There, he heard a beep — a signal indicating that a deer had traveled about 80 miles from its December location.
Colorado’s mule deer population plunged from 600,000 in 2006 to about 433,000 in 2018, while Wyoming’s dropped from about 578,000 in 1991 to about 330,000 in 2021.
Must be a fluke, Sawyer thought, a deer pushed unusually far south by bad weather. Surely no deer moved that far every year. But the following fall, the same deer returned to the Red Desert. By 2013, Sawyer and his colleagues had established that some deer walked from the Red Desert to the Hoback Basin southeast of Jackson, Wyoming, and back every year — a round-trip journey of about 300 miles.
Native peoples have long known that some deer travel with the seasons. Jason Baldes, an Eastern Shoshone tribal member and executive director of the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative, said it was traditional knowledge, passed down from ancestors. “We also have the archaeological evidence that holds up those stories and beliefs,” he said, including artifacts found at bottlenecks along the Red Desert-to-Hoback migratory route.
Anecdotal reports from local hunters, ranchers and biologists suggested that some Red Desert deer migrate. But Sawyer and his colleagues were the first to use GPS satellites to map the migration from start to finish.
News of the results spread like dirt in a Wyoming windstorm, from The New York Times to National Geographic and Al Jazeera. The Wyoming Migration Initiative, a University of Wyoming program co-founded in 2012 by Wyoming Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit leader Matthew Kauffman, began tracking and mapping migrations throughout the state. Professors, graduate students and volunteers spent weeks each year fitting deer, pronghorn, moose, bighorn sheep and elk with satellite collars, measuring rump fat, collecting poop samples and checking for pregnancies with ultrasound wands.
By 2019, Western wildlife agencies were working with the U.S. Geological Survey and UW researchers to map migrations in places like Arizona’s Kaibab Plateau, where mule deer travel up to 90 miles from canyon country to flats each spring and fall, and northwest Colorado, where some of the Bear’s Ears herd move up to 70 miles each spring and fall. Researchers have now mapped dozens of deer, elk and pronghorn routes in Wyoming, and they keep documenting more, including one that extends from northeast Wyoming to Montana and another that wanders on and off the Wind River Reservation.
“I like thinking that these migrations that are happening right now on the reservation have always been there, and we have always tracked them,” said Albert Mason Jr., an Eastern Shoshone tribal member and graduate wildlife researcher with the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative. “I like thinking and assuming that my ancestors followed the same deer down the same paths they used, and now see their two descendants relying on each other.”
All the complicated scientific equipment — the helicopters, net guns, collars, algorithms, satellites, ultrasound machines and maps — led the graduate students and professors who use it to one conclusion: Migration leads deer to better food; better food makes fatter deer; fatter deer survive harsh winters better; and the deer that fare best in winter deliver bigger fawns who grow up to be bigger, fatter, healthier deer. The same is true for elk, pronghorn and bighorn sheep.
So, in 2016, the Wyoming Game and Fish Commission voted to formally designate the Red Desert-to-Hoback migration corridor as vital wildlife habitat. Two years later, not long after the Trump administration also recognized the importance of migration corridors, the commissioners designated two more.
The designations are intended as guidance for land managers and county planning boards, indicating where development could harm migration as well as where fence removal could benefit it. They also help federal agencies decide whether to grant leases for oil and gas development.
This was not the first time the commission had designated vital wildlife habitat. But migrating wildlife cross private land as well as public, and some landowners feared corridor designations would lead to land-use restrictions. By late 2019, after Game and Fish proposed designating another two corridors, conservative state lawmakers decided that the recommendations should go no further and considered drafting bills to undercut future designations.
“I like thinking and assuming that my ancestors followed the same deer down the same paths they used, and now see their two descendants relying on each other.”
Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon, R, had already created a task force on migration corridors, and in 2020, he issued an executive order stipulating that only the governor’s office could designate new corridors. Some conservationists denounced the order as political, arguing that wildlife decisions should be made by wildlife professionals. Others saw it as a middle ground of sorts — a way to conserve deer without alarming conservative lawmakers.
Three years passed without any new designations. Meanwhile, the slicing and dicing of Wyoming’s migration corridors by roads, developments and subdivisions continued.
IF DEER CAN BE LEGENDS, 255 already is one. After researchers collared her in the Red Desert in March 2016, they tracked her as she walked 90 miles farther than the rest of her herd — from southern Wyoming through ranches and subdivisions, over mountain ranges and highways, and into eastern Idaho. Researchers wrote off the walkabout as a fluke. Two years later, after her collar malfunctioned, they recaptured her by chance. After analyzing the data stored in her collar, they realized her Idaho trip was a regular migration.
Deer 255 is fat and elusive and, according to researchers, can get huffy with her fawns, nudging them to keep moving with body language familiar to the parents of Homo sapiens. During her journeys, she crosses land managed by the National Park Service, the U.S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management and the state of Wyoming, not to mention innumerable private parcels and busy roads. I wanted to understand why she, and her fawns, went to all this trouble. And so, on an early October day last year, I stood on a rutted two-track road on Forest Service land north of Jackson, Wyoming, with Game and Fish migration coordinator and habitat specialist Jill Randall and Jackson wildlife biologist Aly Courtemanch, staring at a map of Deer 255’s most recent coordinates.
Every few hours, Deer 255’s collar transmits her location to a satellite, which sends the data to the Wyoming Migration Initiative’s servers every couple of days. We didn’t have her real-time location, but we knew where she spent most of the summer. Even if we didn’t glimpse her, we could tour her summer home and even peek into the refrigerator.
Migration leads deer to better food; better food makes fatter deer; fatter deer survive harsh winters better; and the deer that fare best in winter deliver bigger fawns who grow up to be bigger, fatter, healthier deer.
The Greater Yellowstone’s epic mammal migrations
1. Carter Mountain Pronghorn
This herd, which winters on the plains southeast of Yellowstone National Park, summers on 10,000-foot-high mountain plateaus — perhaps the world’s highest pronghorn range.
2. Owl Creek Mountains Mule Deer
The several thousand deer that trek through the Wind River Reservation face few risks, because the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes manage these lands for wildlife. Off the reservation, many of the deer have to navigate a major highway, fences and residential areas.
3. Sublette Mule Deer
The world’s longest recorded mule deer migration stretches 150 miles from Wyoming’s Red Desert to the Hoback Basin. Research shows that the animals that migrate farthest often return to their winter range fatter than their stay-at-home kin and with more fawns.
4. Sublette Pronghorn
The Wyoming Game and Fish Commission is considering protections for this famous route. The animals migrate more than 100 miles from southwest Wyoming over two highway overpasses and across sprawling gas fields on their way to Grand Teton National Park.
We followed overgrown trails through aspen stands, then up a steep, barren hillside in the Bridger-Teton National Forest. The official Red Desert corridor stops south of here, but this area is the summer range of some of the herd’s most ambitious migrators. As we approached the top of the knobby mountains, stepping through sagebrush and grass still green from summer, we saw what made this country worth the trip.
“This is classic summer range,” Randall said, pointing to open meadows bordering tangled forests. “There’s cover here, they can get away from predators and get in the shade when it’s hot in the summer, but then they have foraging and feeding where they’ll have more forbs out in the open.”
On one hillside were clumps of dried yarrow and remnants of the summer’s flowery asters, clover and protein-rich vetches. We knew from 255’s collar data that she had spent much of the summer in the wooded area nearby. We also knew from the plants that either deer or elk had feasted here this summer.
“Look at this — gone, gone, gone, gone, all those flowerheads are gone,” Randall said, pointing to a balsamroot’s headless stems. Balsamroot, wild geraniums and lupines are a mule deer’s summertime meat and potatoes.
Researchers with the Migration Initiative use the phrase “surfing the green wave” to describe how large ungulates like deer, pronghorn and elk follow the choicest bits of food up in elevation as spring advances. And while some deer will eagerly munch backyard ornamentals, migratory deer are strategic about what they eat.
Young plants have high protein and low fiber — the best combination for mule deer — but lack volume. Older plants are larger but about as nutritious as pencils. Deer prefer plants of intermediate age, the Goldilocks stage of growth, said Anna Ortega, a former UW graduate student who studied the Red Desert deer for seven years. “That’s why tracking this green-up of plants is really good for deer,” she said.
That healthier food is migration’s reward, said Kauffman.
After a decade of research, biologists learned that the Red Desert deer develop migration portfolios of a sort: Part of the herd lingers in the desert, another chunk goes 50 or so miles, and the final group travels about 150, with rare deviations in routes. (An individual doe, for example, may deliver her fawns near the hillside where she was born.)
Ortega believes that the various strategies evolved because, depending on conditions, each one paid off in different ways. But as climate change deepens droughts and development fragments winter range, the short-distance migratory population keeps shrinking. More and more, the long migration to the mountains is the only winning strategy.
IN 1888, before Wyoming became a state, Kip Alexander’s great-grandparents moved from the Nebraska Sandhills to southwest Wyoming, the ancestral territory of several tribes including the Eastern Shoshone, Cheyenne and Crow. His family held on to that original 160 acres and expanded the property, raising cattle and growing hay. Alexander, who just turned 80, still lives on that land, which is ringed by the snow-covered peaks of the Wind River and Wyoming ranges.
His house sits just to the west of the designated Red Desert migration corridor, near the face of the Wind River Range and about halfway between the deer’s summer and winter ranges. Alexander also owns and grazes almost 1,800 acres that jut into the route like a pointed finger. He watches mule deer cross that land each fall, flowing up and over the sagebrush and grass-covered hills before hopping fences, crossing a highway and continuing south. Meanwhile, his neighbors sell their land to developers, who divide it into 40-, then 20-, then 10-acre ranchettes — each with its roads, fences, houses and dogs.
About 12 years ago, after realizing that his adult children weren’t going to take over the ranch, Alexander worked with the Wyoming Stock Growers Land Trust to create a permanent easement on the land he owns in the corridor. He can still graze cows and grow hay on it and it can be sold, but it can’t be sliced up or developed.
While some landowners donate easements to land trusts, others, like Alexander, sell their development rights in exchange for direct payments.
“If you’re going to ask people to change management or do some things on their private land to benefit a public resource,” said Jim Magagna, who runs sheep in the Red Desert corridor and is executive vice president of the Wyoming Stockgrowers Association, “the public ought to be willing to pay for it.”
Money for easements generally comes from private donors, state or federal entities, or some combination of the three. Because the federal government prioritizes easements on land with agricultural or wildlife habitat value, the state’s corridor designations have helped some landowners secure easement funding.
Easements for corridors got a serious boost in 2021, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture allocated more than $20 million for fence improvements, wildlife habitat restoration and easement purchases — a pilot project that eventually established 17 easements on 11,830 acres on designated migration corridors in Wyoming. In 2023, the USDA created the Migratory Big Game Initiative, which expanded the program across Wyoming, Idaho and Montana.
Arthur Middleton, a USDA senior advisor for wildlife conservation and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said the money represents one very tangible way to save migration corridors from death by a thousand subdivisions.
“Habitat restoration and enhancement and protection takes time to get done, either because of the relationships that need to be built, or because of the ecology,” Middleton said. “And one thing you don’t often have, when there’s a political pendulum swinging back and forth, is time.”
Mark Anselmi and his sister, Gina, own two adjoining parcels, amounting to about 300 acres of rolling grass and sagebrush in the middle of the Red Desert-to-Hoback migration route, just east of Alexander’s property. Mark, who served on the Wyoming Game and Fish Commission, understands the importance of intact prairie and foothills, not only to mule deer and elk but also to sage grouse and songbirds. In early December, he received a letter from the Stock Growers Land Trust informing them that their easements were under review for purchase and could take about three years to finalize.
“Habitat restoration and enhancement and protection takes time to get done, either because of the relationships that need to be built, or because of the ecology. And one thing you don’t often have is time.”
Developers and real estate agents are pressuring him to sell his land, Anselmi said, but he doesn’t want to subdivide like some of his neighbors. He sold 75 acres years ago, and he worries that, without an easement, he or his children might someday sell the rest. Enough development, and the deer won’t be able to move through at all anymore.
“So, what do you tell your grandkids? ‘I remember the good old days,’” he said, sitting at a round kitchen table in the little cabin he built on his land. “That’s terrible. They should be able to see this stuff.”
Easements do help, but a map of the Red Desert migration corridor — arguably the most well-known and best protected in the West — shows dozens of parcels with no easements, some covering almost 5,000 acres. And while development has been prevented in some areas, such as a migration bottleneck near Fremont Lake, it hasn’t stopped completely.In 2022,the Sublette County commissioners approved rezoning 299 acres into 51 lots in the middle of the corridor. Later that year, it approved the construction of a 32,400-square-foot trauma therapy center, along with more than 130 parking spaces, on the edge of the corridor. One of the commissioners reminded the crowd during the vote that the corridor designation “does not apply” to private land, reported Wyofile, a nonprofit news site.
One development won’t necessarily sever a migration route, said Kauffman. But it could; scientists can’t predict exactly when a corridor will cease to function — when deer or pronghorn will no longer be able to squeeze through it or go around.
“Some days I look at it and think, ‘Man, how are we ever going to stop this juggernaut of development?’” said Brandon Scurlock, a Wyoming Game and Fish wildlife supervisor in Pinedale. “But I still try to be optimistic. This herd is pretty resilient.”
Conservation-minded developments show promise. Say a developer wants to subdivide 5,000 acres, and migration data shows that pronghorn or deer generally move through the east side of the property. With the cooperation of the state, landowners and developers, houses could be concentrated on the west side, allowing migration to continue.
As Alexander drove his pickup along a highway through the deer migration route in October, he shook his head as he pointed out subdivisions on former ranchland. He gestured at a sagebrush- and grass-covered hill, where deer hooves had carved trails into the ground; a post where biologists installed a trail camera to monitor progress; the gates he leaves open during peak migration. Not nearly as many deer pass through these days, he said, and there are even fewer pronghorn.
But, he added, “it’s hard to stand there and tell somebody who owns some ground what he can do with it.”
IN LATE NOVEMBER, after the deer run the gantlet of private land in Sublette County, they reach the Red Desert, where they spend the winter munching old sagebrush tips and bitterbrush stems. Most of the Red Desert is managed by the Bureau of Land Management, which for the last dozen years (and across three presidential administrations) has been trying to update its plan for 3.6 million acres — an area roughly the size of Connecticut. The plan, which would be in effect for up to 20 years, includes the herd’s entire winter range and could determine its fate.
President Joe Biden’s appointees inherited the standard four alternatives: Status quo (don’t change anything); development heavy (encourage more oil and gas drilling, renewable-energy projects and grazing); conservation heavy (protect more land from development, leave wide buffers for migration corridors, and limit some grazing); and middle of the road (basically status quo, but with some tweaks).
In August, the agency announced its choice: the conservation-heavy alternative. Depending on who you asked, or listened to, the decision would either conserve and protect wildlife and open space (according to the Wyoming Wilderness Association) or kill jobs in a state that was already doing more to address wildlife migration than any other state (according to Gov. Gordon). Wyoming legislators called it misguided at best and illegal at worst; one even said, during a town hall broadcast, that it would affect more people than “the Civil War, Pearl Harbor and 9/11 combined.” Public meetings with state BLM staffers, held across southwest Wyoming, overflowed with passionate opposition.
Federal land-management plans tend to be exhaustive processes, and the agency usually chooses the middle-of-the-road alternative, said Joy Bannon, executive director of the Wyoming Wildlife Federation. The BLM’s surprising choice, combined with its release of an erroneous travel management plan that suggested it planned to close thousands of miles of roads, contributed to the uproar.
“Some days I look at it and think, ‘Man, how are we ever going to stop this juggernaut of development?’ But I still try to be optimistic. This herd is pretty resilient.”
Even some conservation advocates questioned the decision, fearing the political repercussions. Joshua Coursey, founder, president and CEO of the Muley Fanatic Foundation, a deer conservation nonprofit, said the plan, if adopted as is, could discourage the state from mapping or protecting additional corridors. Some local groups that had been working with the BLM on the middle-of-the-road alternative felt undermined by the decision.
“If it is imposed, let’s say, from the federal government, you’re going to have resistance, you’re going to have a certain amount of ‘like hell,’” Gov. Gordon told me in an interview. “Plus, I don’t think the science is going to be as well understood or as well developed or as locally calibrated. I think it’s really going to become much more of a political football.”
Exactly why the BLM chose the conservation-heavy alternative is anyone’s guess — and everyone has one. In an email, the BLM’s national public-affairs office stated that the agency had considered many uses for the area, including energy and minerals development, renewables, livestock grazing, and cultural and wildlife resource protection.
“Preferred Alternative B balances these multiple uses by increasing special management areas, adding additional protections for sensitive wildlife habitat and cultural and natural resources, while allowing continued energy development,” the office wrote. (A federal information request filed to better understand the decision-making process had not been filled by press time.)
Temple Stoellinger, a UW environment and natural resources law professor who has spent decades observing public-land policymaking, speculated that the BLM was thinking strategically. After four years of negotiations among state and local officials, industry representatives, the Trump administration and others, the plan’s middle-of-the-road alternative contained fewer conservation measures than the status quo. Instead of going back to the state for yet more years of negotiations, the BLM’s leadership may have chosen the conservation alternative with the expectation of compromising during the comment period and between the draft and the final version.
Which may be what happens. The BLM extended the normal 60-day comment period, and Gordon asked UW to facilitate a working group composed of representatives from the oil and gas industry and the ranching, conservation, hunting and motorized recreation communities. When I asked the agency’s public affairs office if BLM Director Tracy Stone-Manning was surprised by the harsh public reaction to the plan, the office forwarded a written response: “Our experience is that the more a public discussion goes into the details, science and intention of a proposed plan, the more the heated rhetoric dissipates and the better the final product will be.”
The BLM will likely release an updated version of the preferred alternative this spring. Since a new presidential administration can only reverse federal decisions made in the previous six months, observers expect the agency to push to finalize the plan by June.
DEER 665 LEFT her summer range near Wilson, Wyoming, on Oct. 13, heading south into the mountains and across the busy lanes of Highway 89. She picked her way through a sprawling Jackson suburb and into a nearby mountain range before rejoining the rest of the herd to wander in and out of private lands, cross more than 100 fences, and navigate two more highways on the journey south.
The researchers who briefly captured her when she returned to the Red Desert found that she still had about 12% body fat, more than twice as much as some of her cousins who stayed closer to home. Tayler LaSharr, a post-doctoral researcher with the University of Wyoming’s Monteith Shop, pointed to squiggly lines on an ultrasound machine showing 665’s insides. “At the very top, this is all fat, and this line here, the whiter one, is the bicep,” she said. “This animal is in good shape.”
Volunteers helped with the trapping, and Dominic Wolf, the mayor of nearby Superior, stopped by. Kauffman and other researchers explained the various tests and described the effects of last winter as well as their hopes for the spring. Communicating with the public isn’t officially part of the research, but Kauffman sees it as critical to migration’s survival.
For while the future of this route is uncertain, it is much better protected than places like Carter Mountain in northern Wyoming, where thousands of pronghorn dodge Yellowstone-bound traffic on Highway 120. Or the Wyoming Range, where more than half of the mule deer herd perished during last year’s hard winter and a migration route designation is, according to Wyoming Game and Fish Director Nesvik, likely a couple of years away. Or northeast Wyoming, where antelope migrate back and forth to Montana through an unmapped maze of private land and energy development.
And Wyoming, despite its slow progress on state-level protections, is still ahead of most other Western states. A 2021 joint resolution by the Colorado Legislature called on the state to develop migration policies and requested more data collection and information on species connectivity. California is building the world’s largest wildlife crossing over 10 lanes of traffic, while New Mexico’s departments of transportation and game and fish have a wildlife corridors action plan.
Then there’s Montana, where officials have mapped migration routes but won’t reveal them publicly. They’re concerned that publicizing the routes could harm the state’s relationships with landowners who do not want their land identified as part of a route, or make the wildlife easier targets for hunters or people gathering shed antlers.
“The public perception is, ‘We can just fix this, let’s just save the Red Desert-Hoback, and all we’ve got to do is build an overpass or have an easement or follow the Rock Springs Management Plan.’ But there’s no magic wand,” Sawyer said. “There are so many things that have to happen … that it’s a never-ending task.”
In March, after a three-year hiatus, the Wyoming Game and Fish Commission voted unanimously to proceed with the designation process on the famous Path of the Pronghorn, which passes through a sprawling gas field and lost almost 90% of its animals during the devastating winter of 2022-2023. The Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone tribes are also working to conserve migration pathways on the Wind River Reservation, part of a long tradition of conservation that started when the tribes set aside almost 200,000 acres of land as a roadless area in the late 1930s, decades before the 1964 Wilderness Act. In 2023, the tribes rounded up 6,500 wild horses to improve habitat for species including migratory deer and elk. While tribal fish and game biologists collaborate with colleagues in state wildlife agencies, tribal governments have not formally participated in state-level corridor management. But Baldes said it’s “about time” that broader efforts to protect migration corridors made progress.
Middleton, who has studied migrations around Yellowstone for more than a decade, sounded resolutely optimistic as he spoke about the USDA’s Migratory Big Game Initiative and the value of sitting down at kitchen tables to talk through thorny issues. “I will get too depressed if I just decide it’s ‘us versus them,’” he said. Still, he added later, “sometimes you have sleepless nights.”
“The public perception is, ‘We can just fix this, let’s just save the Red Desert-Hoback, and all we’ve got to do is build an overpass or have an easement or follow the Rock Springs Management Plan.’ But there’s no magic wand.”
We can’t have endless energy development and unchecked subdivisions if we want to protect migratory herds, he said. Something has to give. In some areas, it will be development; in others, it will be wildlife.
Either way, it won’t happen quietly. While there may be noisy resistance to policies like the new BLM plan, there’s also passionate interest in migration, as demonstrated by the more than 24 million people who have watched a trail camera broadcasting one fence crossing, and by dedicated deer groupies like Julie Legg, with her camera and her online audience.
Standing in the living room of her home in Superior, Legg flipped through the TikTok videos on her smartphone. Heart emojis from her followers festooned the images of mule deer on the move. “I guess we could do without them,” she said. “But I wouldn’t want to.”
This story is part of High Country News’ Conservation Beyond Boundaries project, which is supported by the BAND Foundation.
Christine Peterson lives in Laramie, Wyoming, and has covered science, the environment and outdoor recreation in Wyoming for more than a decade. Her work has appeared in National Geographic, Outdoor Life and the Casper Star-Tribune, among others. We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.
This article appeared in the April 2024 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Perilous paths.”
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