Restoring Wild Patterns

by Meredith Taylor

Protecting and restoring traditional wildlife migration corridors between the vast landscapes of Greater Yellowstone and the northern and southern Rockies is a daunting challenge. Booming oil and gas fields, livestock overgrazing, sprawling subdivisions and other human developments are fragmenting habitat, encroaching on critical winter

Pronghorn and mule deer still make the longest terrestrial mammal migration in the lower 48 states: a 160-mile trip from Jackson Hole to the Green River Basin and Little Colorado Desert.

range and blocking historic migration routes throughout Greater Yellowstone. Safeguarding vital links between summer and winter ranges is critical to ensure the survival of abundant, healthy, genetically diverse wildlife populations in the future.

In response, WOC, the Wyoming Wildlife Federation and other conservationists have crafted a proposal called Restoring Wild Patterns. We have presented the proposal to citizens and submitted it to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Park Service as a conservation alternative to the agencies' draft Elk and Bison Management Plan for Wyoming.

Following Ancient Paths

Since the last Ice Age, an array of wildlife species has followed ancient migration patterns each year from the heart of Yellowstone south through the Gros Ventre, Snake, Hoback and Green River drainages. This pattern is as basic as breathing for animals like elk, deer, antelope and their predators that move between summer and winter ranges. In addition, a host of other species, from insects and birds to reptiles and small mammals, have adapted themselves to - and depend on - the annual migrations of charismatic megafauna within Greater Yellowstone.

However, with the pioneer settlement of the West, many historic migration corridors and linkage zones from forested mountains to sagebrush grasslands were blocked by fences, homesteads and cattle and sheep ranches. Uncontrolled hunting decimated some native big-game herds and, to some extent, altered patterns of animal behavior and migration throughout this vast landscape.

At the same time, wolves and grizzly bears were nearly hunted to extinction. Without pressure from these large predators, ungulates like elk and deer had no incentive to disperse widely across the landscape, and instead grazed and browsed smaller areas of their summer and winter ranges, increasing impacts on local plant communities.

As a result of these dramatic changes over the past century, some big-game animals no longer migrate. Many wildlife managers now assume that elk and other wildlife no longer follow their instincts to winter in the desert lowlands, since they are "short-stopped" by state and federal feedgrounds.

However, studies by Hall Sawyer and Fred Lindzey of the University of Wyoming Cooperative's Fish and Wildlife Research Unit recently documented that pronghorn and mule deer still make the longest terrestrial mammal migration in the lower 48 states each winter: a 160-mile trip through southern Greater Yellowstone, from Jackson Hole, the Hoback and the Gros Ventre Range to the Green River Basin and Little Colorado Desert.

Some traditional migration routes still remain, although bottlenecks along the Green and New Fork River corridors and at Trapper's Point have severely restricted wildlife movement. Elk are still seen in the Green River Basin from the west of the Prospect Mountains down the Big Sandy River to the Seedskadee National Wildlife Refuge and the Little Colorado Desert. Despite a daunting array of human obstacles in their path, deer and antelope still manage to migrate from Grand Teton National Park to their historic desert winter range.

"Saving" Elk

A century ago, forward-thinking conservationists proposed five winter-game preserves to protect wildlife habitat and migration routes between Yellowstone National Park and the Green River. But because many local ranchers and landowners opposed what they perceived as a "federal takeover" of lands between the Gros Ventre and Green Rivers, only three of these preserves were created: the Teton Game Preserve (now the Teton Wilderness), the National Elk Refuge and the Izaac Walton League addition to the refuge.

With only portions of critical habitat protected, ranchers first and later wildlife managers began to feed the elk to "save" them for future hunters and other wildlife enthusiasts. At the time, supplemental winter feeding seemed like a good solution to the problem of hungry elk raiding ranchers' haystacks. Despite ranchers' and government officials' altruistic intentions, feeding elk - as well as attempting to eliminate their natural predators - had unintended consequences. Elk populations, artificially sustained by supplemental feeding, have exceeded their carrying capacity on available habitat, threatening other wildlife species and native plants and increasing the incidence of disease transmission.

A Recipe for Disaster

In 1944, the Wyoming Game & Fish Department (WGFD) conducted an experiment to re-establish elk migration paths from desert winter ranges to surrounding mountain summer ranges by transplanting elk on Horse, Cottonwood, Dry Piney and Slate Creeks, Black Canyon, Hams Fork, the Red Desert and near the Wind River Front.

Biologist Warren Allred reported that "[n]ot more than half of the elk that leave the mountains hit the feedgrounds. The balance of the elk drift onto the fringe of the Red Desert to the south. It is believed that within the next few years the emergency feedgrounds will be entirely eliminated." However, a few hunters and landowners prevented the elimination of "emergency" feedgrounds by successfully demanding that more state feedgrounds be established.

In the 1940s, biologist Olaus Murie documented the impacts of high-density elk populations on native habitat and other native species. "[C]onditions are obviously very wrong for the Jackson Hole elk," he wrote. "Artificial feeding of game animals is now rightly looked upon as the last resort in wildlife management - a practice to be adopted only when all efforts to provide suitable winter range have failed."

Elk concentrated on the National Elk Refuge and state feedgrounds are vulnerable to a catastrophic die-off from disease. In a 2000 article in Wyoming Wildlife News, biologists called feedgrounds "a recipe for disaster." From Michigan to California, tens of thousands of wild animals have been slaughtered to prevent the further spread of brucellosis, chronic wasting disease, hoof and mouth disease and tuberculosis. In contrast, brucellosis is rare in the healthy, free-ranging elk herds that migrate in and out of Yellowstone into Wyoming, Montana and Idaho.

Recommendations

Protecting and restoring wildlife migration corridors requires the conservation of large landscapes rather than the piecemeal, politically expedient land partitioning we have seen in the past. To ensure the long-term survival of our wildlife populations, Restoring Wild Patterns challenges wildlife managers to re-evaluate their priorities by working to safeguard existing migration corridors and restore missing links in those corridors.

Restoring Wild Patterns recommends the following actions:

• Create incentives to private landowners to protect open space through the voluntary sale of conservation easements;
• Protect missing links of critical wildlife habitat on private and public lands in the Gros Ventre and Green River valleys by implementing county land-use plans. Such plans are needed to reduce future subdivision sprawl and, where development has already occurred, help private landowners avoid conflicts within wildlife migration corridors;
• Place a moratorium on new oil and gas leasing in migration corridors until federal agencies can complete cumulative-effects analyses of the impacts of this unprecedented development;
• Tax mineral production on public lands to create a wildlife trust fund to finance habitat acquisition and conservation easements;
• Encourage industry to work with land managers and conservationists to provide crucial winter range habitat as off-site mitigation from oil and gas fields and transmission routes; and
• Phase out elk feedgrounds where possible and allow supplemental feeding only on an emergency basis to manage wildlife at carrying capacity on native range.

It is critical that landowners, state and local governments, land managers and conservationists work together to find common ground. The choice to protect and restore historic migration paths is ours now, but as the last great corridors are being fragmented, this may be the last chance we get to make that choice.