Colorado plays the long game on nearly three million acres of state trust land

By Birch Malotky

Senator Dylan Roberts might be one of the few people in the Colorado state legislature who has been interested in state trust land for years. This widespread but generally misunderstood type of land is often lumped in with public lands, but it has a specific and unique purpose that sets it apart from national parks, forests, wildlife refuges, and so on. Trust lands—which the federal government granted to states when they became states—are managed to support K-12 schools and other public institutions, usually by making money to fund them.

Most state trust lands have been leased for agriculture, mining, and logging, but not all parcels—which are scattered all over Colorado— have good soil, or minerals, or forests. Roberts says there are “small tracts of land within cities and towns or along highways that aren’t going to be used for traditional leasing ever, and are not wildlife corridors or anything like that, so they’re not generating any economic value.” The senator, who represents a district with “some very high-cost communities that deal with significant housing challenges,” thinks that building affordable housing on these random bits of trust land could make good money for the schools while helping keep working families where they are needed.

He points to a quarter-acre plot “right in the heart of Denver that was state trust land and, for whatever reason, hadn’t been developed or sold.” The Colorado State Land Board, which manages state trust lands, built affordable housing on the parcel back in 2022, and “that became the model,” Roberts says. When he started looking at state trust land in his district, which spans much of northwestern Colorado and includes places like Vail, Aspen, and Breckinridge, he discovered several promising parcels “along already existing transportation corridors and near other residential and commercial development.” Through these efforts, one project is already moving forward in Dowd Junction, between Avon and Vail.

As the 150th anniversary of Colorado, and its state trust lands, approached, Roberts connected with a number of other legislators and organizations interested in exploring and expanding these kinds of creative uses of trust land. Together, they drafted and passed HB 1332 last spring, which instructs a working group to conduct an analysis of state trust lands and write a report with recommendations on opportunities to advance affordable housing, conservation, climate resilience, biodiversity, recreation, and renewable energy.

The act, presented as a kind of sesquicentennial performance review, is the latest juncture in a long history of Colorado figuring how to make the best out of a group of lands that were designated for a certain purpose, but weren’t optimally designed to fulfill that purpose. Throughout that time, the scattered, widespread nature of the parcels has proven both challenge and opportunity, and has required creative thinking and a reckoning with the legal and moral responsibility of managing not only for this generation or the next, but for generations far into the future.

Most people have never heard of state trust lands. Matt Samelson, an attorney with Western Environmental Law Partners who helped advocate for HB 1332 and has been appointed to the working group, admits that it’s “a pretty weird little corner of the land world.” The Colorado State Land Board Director, Nicole Rosmarino, says that most Coloradans are not aware of the specifics of her agency’s mission. But that agency is the second largest landowner in the state—responsible for 2.8 million surface acres and 4 million sub-surface acres—and its mission goes back to the founding fathers, Manifest Destiny, and a desire to measure and divide the world into a uniform grid.

Before the Constitution was even adopted, a newly independent America turned to securing its claims to the western frontier, wanting to ensure that new territories did not try to split off from the young and fragile republic, and also that they would hold to the democratic ideals of the revolutionaries. Many saw public education as essential to preparing the nation’s citizens for their civic duties, but funding was a problem. The settled, eastern states had an established tax base, but yet-to-be-formed western states did not, and the federal government was in massive debt from the war.

Cash poor but land rich, the Continental Congress passed the Land Ordinance of 1785 and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which divided the West into square townships, among other things. Each township was made up of 36 sections of one square mile (640 acres) each. The 16th section, located at the heart of each township, was reserved “for the maintenance of public schools within said township.”

This one provision laid the foundation for more than a century of land grants, from Ohio’s statehood in 1803 to Arizona’s in 1912. Totaling more than 80 million acres, the school land grants made during this period were nearly as large as those made to the railroads. So, this is where the question of a system designated for a purpose, but not designed for it, begins. Why were the grants made in this pattern? How, exactly, were these lands meant to support public schools? And why the 16th section?

It’s tempting to imagine that a central section was reserved for the purpose of actually hosting a schoolhouse, such that each township was organized around its civic core and distributed across the countryside with mathematical precision. It does seem to fit with the intellectual zeitgeist of the revolutionaries, who were enamored of rationalism and the idea of an agrarian democracy. But if that was the intent, realities on the ground rendered it more symbolic than practicable, creating a mismatch between how the lands were distributed and how they came to be managed that has created challenges for administrators ever since.

At the least, it seems the Continental Congress did intend for there to be a school in every 36-square-mile township in the West, which explains why the grant pattern was one parcel in each township instead of a single block of school trust lands. The evidence is in the way that the initial grants to new states were directed to township-level governments for the exclusive benefit of that township’s schools. The vision was not a statewide, state-administered school system, where land or a school in one township could support a broader area, but rather one characterized by self-sufficiency and local control.

This likely reflects, in part, post-revolutionary uneasiness with centralized government, but it was a fundamental flaw in both purpose and design. The reality of settlement and western landscapes meant that population centers formed around travel corridors, arable land, military outposts, and other strategic features, rather than the artificial boundaries of the rectangular survey system. This left plenty of townships lacking people, governments, and the need for a school.

In response, Congress changed to whom the grants were made, and for whose benefit. By the mid-1800s, it was granting land to state governments rather than local ones, for the support of schools statewide rather than exclusively for schools in the township where the land was located. But which lands were granted did not change, so the basic pattern of reserving a little bit of land all across the state persisted. This created a kind of checkerboard land ownership that people today sometimes call “the blue rash” because of the way that state trust parcels—light blue on many maps— pock the surface of many western states.

The scattered nature of these lands is the first challenge that trust land managers have had to contend with over the years. Smaller, discontinuous parcels don’t offer the management efficiencies that larger parcels do, and they are more vulnerable to impacts from the lands around them. “The checkerboard makes it hard to have consistent management,” Samelson says, “because the surrounding uses and surrounding ownership may just have a very different perspective than the state does.” For example, he asks, “How do you manage a little 640-acre parcel inside of a Wilderness Study Area? Are you actually going to generate money from that?”

In Colorado—which received sections 16 and 36 in each township “for the support of common schools”—the checkerboard mostly overlays the eastern plains, with far less state trust land appearing west of the Continental Divide. That’s partially because Colorado didn’t receive sections that were already spoken for, including a lot of the Ute reservation, which at that time covered roughly the western third of Colorado.

In today’s Southern Ute and Ute Mountain Ute reservations, there are still no state trust lands—a sharp contrast to many states. A Grist report found that Utah, for example, claimed more than half a million acres, or 5.7 percent, of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, while the Leech Lake Reservation in Minnesota is nearly 20 percent state trust land.

In answer to the difficulties of the checkerboard, Colorado has, over the years, successfully traded away many of its trust parcels that were surrounded by Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service lands, and pursued consolidation. It now holds title to several properties of 25,000 acres or more, including State Forest State Park and a number of ranches. But land exchanges can be complex and slow, and require a landowner who is willing to trade, so plenty of those 640-acre sections remain.

As to the question of how the reserved sections were meant to support schools, the 1967 Lassen v. Arizona Highway Department Supreme Court case implies that at least some of the granted lands were intended to be used as building sites for schools. Indeed, the Maxwell Schoolhouse in Buena Vista still stands today as a historic site on Colorado trust land. But the court also goes on to say that because “the lands were obviously too extensive and too often inappropriate” for “actual use by the beneficiaries…the grant was plainly expected to produce a fund, accumulated by sale and use of the trust lands, with which the State could support the public institutions designated by the [Enabling] Act.”

This practice of funding schools through leasing and sale was well-established in the colonies when the Land Ordinance passed in 1785 and is, for the most part, exactly what happened. The states created before 1851, like California, sold all or most of their state trust lands, with at least one case of granted lands being given to teachers in lieu of salary. The younger states tended increasingly towards retention and leasing. Colorado, which was formed in 1876, still holds 62 percent of its original granted lands, with older states retaining as little as 3 percent and younger states as much as 91 percent. For the states that retained their granted land, leasing reflected the primary industries of the 19th and early 20th centuries—farming, grazing, logging, and mining.

Most states also developed a permanent fund to house trust land revenue (from sales and leasing), the earnings from which could be distributed to schools. Colorado was the first state required to do so. Over time, administration of these land grants evolved into, and has been interpreted by courts as constituting, formal trust arrangements, in which the state (the trustee) has the legal responsibility to manage the land and the permanent fund (the trust corpus) with undivided loyalty, good faith, skill, and diligence, for the benefit of public schools and other named institutions (the beneficiaries).

In Colorado, 95 percent of trust lands benefit K-12 education, with smaller grants supporting public buildings, the penitentiary, and state universities. Another pair of trusts, called the internal improvements and saline trusts, benefit the state park system. This pair of trusts includes land within 13 of Colorado’s state parks, for which the parks themselves are the beneficiaries but have to contract with the State Land Board to use. Samelson calls this situation “perhaps unduly complicated,” and it’s part of why he and others first got involved with HB 1332.

Across all Colorado state trust lands, leasing generated $230 million last year, with the permanent fund producing another $50 million in interest. About half that went back into growing the permanent fund and half went to the Department of Education’s Building Excellent Schools Today (BEST) program. The program supports school construction and renovation, fixing things like boilers and roofs, particularly in rural Colorado where there is less of a tax base.

While many states, Colorado included, have at times taken their trust responsibility to mean maximizing revenue generation, this management strategy can be in tension with the duty to sustainably manage trust assets, such that they can continue to benefit future generations of schoolchildren in perpetuity. This tension came to a head in Colorado in 1996, when voters approved a constitutional amendment that asserts “that economic productivity of all lands held in public trust is dependent on sound stewardship, including protecting and enhancing the beauty, natural values, open space, and wildlife habitat thereof,” and instructs the board to manage state trust lands to “produce reasonable and consistent income over time.” Amendment 16 also created a 300,000-acre Stewardship Trust “to preserve the long-term benefits and returns to the state” by managing the lands specifically for their natural values.

The ballot measure was a sharp rebuke to the maximization-focused management of the time, which had led to a series of high-profile controversies around proposed uses of trust lands—including what would have been the nation’s largest commercial hog farm, sited along the South Platte River near billionaire Phil Anschutz’s hunting lodge.

Amendment 16 was accused of violating the trust mandate, but the courts ultimately found that encouraging “sound stewardship” and “reasonable and consistent income” was not corrupting the purpose of the State Land Board, but rather providing guidance on a management approach for achieving that purpose—one that upholds the long-term health of the trust.

As to the final question of why the founding fathers reserved the 16th section specifically, the Supreme Court justices write in Cooper v. Roberts that it was meant “to plant in the heart of every community…grateful reverence for the wisdom, forecast, and magnanimous statesmanship of those who framed the institutions for these new States.” It would also promote “good governance and the happiness of mankind by the spread of religion, morality, and knowledge.”

Apart from this largely symbolic gesture, it was likely just as good a method as any other to systematically grant largely unexplored land to unknown future states. It still can’t be called optimal—while states ended up with some land that was excellent for generating revenue to fund schools, they also had plenty that was steep and dry, lacking trees or minerals, or too far away from roads, rivers, and towns to be useful. Congress did give more land to the more arid states (two sections per township and then four), but the disparate value of granted lands, in addition to their small, scattered nature, has remained a challenge through centuries of trust land managers trying to meet their constitutional obligation. For most western states today, a small percentage of the granted sections generate the majority of revenue, while the rest produce more marginal incomes, or in some instances, no money at all.

But Rosmarino, the Colorado State Land Board director, says we have to be careful about using too broad a brush on the issue. The distribution of trust lands is an advantage, she says, for the opportunity it affords to build relationships all across the state, with local governments and lessees that live and work close to the land. Isolated sections can be integral parts of larger projects, from multigenerational ranches and farms to new, utility-scale renewable energy projects. They can also, with creative thinking, support “projects with a pretty small footprint that have provided big results financially for the State Land Board,” as well as the community and the environment, she says.

For example, a sale of 400 acres of state trust land surrounded by development in Erie yielded $40 million for the state’s permanent fund. In southeast Colorado, the City of Lamar plans to purchase electricity from a solar garden being built on 30 acres of trust land. And there is that quarter-acre lot in the middle of Denver with the affordable housing development that inspired Senator Roberts.

Colorado also hosts some of the West’s only ecosystem service leases on state trust land. In one case, when a water utility needed to offset the impact a new reservoir would have on the federally threatened Preble’s meadow jumping mouse, the State Land Board restored and enhanced 222 acres of habitat on state trust land. This created the state’s first species conservation bank, which has generated around $750,000. In another case, a 200-acre floodplain on the South Platte River became a wetland mitigation bank that offsets gravel mining elsewhere in the watershed. That lease has generated more than $2 million for Colorado’s schools, on a property that was appraised for less than $200,000. For both the jumping mouse and wetland mitigation projects, grazing was able to continue on most of the property.

These kinds of projects can turn the challenge of the checkerboard into an asset, says Mindy Gottsegen, the conservation services manager who developed and runs the State Land Board’s ecosystem services line of business. That’s because a diverse land base can mean access to diverse markets, and the State Land Board is continuously expanding its leasing program to take advantage of that dynamic.

Of course, legacy industries remain integral to Colorado’s school trust—96 percent of land is leased for farming and grazing, and 82 percent of revenue comes from mineral extraction, particularly oil and gas development. But, Gottsegen says, “We have areas of the state where we think there’s no oil and gas, and it’s very arid. Now all of a sudden, we know that there are big helium reserves there, and we have access to that because of the checkerboard pattern.” All it takes is for a new market to develop, and a property that didn’t seem like it had much to offer 30 years prior is suddenly worth a lot more.

Amendment 16’s intergenerational outlook helps preserve these kinds of opportunities. By dialing down the pressure for immediate, maximized return, the amendment allows managers to forego near-term development and keep their options open on any given parcel of land. And the emphasis on sound stewardship has provided fertile ground to explore leasing for things that preserve or enhance the value of land while still making money for the beneficiaries, like regenerative grazing and wildfire restoration for carbon credits, which Gottsegen is currently working on.

The founder of a land trust and a former advisor to the governor, Rosmarino sees her position, and these kinds of projects, as “a great convergence of my background in conservation and agriculture, and also my interest in being really entrepreneurial in generating revenue for a good cause.” That’s why she welcomes working with the State Trust Lands Conservation and Recreation Work Group, which was formed by the passage of HB 1332 last spring. “We really see it as an opportunity to showcase how innovative we are trying to be,” she says, adding that “creative solutions can come from anyone and anywhere.”

Senator Katie Wallace, who co-sponsored HB-1332 with Senator Roberts and Representative Karen McCormick, says that “the goal of the working group is to see how state trust lands can support conservation, climate resilience, biodiversity, and recreation, while still honoring and uplifting the duty to generate reliable revenue for our public schools.” The bill’s proponents hope it can provide support for the State Land Board’s existing efforts and inspire new projects, particularly by “pulling in a lot more voices from a lot of different perspectives,” says McCormick.

The State Land Board is “a pretty lean organization, and because of its small size and the sheer amount of land they have, a lot of times they end up having to be reactive to proposals coming from outside entities,” says Samelson. They have still managed to do some really exciting and creative work, says John Rader, who was part of the coalition that advocated for the bill, but “there hasn’t been a comprehensive, holistic approach that gathers stakeholder input,” he says.

So, the bill establishes what Wallace and McCormick both call a kind of mind trust, featuring 24 members representing the trust beneficiaries, agriculture, oil and gas, conservation, recreation, affordable housing, and the Southern Ute and Ute Mountain Ute tribes, as well as experts in economics, law, and real estate. “We kept adding seats to the working group,” says McCormick, “which tells you that folks saw the importance of having their voices in the mix.”

The group, which only just convened for the first time in October, is instructed to inventory state trust lands for their potential to support these various goals—for example by identifying parcels that contain habitat for Colorado’s species of great conservation concern—and to analyze the various tools and mechanisms available to achieve them—like conservation leases and land swaps. They will present their recommendations in an interim report by March 16 and a final report by September 1, 2026.

The idea, Samelson says, is to create space to have a proactive conversation “outside of the pressure cooker of the capitol dome,” where a wide variety of folks can mull over all the different options and available avenues “and come back with a package that, hopefully, has been thoroughly poked at from different angles.”

All the bill’s sponsors and proponents emphasize that the intent of the group is not to displace or discount legacy users of state trust lands, but rather to look in the margins of what’s already happening for new opportunities to make the whole corpus of trust lands work for the beneficiaries. “How do we look at those parts of the corpus that aren’t oil and gas, or agriculture?” asks Wallace.

Samelson, for example, is interested in what he calls inholdings and edgeholdings—those tricky 640-acre parcels that can be hard to manage on their own. Rader, who is the public lands program manager for the San Juan Citizens Alliance, is also interested in inholdings, particularly in nearby Lone Mesa State Park. “That’s our small window into state trust lands,” he says, “and from there the conversation just started ballooning outward.”

The twist with those Lone Mesa inholdings, and state trust land in 12 other Colorado state parks, is that they’re part of the land grant that was made to benefit the state park system. So, you end up with a weird situation “where Colorado Parks and Wildlife [which manages state parks] is both the lessee and the beneficiary,” says Rader. Since it doesn’t make sense for Parks and Wildlife to pay rent that would be given back to the agency, they enter into beneficial use agreements, often short term, where no money is exchanged. On the state parks side, “that doesn’t give us a lot of certainty about longterm management for conservation and recreation,” says Rader, “and it doesn’t generate a lot of revenue for the State Land Board, so it’s kind of this double inefficiency.”

Thinking about creative management solutions for the lands that benefit state parks is one of the working group’s first tasks. Also intended for the interim report is a look at the Stewardship Trust that arose from Amendment 16. The amendment “says that the lands are supposed to be managed to preserve and enhance their natural values,” says Rader, “but it doesn’t really define natural values. It doesn’t tell the state land board how to manage for them. It doesn’t say what uses are compatible or incompatible with those natural values.” He’s hoping the working group can define some terms and establish clearer procedures. Beyond those specific trusts, Rader just wants to know what’s out there in terms of creative uses of state trust land, particularly when it comes to making money while conserving the land.

It’s a timely conversation, in part because “we are in a really tough budget situation and we have been for a really long time,” according to Wallace, “and that makes any revenue stream absolutely irreplaceable.” But more than immediate need, everyone seemed to feel that this moment—150 years after Colorado first received its trust lands, and 30 years after Amendment 16 established the twin pillars of sound stewardship and reasonable and consistent income—was simply ripe for reflection.

“There hasn’t been a comprehensive look at how we are using our state trust lands in quite a long time,” says Roberts, “and the practical reality of our state is changing. We’re struggling with issues like housing and wanting to promote more outdoor recreation and protect the environment, and this is a chance to get some of the best and brightest minds together to look at the opportunities to maximize the value of every state trust land—not just the big parcels, but the small parcels too.”

Birch Malotky is the editor of Western Confluence magazine and writes from Laramie, Wyoming.

Header image: Lowry Ranch. (Raquel Wertsbaugh)

The complicated legacy of allotment legislation

By Autumn L. Bernhardt

Consider a pronghorn doe embarking on her yearly migration route or simply traveling an intermediate distance in search of better grass. Over the course of her journey, she may cross streams, roads, and fences. She may also cross different types of public land managed by state and federal agencies, as well as private property located in various counties. Then imagine that this same doe ventures onto a reservation that has been subject to allotment legislation. While on the reservation, she not only passes through tribal lands, but also private property owned by tribal citizens and private property owned by non-tribal citizens.

As she crosses these varied physical and legal landscapes, the entity with jurisdiction over this doe also changes. In some cases, it may be unclear who is responsible for her, creating challenges for environmental code enforcement and wildlife management. These challenges in environmental management are just a taste of the complexity in other areas of tribal administration and regulation.

For the most part, governments have authority to pass and enforce laws within their territorial limits. But tribes are often frustrated in this by the legacy of federal policy known as allotment, which broke up reservation lands into private property parcels and authorized the sale of lands deemed “surplus.” Allotment dramatically reduced the size of reservations and created a political geography that invites jurisdictional confusion and conflict between the federal government, states, tribes, and private landowners. In the almost century and a half since allotment began, the law has been slow to deal with its fallout, and even today, clarity and regulatory coordination remain elusive.

To understand how allotment impacted reservations, some basic understanding of land tenure and trust law is helpful. Reservations are held in trust by the federal government. Tribes, with their own distinct governments, have beneficial ownership of these lands. This means that the federal government holds legal title, but tribes are still recognized as owners with certain rights and expectations of use and possession of land. As a trustee, the federal government has a high fiduciary duty to tribes as trust beneficiaries, which implies good faith and even-handed dealings. In the foundational Cherokee Nation v. Georgia case, the Supreme Court likened this special trust relationship to that of “a ward to his guardian,” while also noting that the Cherokee tribe was “a distinct political society separated from others, capable of managing its own affairs and governing itself.” Despite the duty a guardian should have to act in a ward’s best interests, this ward-guardian analogy has been used, at times, in a more paternalistic way to justify absolute discretion by the federal government in its relationships with Native nations.

Most reservations were tribal trust land before the General Allotment Act of 1887, which took tribal land out of trust, converting large holdings within reservations into private land that could be bought, sold, and taxed. The act—sometimes called the Dawes Act because Congressman Henry Dawes from Massachusetts guided it through the legislative process—somewhat resembled the Homestead Act in operational terms. It awarded roughly 160 acres to each family head who was on a tribal roll (or Dawes roll), although the acreage varied between grazing, agricultural, and timber land, and, after subsequent amendments, depended on who the intended allottee was. The act also contained a mandate for the disposal of reservation lands that the federal government deemed “surplus,” which were sold to settlers. Although the General Allotment Act played a predominant role in allotment policy, several surplus land acts and allotment acts that only applied to a single tribe also contributed to the fracturing of land ownership.

At first, allotted land would be held in a different kind of trust, where the allottee, rather than the tribe, was the beneficiary. During this period, which the act set at 25 years, the allottee didn’t have full private property rights, and the state couldn’t tax the land. After the trust period ended, the land would be private, “fee patent” land that could be taxed by the state and sold by the allottee, who could also be granted US citizenship. Sometimes the federal government extended the trust period. A competency commission, typically made up of non-tribal citizens involved in federal-tribal affairs, could shorten it by finding the allottee to be “competent.”

While some tribal allottees still have land holdings within reservations, many allotted parcels that were originally awarded to tribal members eventually transferred into the hands of non-tribal members. Tribal allottees may have been willing sellers in some instances, but in other instances they may have been pressured to sell or lost lands due to tax default or mortgage foreclosure. Economic conditions on reservations were dire, forced assimilation to new food economies without regard to ecological realities was ill-fated, and Indian Service agents and their successors in the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) could be heavy handed in their control of the daily lives of tribal members, including how tribal members ran their own farms and ranches. Furthermore, tax notices came in the mail to sometimes remote destinations in a language that tribal members did not always speak fluently. For these reasons, early “competency” findings were often criticized because they subjected the allottee to taxation and pressure from land speculators sooner rather than later.

Allotted lands did not slip through the hands of tribal allottees because tribal societies lacked any concept of private ownership. Although nomadic tribes had communal territories that sometimes shifted with the seasons and migration patterns, a number of more location-bound tribes had designated fishing, hunting, and agricultural lands reserved to families or clans. Tribes in the Southwest did pool their resources to operate communal irrigation systems, and some Great Plains tribes hunted buffalo collectively, but in both cases harvested crops or game often went home to individuals and family units. The story of allotment is more complicated than can be explained in a line or two. Tribes had their own laws and customs and were submerged into a completely different set of customs and laws.

The allotment era came to an official end in 1934, with Section 1 of the Indian Reorganization Act declaring that reservation land shall no longer be allotted. Covering more than just allotment, the Indian Reorganization Act came about after a study known as the Meriam Report documented many of the failures of allotment and federal administration of tribal affairs. But a lot of land had already been allotted, leaving reservations reduced in size and with land tenure alternating between tribal and fee patent lands that were owned by either tribal members or non-tribal members.

The checkerboard metaphor has been in common usage for a long time, but comparing maps of allotted reservations to checkerboards can be a bit misleading. Checkerboards are uniformly spaced and suggest some sort of deliberate planning and organization. The map of the Cheyenne River Sioux reservation, by contrast, looks a bit like digital camo. The map of the Nez Perce reservation looks like small islands of tribal land floating intermittently in an ocean of non-tribal allotted land. Reservations can be lightly to heavily allotted, but roughly three-quarters of all reservations were allotted to some degree.

Like so much of American law, allotment was born out of a particular time and a particular set of cultural narratives. Having begun during the thrust of Manifest Destiny, allotment was ostensibly assimilationist in nature. Along with government-funded boarding schools, missionary conversion efforts, and the creation of reservations themselves, assimilation policy was regarded by its advocates as the gentler arm of Federal Indian policy, especially in comparison to extermination strategies like the Indian Wars. Assimilationists, such as John Wesley Powell, aimed at making Indigenous peoples in the US more palatable to, and theoretically more integrated in, dominant society by making them more like dominant society in dress, speech, religion, gender norms, and thought. Although assimilation was deemed less forceful, it was still coercive. R. H. Pratt, who acted as superintendent of the notorious Carlisle Indian Boarding School, summarized assimilationist theory when he said: “A great general had said that the only good Indian is a dead one…I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him and save the man.”

In the case of allotment, assimilation meant compelling Native Americans to become “pastoral and civilized” by doing agriculture the way Euro-Americans thought agriculture should be done. That translated to breaking apart communal tribal land, assigning individual land parcels to tribal members to farm and graze, and making tribes perform irrigated agriculture on arid private real estate more suitable for buffalo migration, with little to no capital or equipment. Its advocates claimed that allotment was good and necessary for the development of Native Americans and the only viable means to ensure their physical survival given the aggressive behavior and attitude of the country. Henry Dawes, the sometimes-namesake of the act who was opposed to both slavery and Indian-ness, said he wanted to “rid the Indian of tribalism through the virtues of private property.”

Despite this sentiment, the motives underlying allotment were mixed. Teddy Roosevelt famously described the General Allotment Act as “a mighty pulverizing engine to break up the tribal mass.” Allotment presented an opportunity to open reservations for settlement and relieve the government of its trust responsibility and obligations toward tribes—a new tactic, but not a new goal. At the time allotment came into being, only a few dissenters voiced concerns that it was a thinly veiled pretext for speculator land grabs or condemned the expressed concern for the welfare of Native people as barely masked greed for tribal land. Colorado Senator Henry Teller was nearly alone in prophesying that “if the people who are clamoring for it understood Indian character, and Indian laws, and Indian morals, and Indian religion, they would not be clamoring for this at all.”

Consistent with the assimilationist attitudes of the time, tribal consultation and consent were not robust concepts or deemed necessary for the allotment process. Although special allotting agents were sent to reservations to obtain agreement from the tribes, allotment was a foregone conclusion in the minds of its advocates. Some tribal members may have initially thought of allotment as a way to get the federal government and its agents off the backs of tribes or to bring prosperity to the tribe, but there are historical accounts that show a deep suspicion of allotment as well. This is likely because before allotment came into being, the federal government “re-negotiated” many treaties to significantly reduce the reservation land base—once tribes were relatively confined to reservations and their military might had diminished.

In one case, tribes pushed back against the lack of consent in an attempt to stop allotment of their reservation. Article XII of the 1867 Treaty of Medicine Lodge Creek with the Kiowa and Comanche tribes stated that further cession of tribal land would require the signatures of “at least three-fourths of all the adult male Indians.” But in 1892, when David Jerome went to Fort Sill on behalf of the federal government to get support for allotment of reservation lands, he only obtained 456 signatures, a significantly smaller percentage than the treaty requirement. Tribal members also made complaints of a mangled translation of agreement terms and some signers requested to have their signatures removed. They wrote letters to Congress, sent a delegation to Washington, and testified in opposition to allotment, but despite these clear repudiations, Congress ratified Fort Sill allotment by means of a rider to a bill concerning a separate reservation in Idaho in 1900. When the reservation of the Kiowas, Comanches, and Apaches was opened up to settlement, a Kiowa leader named Lone Wolf brought a lawsuit against the US government that made it all the way up to the Supreme Court.

In Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, the Supreme Court ruled in 1903 that Congress can abrogate a treaty, or render it void, without the agreement or approval of the tribe—in this case, by allotting a reservation without sufficient signatures. The Supreme Court linked this power of treaty abrogation to that special trust relationship between the federal government and the tribes, writing that “Congress possessed a paramount power over the property of the Indian, by reason of its exercise of guardianship over their interests.” The court also held that despite the criticisms of fraud and coercion, “we must presume that Congress acted in perfect good faith.” The case carried the weight of precedent for many years and stagnated the waters of tribal self-determination, leaving lasting marks on Indian Country.

Subsequent cases have, however, softened the precedent laid down by Lone Wolf. In particular, the 1980 United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians case was similar to Lone Wolf, in that the US government took land—in this case the Black Hills, by military force and threat of starvation—without the signatures of the three-fourths majority of Sioux men as required by the Fort Laramie Treaty. In this decision, the US Supreme Court somewhat side-stepped the question of treaty abrogation but declared that the Sioux Nation was entitled to just compensation for the land that had been taken a hundred years prior. Importantly, this case suggests that judicial review can act as a check on congressional power in Indian affairs.

Consent for allotment, and the question of treaty abrogation, is not the only decades-long legal battle to come out of the allotment era. Another major legal question arose around how the allotted parcels themselves were owned and managed. Over time, ownership interests in the parcels that tribal members were able to hold onto became fractionated due to tribal allottees dying without wills. Lawyers call this dying intestate. In the absence of a will that specifies how property, such as a land parcel, is to be distributed, property is split according to statutory probate laws. Generally, that meant that allotted parcels were divided among family members and heirs. Over generations, this led to some parcels becoming fractionated down to the thousandths.

Allotment was in many ways too much, too soon, and in the wrong way. Allotment land parcels, like homestead parcels, were by and large too small to support farming and ranching by small family units in arid country, and fractionation of ownership only exacerbated this ecological reality. Between this challenge, the complexity of managing land among a multitude of potential decision-makers, and likely some attendant government pressure, tribal allotment parcels often ended up being leased.

The BIA was supposed to lease allotted lands, place funds in Individual Indian Money accounts, and distribute the proceeds to owners, including owners who had highly fractionated interests. For decades, tribal members contended that allotment parcels were leased with little regard for fair market value and operated as a subsidy to non-tribal interests. They also voiced concern that the land was run into the ground due to poorly managed leases where over-grazing and over-tillage were rampant. Complaints that the BIA could not account for hundreds of millions of dollars and that account beneficiaries did not receive what they were owed eventually found their way to court through the Cobell class action lawsuit.

Cobell began in 1996 and has a storied history, with a DC federal district judge saying that “it would be difficult to find a more historically mismanaged federal program than the Individual Indian Money (IIM) trust.” At one point, this judge also ordered the BIA to disconnect their systems from the internet to avoid potential transfer and embezzlement of land lease funds. After the original judge was replaced at the request of the government, which claimed he had an anti-government bias, the case made its way to appeal. Finally, in 2009, the individual Indian trust account beneficiaries and the federal government reached a settlement. Among other agreements, $1.4 billion was to be distributed to Individual Indian Money accounts and $2 billion was earmarked for a Trust Land Consolidation Fund to purchase fractionated allotment land interests and transfer title back to tribes.

The idea of consolidating fractionated allotment parcels and returning them to tribes was not a new concept, but the means to accomplish the return of land has caused some conflict. In 1983, Congress passed the Indian Land Consolidation Act, which originally required fractionated interests that were less than 2 percent of an allotment parcel to escheat, or pass back to, the tribe rather being split among heirs, which would increase fractionalization. The act has been amended several times now to respond to successful lawsuits claiming that it was unconstitutional under the 5th Amendment to “take” these interests without just compensation. Now, to avoid unconstitutional taking claims, fractional allotment interests must be purchased with consent of the seller at fair market value. Additional provisions also authorize tribes to adopt land consolidation plans and probate codes that apply to allotment land interests.

All these decades of laws and lawsuits—only some of which are mentioned in this article—and the digital camo of land ownership they produced underlie the jurisdictional complexity on reservations today. Reconsider the pronghorn doe in search of greener grasses. The person or government that can make decisions about her may depend on whether the land is communal tribal trust land, allotted land owned by tribal citizens, or allotted land owned by non-citizens. It also might depend on whether Congress has passed a relevant statute dictating jurisdiction in a particular matter, and how higher courts have interpreted that statute according to the specific facts of the case.

In Montana v. US, another highly analyzed case, the Supreme Court held that tribal regulation of duck hunting and trout fishing did not apply to non-citizens on their own private allotment land within the Crow Reservation. Although the court also provided that tribal civil regulation might apply on noncitizen private land when “necessary to protect tribal self-government or to control internal relations,” jurisdictional determinations appear to be circumstance specific. As both people and wildlife transition between different jurisdictions, landscape-scale regulatory coordination may be desirable but remains elusive, given the legal dynamics tied to allotment.

In truth, reservations and tribes would not exist if allotment had worked the way some of its proponents wanted it to. The consequences of allotment implicate Federal Indian law, property law, Constitutional law, probate law, wildlife management principles, legislative interpretation, and so much more.

Autumn Bernhardt has over twenty years of experience in environmental matters and has worked as an entrepreneur, professor, and attorney. Bernhardt litigated water disputes between states as a Colorado Assistant Attorney, served as an Assistant Tribal Attorney for the White Mountain Apache Tribe, and now provides environmental consulting services.

Header image: Wildlife regularly cross jurisdictions on their daily and annual migrations, which can complicate environmental code enforcement on reservations that have been allotted. (Tom Koerner/US Fish and Wildlife Service).

For grizzly bears, some of the most desirable dispersal habitat crosses heavily checkerboarded lands 

By Katie Hill 

It took all night to drive hundreds of miles from the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem (NCDE) in northwestern Montana to the shores of Yellowstone Lake, a trip that Dr. Cecily Costello spent in the passenger seat of a pickup truck. Hitched to the truck was a large, tubular trap containing a young, male grizzly bear, previously tranquilized but now wide awake and sporting a fresh GPS collar. 

With a team of researchers, Costello, a bear biologist for Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks (MFWP), helped haul the culvert trap onto a boat. Then, the seaworthy crew and the federally threatened apex predator steered to a southern arm of the lake. When they struck land, they had to figure out how to release the bear into the wilderness near the shore. 

“We rigged it up so that we could pull a long rope to open the trap from the boat out on the water,” Costello says, noting that her team has been pleased with the success of the 2024 relocation. “The male stayed remarkably close to where we left him. He made one little interesting movement in the fall just before denning, but he’s pretty much staying put inside the park.” The hope is that the NCDE transplant will introduce some genetic diversity into the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem’s (GYE) grizzly population, which is currently one of the criteria for delisting the species under the Endangered Species Act. 

In some ideal version of the future, it wouldn’t take traps, tranquilizers, trucks, boats, and ropes to get grizzly bears from the NCDE to intermingle with those in the genetically isolated GYE and produce healthier, more resilient bears. Instead, bears dispersing from their home territories would traverse the slim margin of range between the two recovery zones on their own. The two populations, which have exceeded their recovery goals, are already bleeding out into more lowland riparian areas and valleys between the towering mountain ranges, but they haven’t yet spanned the gap. According to recent research by Costello and Dr. Sarah Sells, the assistant leader of the Montana Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit and a US Geological Survey ecologist, some of the most likely, but perhaps surprising, dispersal routes for grizzly bear connectivity lead straight through checkerboarded lands. 

The checkerboard usually refers to an alternating pattern of square-mile parcels under federal and private ownership, which is left over from a time when the federal government awarded railroad companies every other parcel along the tracks to incentivize transcontinental railroad construction. In Montana’s Boulder Mountains, for example, which is one of the rugged ranges separating the northern grizzly populations from Yellowstone, the US Forest Service manages the public parcels, while a series of livestock companies and other individuals own the private parcels.  

A different kind of checkerboard connects the Scapegoat Wilderness and surrounding Helena National Forest to the Sheep Creek and Sleeping Giant Wilderness Study Areas at the north end of the Big Belts. This region features alternating private lands and state trust lands, which were awarded to Montana when it became a state and are constitutionally required to generate revenue for Montana’s public schools and other community resources. 

From a 10,000-foot view, checkerboarded lands seem like they should be heavily manipulated, chopped-up landscapes. Only European settlers would think to carve lands up and hand them out to various owners in such a manner. The roster of landowners and managers ranges from the state of Montana and three different federal agencies, to absentee landowners and fifth-generation working ranchers. Logic dictates that such a level of human involvement in a landscape would drive grizzlies and other wildlife away. After all, grizzly bears in the Lower 48 survived near-extinction in the late 1800s by retreating into deep, dense habitat, as far away from human influence as possible. 

“But our simulated bears don’t know anything about land ownership,” says Sells of her and Costello’s work modeling potential dispersal pathways between the NCDE and GYE grizzly populations. Instead, they used GPS collar data from real grizzlies to model how bears moving through a landscape respond to its overall greenness, terrain ruggedness, density of riparian areas, density of buildings, distance to secure habitat, and distance to and density of forest edge. “Secure habitat,” per the US Fish and Wildlife Service, means habitat on state, federal, and Tribal lands that is 500 meters away from nearby roads. 

Then, “these bears take a walk in our simulations,” choosing a path “based on how the model from their data showed them choosing between these [variables],” Sells says. With a long list of known grizzly bear deterrents between the NCDE and the GYE—Interstate 90, growing population centers, new real estate development, sprawling road networks, heavily pressured public lands, and natural resource extraction projects— “most bears tended to select for areas with greater greenness value, closer to secure habitat, higher densities of riparian areas, and generally close to forest.” 

Between many bears taking many simulated walks, the model “strings together this pathway that tends to [have] lower building density, higher riparian density, be closer to forest edge, and be farther away from roads. So that’s where you see these rivers of blue that indicate where bears are most likely to travel,” Sells says. 

It turns out that this combination of factors foreshadows bears moving through checkerboard, a sign that these areas possess a higher proportion of intact, desirable habitat than the surrounding lands. 

That’s largely due to the work of private landowners, according to Heart of the Rockies Initiative partnerships manager Jim Williams. “Working families produce food and, at the same time, protect the spaces between blocks of protected public land,” Williams says. “[Most] of the connectivity habitat within checkerboarded matrices of public lands is on private agricultural lands in the transboundary Northern Rockies, here and in British Columbia and Alberta.” 

Take the Hibbards, one of countless landowning families who live, work, and play in a checkerboard matrix between the NCDE and GYE. Cooper Hibbard grew up on the ranch owned by Sieben Live Stock Company, not to be confused the nearly Sieben Ranch, owned and operated by his cousins. Although he is now the fifth generation to work it, he is the first generation to experiment with novel, selective grazing techniques to improve the soil’s water and carbon retention and has been widely recognized in the sustainable ranching community. 

While the Hibbards hold a more contiguous tract of land than most, they neighbor parcels held by the Bureau of Land Management, the Forest Service, the state of Montana, and other private landowners. Apart from I-15 snaking northeast from Helena to Great Falls, this area is remote. The closest town is Cascade, population 600, about 20 miles northwest as the crow flies. 

Compared to large, intact tracts with more proximity to major population centers, these rural parcels in their 640-acre increments have far less to offer real estate developers. So, they’ve largely escaped development. Those who do build on heavily timbered, checkerboarded parcels often opt for cabin-style dwellings, which tend to be less disruptive for wildlife habitat than suburban style homes with lawns. Meanwhile, the public lands within the checkerboard have often lacked reliable public access, meaning they aren’t as pressured by outdoor recreationists seeking backcountry adventure, hunting, or otherwise spending time on the landscape. 

Instead, both public and private parcels in the remote checkerboard between the NCDE and the GYE are more heavily used for livestock grazing, which can help maintain healthy landscapes, and potential resource extraction. While something like timber cutting does disturb the natural condition of an area, its impacts are still less permanent than those of a subdivision. Some studies even show that bears might select regenerating clear-cuts and other restored extraction areas for their renewed food sources and cover. 

In other words, the West’s growing recreation pressure on intact public lands and growing development pressure on intact private lands has made the checkerboard into something of a de facto last best place for wildlife. 

But, it’s not without its own issues. Conflict between bears and the people stewarding the land is part of the reason why grizzly bear connectivity is such a touchy subject in the rural West, particularly in areas where landowners and government entities border each other. 

Hibbard first encountered the aftermath of hungry grizzly bears on his family’s ranch in 2017. Eleven dead calves littered the rangeland sandwiched between the Big Belts and the Adel Mountains, almost perfectly equidistant between Glacier and Yellowstone National Parks. When Hibbard woke up the morning after the grizzly attack and stepped outside, something in the air he’d been breathing since infancy was different. 

“It immediately changed the feel of this place,” Hibbard says. “Not for better or worse, but it changed the feeling. You aren’t just going to walk out the door with kids without being prepared. That was when the shift truly happened, when we knew this place was going to continue to be different.” 

Hibbard is probably the first in his family to have to coexist with grizzly bears, except maybe his great, great grandfather, Henry Sieben, who arrived from Illinois in 1864 when the species was already in immense decline. “This grizzly question is a big deal. But I also see them as a small ingredient in the big stew,” Hibbard says, mentioning that range riders and other adaptive techniques for grizzly coexistence might be part of the near future of Sieben Live Stock Company. 

Supporting landowners by providing funding for these kinds of adaptations is part of the Heart of the Rockies Initiative’s work, says Williams, who worked with MFWP for 31 years as a wildlife biologist and program manager and helped develop grizzly bear conflict monitoring programs in the NCDE. Range riders and electric fences can cost tens of thousands of dollars—money that ranchers rarely have just lying around—so as long as grizzlies remain a federally protected species, coexistence will cost some serious cash. 

Now, Williams works on a program called Keep It Connected, which funnels private philanthropic dollars to working-lands families seeking perpetual conservation easements through nearby land trusts. “When a land trust comes to us with a project that lists wildlife connectivity as a primary component, on top of keeping a working agricultural family on the land rather than growing homes, we review it,” he says. “If it’s a match, we bring it to our board for approval. Then, philanthropic donors can search through our list on our website and close the funding gaps on projects depending on what species and locations they’re interested in. It’s almost like online shopping.” 

The program is needed, Williams says, because the pace and scale of development continues to climb and to reach further into what was once considered less desirable land. More than half of new houses built in Montana from 2000 to 2021 were built outside of incorporated areas, and 41% were built in subdivisions where individual lots exceeded 10 acres in size, a report from Headwaters Economics shows. Around Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks, residential property has increased 132% since 2000, according to a documentary by the Western Landowners Alliance called “Grizzlies and Grazing.” 

This rapid landscape transition means that any version of grizzly bear connectivity will rely, at least in part, on open space preservation and private land stewardship. And conservation easements, which allow ranchers to monetize their open space and wildlife habitat without disrupting their livestock operation, are one way they stand to benefit from a grizzly bear’s presence on a landscape, Williams explains. With the bulldozer threatening both the rancher and the grizzly bear, then the “enemy of my enemy” adage must apply in some way. 

While the federal government oscillates over the status and management of Ursos arctos, one thing remains clear: bears will continue to find refuge from a growing, urbanizing West in the kinds of landscapes that rural landowners have long occupied, worked, and stewarded, especially those interspersed with public parcels where habitat remains intact. As long as these checkerboarded areas have water, food, cover, and distance from major population centers, they will continue to be fair game for grazing and grizzlies alike. 

“We can adapt,” Hibbard says. “We’re building enough resilience into this system that we can roll with these punches, but we can’t be lackadaisical about it. We have to be proactive.” 

Katie Hill is a freelance journalist, writer, and editor based in western Montana. Her writing about wildlife science, conservation, public lands issues, and hunting has appeared in a variety of publications. 

Header image: Grizzly bears in Yellowstone (Sarah Sells)

Climate change threatens the Sámi way of life, and so does the green transition

By Camilla Sandström

Long ago, it is said, the Indigenous Sámi people of the North made a quiet, sacred promise with the reindeer. They would look after each other, bound in mutual trust and survival. The reindeer herders would ensure the herd’s safety and provide food in exchange for a portion of the animals to support their families. Whether a myth or a deeply held belief, this connection between herder, reindeer, and land has formed the bedrock of Sámi culture, defining a way of life that remains tied to the landscapes of northern Finland, Norway, Sweden, and parts of Russia.

This strong bond has shaped not only the Sámi people but also the lands they inhabit, known collectively as Sápmi, an area that is still perceived as relatively ecologically intact. But today, like many regions home to Indigenous communities, Sápmi faces mounting pressures not only from climate change, but also from the efforts to mitigate that change. The “green transition,” or shift toward a fossil fuel-free society, has brought wind farms, mining, forestry, and more to the region. Without proper consultation, these projects threaten the reindeer’s grazing lands and disrupt the delicate balance that has sustained this culture for centuries. As a result, the ancient promise between the reindeer herders and the reindeer is becoming harder and harder to uphold.

The landscape of Sápmi is characterized by a continuous rhythm of change, from dark days to bright nights, warm summers to freezing winters. Beyond spring, summer, autumn, and winter, the Sámi people define four additional seasons: spring-summer, autumn-summer, autumn-winter, and spring-winter. This seasonal calendar, which structures the lives of the Sámi people, is based on the migrations of their semi-domesticated reindeer. In Sweden, this often means a journey of nearly 450 kilometers—from the high mountains near the Norwegian border in the autumn-winter to the forest lands by the Bay of Bothnia in winter, then back again in spring-winter. This cyclical migration, intrinsic to Sámi culture, is made possible by the longstanding, legally upheld right of nomadic reindeer herders to use the land, public and private, for seasonal grazing.

Yet with climate change, these eight seasons are narrowing. Winters are becoming shorter, with as many as 58 days of snow already lost. This complicates the reindeer’s passage across previously frozen rivers and lakes, making routes increasingly dangerous as the ice thins. While the lack of snow can make food more accessible, “in Norway’s coastal areas where we herd our reindeers during the winter,” says Ina-Theres Sparrok, a herder in the Voengelh Njaarke reindeer herding district in Norway, “it complicates herd management and creates friction with local farmers.”

In other cases, climate change can make lichen, reindeer’s primary food source, harder to get to. “Unpredictable, extreme winter conditions, from heavy snowfall to cycles of freezing and thawing, creates thick layers of ice that trap the vital lichen below, making it increasingly difficult for the reindeer to forage,” says Ante Baer, a reindeer herder in the Vilhelmina Norra reindeer herding community in Sweden, and Sparrok’s partner of over a decade. (Disclosure: Baer and Sparrock are the author’s son and daughter-in-law.)

During these bad winters, it becomes more challenging to keep the herd together, Baer says, which also makes it more difficult to protect the reindeer from large carnivores such as lynx, wolverines, and eagles year-round, as well as brown bears during the spring-winter, spring, and summer seasons.

The summer, with its warmer temperatures and diminished snowfall, stresses the Arctic-adapted reindeer and brings new survival risks during heat waves. In these ways and more, the effects of climate change are already deeply felt in reindeer husbandry, reshaping the migratory patterns and the very fabric of Sámi life.

The green transition, which has emerged as a necessary response to the pressing challenges of climate change, has brought additional strain to these lands. Long used by the south for its resources, Sápmi has been host to mines, hydroelectric dams, and other extractive industries for more than a century. Today, the pursuit of cheap energy is accelerating a surge of activity, from battery factories and renewed mining ventures to large wind energy projects. For the reindeer herders, this relentless demand brings a double burden: the climate itself is changing, and so, too, is the land they rely on to preserve their way of life. A recent report on the impact from a Norwegian wind park on a reindeer herding community illustrates how one encroachment causes a chain reaction: loss of grazing areas disrupts seasonal pastures, directly impacting herd health, herders’ finances, and finally their livelihood, language, and culture.

Forestry, too, is increasingly seen as a key component of the green transition, due to its role as a significant carbon sink absorbing carbon dioxide and storing it long-term, while also providing renewable materials and bioenergy that substitute for more carbon-intensive products. However, in Sweden, it has also reduced the land rich in lichen—a critical food source for reindeer—by as much as 70%. This has left the landscape fragmented into smaller, isolated patches, increasing grazing pressure on the remaining areas. In Norway, forestry has a smaller impact, but farming, recreation, and tourism are increasingly occupying crucial mountain valleys, creating a lot of activity in areas that were previously rather pristine.

Research reveals that the cumulative effects of these various industries on Sámi lands are rarely fully considered, often leaving Sámi herders in court defending their right to land and the essential bond with their reindeer, with outcomes that vary. This undermines sustainable reindeer husbandry, which relies on a profound interdependence between people, animals, and land. “But,” says Baer, “it is possible to make some accommodations through careful planning, forest management, and collaboration.”

The Sámi, along with the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Peoples, have long advocated for improved planning processes that more fully consider reindeer husbandry and align with international conventions on Indigenous rights ratified by the four nations encompassing Sápmi. For example, one pathway for cooperation is a formalized consultation process embedded in forest certification schemes, which would require co-planning between forestry companies and reindeer herding communities. Recently, the introduction of free, prior, and informed consent has also provided herders with a new tool to protect vital grazing lands from further encroachment by forestry activities. However, effective processes remain lacking outside of the forestry sector, particularly those that would provide opportunities for co-planning and mutual consideration. This gap has become even more apparent as an increased sense of urgency fueled by climate change is accelerating decision-making around resource extraction.

Despite the many challenges they face, Baer and Sparrok, who are both 29, remain committed to a future in reindeer husbandry. They see the growing demand for healthy, unprocessed foods and the increased recognition of nature-based solutions as opportunities for their way of life to be part of the answer. They also acknowledge the urgent need for both individual and collective action to address climate change and the biodiversity crisis, and they believe reindeer herding offers unique insights and practices that align with sustainable land stewardship.

“We have been here for countless generations, adapting ourselves and our practices to this landscape,” says Baer. “It would take a great deal to move us from this place because our lives and the lives of our reindeer are woven into this land. We are still here, and we intend to stay.”

Camilla Sandström is a professor in political science at Umeå University, Sweden and UNESCO Chair on Biosphere Reserves as Laboratories for Inclusive Societal Transformation. Her research focuses on how policy and governance can be designed to meet environmental goals and effectively manage conflicts between different objectives.

Header image: Reindeer on the move. (Ina-Theres Sparrock)

The rise of community-based conservation in Africa’s last absolute monarchy

By Kelly Dunning

One of my first days in Eswatini, a small country bordered by South Africa and Mozambique, my guide told me a story about the Rhino Wars. In the 1990s, he said, “poaching of all wildlife was out of control,” and seemed poised to eliminate many wildlife species in the region. But then, “Eswatini’s biggest conservation leader, a man named Ted Reilly, brought a dead, poached rhino to the palace of the king and left it there for him. It was a sad sight—the rhino had been mutilated for its horn, the poor thing—but it left a message about the work the king needed to do to fix conservation in Eswatini,” he said. “From that day, and for decades, our king financed and supported projects to set aside preserves and to reintroduce wildlife that had been hunted to extinction.”

The change was dramatic. Today, you are more likely to see a rhino in Eswatini than anywhere else in the world. Overall, the country has 10 to 100 times less illicit wildlife poaching than nearby locations that are widely considered the crown jewels of wildlife safari tourism, including Kruger National Park. As a researcher interested in policy that supports sustainable tourism and wildlife conservation, I was in the country to investigate this incredible success. I wanted to know what wildlife conservationists were doing in Eswatini to combat poaching, and if it could be replicated elsewhere on the continent. By the time my field work abruptly ended in a helicopter evacuation, I knew the question of poaching was tied up in the same cultural and political factors that shape the country itself.

Eswatini—known as Swaziland until the king renamed it in 2018 to celebrate 50 years of independence from colonial Great Britain—is Africa’s last absolute monarchy. The new name is in the native siSwati language and was meant to signify the importance of Indigenous culture to the Swazi people, embodied in their highest chief, the king. The king is also synonymous with wildlife—culturally, historically, and even linguistically. He is the Ngwenyama, which means lion, and the queen mother is the Ndlovukazi, or great she-elephant.

In the years since the Rhino Wars, the king has conferred royal protection on wildlife, with very stiff punishments for anyone who violates these protections. The royal protections are codified in Eswatini law and implemented by a complex system of Indigenous chiefdoms that span the kingdom at the local level. Each chief acts as the representative of the king in the village, overseeing natural resources (including wildlife), managing disputes, administering land uses, and enforcing the king’s rules.

Perhaps thanks to those rules, visitors are actually guaranteed to see a rhino in Hlane National Park, the king’s royal preserve. I started my field work here, hoping to interview the elite game wardens who ensure the rhinos’ survival. Waking early and excited in a green canvas bunk tent to the bellowing of hippos, I took a lightly heated shower courtesy of the camp’s solar panels, which supplement the two hours a day a generator runs. Lack of power is common in Eswatini, which is among the poorest nations in Africa, with 59 percent of the population living in poverty, and 20 percent in extreme poverty.

After a quick breakfast, I climbed aboard a safari truck with my Eswatini partners and set off to look for the “Big Five” of African safari tourism—rhinos, lions, leopards, African elephants, and Cape buffalo. On the way, my colleague explained that the royal national park had historically been the king’s hunting grounds, with the strictest protections placed on the wildlife. Today, it makes up one of the largest (22,000 hectares), best resourced, most visited, and most well-managed protected areas in the country. Its conservation planning process is tightly controlled by the inner circle of the king and Ted Reilly, and its game wardens are some of the best in Africa. Sooner than I would have believed, we were eye to eye with rhinos. They were, simply put, majestic creatures, and the power of the king to protect wildlife species that are so widely poached elsewhere became immediately obvious.

When I interviewed the game wardens, who casually rested on their 30-caliber rifles while we chatted about their many brushes with death combating illicit poaching gangs, they suggested we take a detour to what they said might be the “future of African wildlife tourism.” According to the senior game warden, this community-based wildlife conservation project harnessed the power of Eswatini’s Indigenous culture and tradition, its youth, and its educational programs to build its own take on wildlife tourism. Up to this point, most of the emphasis in my interviews was on the greatness of the king, so it was surprising to hear about the efforts of a smaller village in protecting wildlife. I was eager to see it.

The next morning, my colleagues and I were on our way to the small community of Shewula, bundled up in coats, scarves, and hats against the winter morning’s chill. When we exited the vehicle after four hours on rough dirt roads, we were immediately met with an extraordinary scenic view over the biodiversity hotspot of the Lubombo Mountains, with the border of Mozambique visible in the distance. We had arrived at Shewula Mountain Park, a community-based ecotourism project run entirely by members of the chiefdom.

Formed in 1999 with resources and encouragement from the king, Shewula is a stark contrast to Africa’s bigger safari destinations, with their thronging crowds and Disney World-like atmosphere. Here, visitors are encouraged to become enmeshed in the life of the village, staying with community members, cooking with them, making handicrafts, and playing with their children. The wildlife walks are led by locals, and there are no fences, so the animals move freely around and through the village.

Our first stop was into the mud brick home of one of the local women who brews a milky white beer from sorghum. Under her thatched roof, we tasted beer with a communal ladle before another local took us out to look for giraffe, birds, and impala. It was just a quick walk from their homes to iconic African wildlife species and some of the best birding on the continent.

During our day of interviews with the Shewula villagers, we heard a lot about the king, and how it was his power protecting the wildlife from poaching. “If the king says wildlife is not to be poached, chiefs enforce this and villages listen,” one community member told us. When—looking at a family of warthogs through binoculars—I asked our wildlife guide about the low poaching rates, he said, “The answer to your question can be found in the king himself. He loves wildlife. He is friends with the most important conservationists in the country, who have convinced him over years of friendship with the king and his father that wildlife are very important and great ways to make money. Without his support, Shewula would not exist as you experience it today.”

“But,” he added, “we are also a product of our way of life in our village, and follow our chief.” As I spent more time in Shewula, it was clear that the king wasn’t the entire explanation for Eswatini’s success in wildlife protection, or for Shewula’s thriving and unique model of wildlife tourism. It was also the villagers, the importance they placed on intermingling Indigenous customs with wildlife tourism, and the opportunities it provided for economic development, youth education, and local stewardship.

I heard countless stories of widows supporting their children with their home brewing business and young men with no options immersing themselves in wildlife guiding, finding their specialty in birding or animal track identification. “If I didn’t have the tour guide business, I would be unemployed. There would be no opportunity here,” said our wildlife guide, who knew every bird by its call. “With the community-based wildlife tourism business that we all share in equally, there is a lot of opportunity to grow and be entrepreneurs. This demonstrates to us how important it is to protect wildlife that draws people here.”

The blending of culture and tourism has also helped win over the more skeptical community members, who worried that wildlife tourism would mean choosing to cater to foreigners with money over traditional ways—a frequent clash in African nations with wildlife tourism. Rather, Shewula villagers talked about leveraging traditional ways to bring in visitors, spur economic growth, and protect wildlife. Conservation was not viewed as something done for tourists, but rather as an essential part of the village’s way of life.

After leaving Shewula, I was starting to put together a story of royal protections interwoven with local people working to steward wildlife. Then, sitting in a colleague’s brightly lit kitchen in the capital city, an announcement came over the radio that some of the nation’s first and most extreme anti-monarchy protests were breaking out. Protesters were furious with economic conditions, including the persistent and extreme poverty, and the king’s absolute power to veto anything the government did. Within 24 hours, violence erupted and the king declared martial law, called in the army to put down the protests, closed the roads, and shut off the internet. Commercial airlines suspended flights in and out of the country and the US Embassy told us that they lacked the capacity to get us out—we would need to contact our crisis insurance.

The night the army came, our hotel’s owner allowed me into his family’s car and we drove up into one of the national parks, passing through a roadblock that was on fire. We stayed in one of the park’s lodges to avoid roving bands of protesters looking to burn any assets held by the king, including our hotel. I spent the night watching flames engulf large portions of the city below and listening to thousands of rounds of unending gunfire. Grocery stores had been closed for three days, so all I had was a can of spaghetti sauce and a few gallons of water thankfully left in the abandoned hotel lobby.

The next day, we were able to evacuate by helicopter to Johannesburg, and then fly back to the United States. That first cheeseburger in the Johannesburg airport was the best in my entire life.

The extreme nature of the protests raised serious questions about the long-term survivability of the political system in Eswatini, and by extension the system of wildlife protection that just days before had seemed so strong to me. In a remote interview with a national park manager, he said, “When people see wildlife as the same as the king, when the king is protested or maybe one day toppled, protests will target wildlife and parks because it is seen as part and parcel with the king. This makes our system brittle and puts our wildlife at risk.”

I knew that there was dissatisfaction and anger with the king, who embezzles significant money from public coffers, according to both my interviews and many good governance nonprofits. I also knew how closely associated the king and wildlife are. But still, brittle was not the word I would use to describe wildlife conservation in Eswatini. The situation was too complicated to be defined by a single narrative around the monarchy.

Within this autocratic system where the king’s word is law, community-driven enterprises like Shewula are leading the way in growing the wildlife tourism community. There, wildlife conservation practice is strong. All walks of life are involved, invested, and benefitting. And they are embracing the change and innovation that is needed. It’s that strong investment by the community, rooted in the Indigenous cultural system, that I suspect conservationists across Africa may look to when trying to meet the many, multi-faceted challenges that face their countries and their wildlife.

Kelly Dunning is the Timberline Professor of Sustainable Tourism and Outdoor Recreation at the University of Wyoming. She has been working collaboratively on sustainable development in sub-Saharan Africa since 2009.

Header image: Giraffe roam outside Shewula Mountain Park (Kelly Dunning).

Wolf management in the Alps requires attention to science and people

By Francesco Bisi

The first wolves to enter the Alps in nearly a hundred years found themselves in southeast France’s Mercantour National Park in 1992. Like the area’s glacial lakes, Bronze Age rock carvings, and “perched villages,” the wolves were a relic of a time past. Once abundant and widespread, centuries of organized extermination had whittled down Eurasian wolf populations to nearly nothing, and had eliminated them entirely from the Alps by the early 1900s.

But wolves did not go extinct across Europe, and in the last 50 years, relict population have naturally spread back into parts of their old range. Their return has sparked conflict, and with it, the need to bridge social, administrative, and disciplinary boundaries. At least, that’s what partners of LIFE Wolf Alps EU —an interdisciplinary, multi-national project I supported as a researcher—think is the key to moving towards coexistence, rather than returning to a time of hatred and fear.

Wolves have been systematically trapped, hunted, poisoned, and bountied for over a millennium, from England and Scandinavia to the Balkans and Bavaria. In France, Charlemagne institutionalized the practice around the year 800 when he created the “louveterie,” an elite corps of hunters tasked with eradicating wolves. More than a thousand years later, France killed its last wolf in the 1930s.

But, as wolves became less of a threat to livestock and life in a rapidly industrializing world, and with the growing popularity of new environmental ideals, the fervor for extermination faded before the job was done. In 1979, when the Bern Convention made wolves a strictly protected species throughout Europe, about a hundred wolves remained fragmented in the Apennine Mountains—which run from toe to calf along Italy’s boot. A few more sheltered in the most remote parts of Slovenia’s Dinaric Alps, with diminished populations elsewhere in eastern Europe. These have been the most important source populations for the species’ natural recolonization of the Alps.

In addition to new protections, wolves benefitted from the decline of traditional rural economies and gradual depopulation of the mountains—particularly the most remote regions—as pastoralists and others sought better services and opportunities at lower elevations and in cities. This opened up habitat not only for wolves, but also deer, boar, and other prey species, making the Alps a lower conflict place with better food than they had been in centuries.

Over the course of two decades, the Italian Apennine wolves made their way towards the Alps, finally reaching France in 1992, the same year that the species saw further protection in the European Union (EU) under the Habitats Directive. From there, they have continued to expand through the crescent-shaped range, first reaching Switzerland in 1995, Italy in 1996, and Austria in 2008. In more recent years, wolves have also entered the Alps from southern Slovenia, the Karpathian mountains (Slovakia), and the central European lowlands (Germany, West Poland, Czech Republic). In each country, breeding pairs and resident packs lagged well behind the first wolf sighting, in some cases more than a decade.

The returning wolves face a world that has largely forgotten what it was like to live alongside them, but has not forgotten how to fear them. While those first Mercantour wolves found what National Geographic calls “the last terre sauvage in the Alps,” the range as a whole is not wild. The Alps still support 14 million people across 6,000 settlements, and a deep tradition of agriculture is bound up in both the culture and the landscape. Wandering shepherds and their cattle, sheep, and goats are iconic to the region, and their grazing maintains high alpine meadows and other distinctive ecosystems that support rich biodiversity and endemic species. Many see wolves as an existential threat to this precious and delicate system, raising questions about the feasibility of human-wolf coexistence.

The LIFE WolfAlps EU project believes that such a sprawling, complex issue needs to be addressed at the same scale—with a coordinated, population-level outlook rather than fragmented management limited by administrative and disciplinary boundaries. Spanning France, Italy, Austria, and Slovenia, the team has worked for the last decade on a two-part approach. First, establish a solid baseline understanding of the wolf population and its spread in order to develop unified, scientifically-grounded information and messaging. Second, work along nine different “axes of intervention,” to foster understanding and reduce conflict between wolves and people.

Part one began in Italy and Slovenia in 2013 with a focus on “knowing before acting,” meaning years of data collection on the wolf population, human attitudes, livestock depredation, poaching, and more. Wolves typically occur at low densities in rugged terrain, making basic monitoring a challenge. A lack of consistent methodology adds to the difficulty, especially when trying to compare data between administrative authorities in multiple countries. The WolfAlps team addressed this issue by training 512 participants—including volunteer associations, professional researchers, and public authorities—to collect standardized data through snow tracking,
wolf howling, genetic analysis of biological samples, and camera trapping.

During this time, I was in charge of wolf monitoring in the Lombardy region in the central Italian Alps. Most of the activities took place during winter, and for the first time during a snow-tracking activity, I came across evidence of a deer killed by a wolf. This discovery made me realize that I was not alone in the wilderness. However, the most significant aspect was that, while I was out there looking for tracks in the snow, many other operators were conducting the same monitoring efforts across the Alps.

These shared and scientifically collected data were the first step for researchers and managers to speak a common language over such a broad landscape, which aided credibility and coordination. Sharing this information took many forms, from a Wolf Alpine Press Office to newsletters, social media, conferences, an interactive, traveling exhibition, a theatrical show, art contests, a children’s book, and more.

Overall, the first project laid the foundation for a broad network of stakeholders and partners working together on a shared and coordinated conservation program. Other early activities included assessing the threat of dog-wolf hybridization, supporting preventative measures, and implementing anti-poaching efforts.

Rucksacks full of scientific knowledge, listening to people became the next most important step for conservation. The second project, which began in 2019, expanded to include France and Austria and made improving human-wolf conflict its primary focus. Particular attention was given to understanding the needs of those most impacted by the wolves’ natural return and working with them to share knowledge and explore solutions for coexistence. In this project, I continued to coordinate the monitoring activities in the Lombardy region and participated in numerous meetings with shepherds, hunters, and environmental protection associations to discuss the wolves’ return to the Alps and what it meant for them.

Shepherds have perhaps the oldest and most persistent reason to resent wolf recolonization—livestock depredation. A 2023 report by the EU estimates that wolves kill at least 65,500 head of livestock each year, nearly three quarters of which are sheep and goats. The report also notes that wolf-killed sheep comprise just 0.065% of the EU’s total population of 60 million sheep, but at a local level, livestock loss can be unbearable.

Depredation rates are typically lower in areas where wolves never disappeared. For communities where wolves were absent for nearly a century, however, herders have largely lost the habit of coexistence with predators, including constantly accompanying free-ranging livestock and the use of guard dogs. Adapting their herding practices can mean increases in cost, work, and stress for farmers who are already struggling, and solutions like electric fences are not always feasible or sufficient. Capacity and expertise also vary widely between professional herders with large flocks and hobby farmers.

Although there is no one-size-fits-all solution, researching, supporting, and experimenting with best practices, particularly through peer-to-peer knowledge sharing, can contribute to making Alpine pastoralism more sustainable, thereby preserving a unique cultural institution, rural livelihoods, and important habitat. Talking directly with people about these options, I noticed, tended to be more effective than simply giving them money to buy prevention tools or as reimbursement for livestock predation.

Hunters are another stakeholder group that have expressed concerns over wolf recolonization, seeing them as competition for game species. Rather than dismiss these concerns, WolfAlps designed a series of participatory studies that involved hunters throughout the process of investigating the wolves’ impact on wild prey, particularly red deer. Researchers found that the impact of wolves on game populations is minor compared to hunters themselves, but hunting management may need to be adjusted in some areas where wolves have returned.

The project has likewise taken seriously the rural Alpine residents who fear for their safety, discussing potential risks (like improper food management and uncontrolled domestic dogs) and holding an International Conference on Bold Wolves. In the last 40 years, there have been very few cases of wolves attacking humans in Europe. None of them were fatal, and they were mainly caused by habituated wolves. The 2023 EU report concludes that “the risk of people being attacked by wolves is incredibly low in the modern world.” However, I often heard people claiming the opposite, possibly influenced by media misinformation.

By creating regional dialogue platforms where people could express their concerns and feel heard, WolfAlps has perhaps not fully changed minds, but at least opened a door to greater trust and understanding. In my experience, even the people who shouted at me during meetings would sometimes come up afterward and thank me, not because I solved their problem, but because I listened to them.

These conversations have also revealed an opportunity for the wolf to shed light on a much broader context. Local community meetings often ended with the idea that wolves are not themselves the whole problem, but rather the straw that broke the camel’s back; people use the time to talk about other challenges for farming and rural living. In this sense, the wolf becomes their microphone.

I also saw how in regions where wolves have been present for 30 years or more, both wolves and humans have been able to coexist, even though the conflict has not been entirely resolved. In these areas, the greatest challenge is not pushback from the public, but rather administrative fragmentation that complicates effective conservation and management.

These stakeholder engagement platforms are just one part of the project, which also includes Wolf Prevention Intervention units, a host of trainings, hybridization prevention, development of eco-tourism, an Alpine Young Ranger Program, anti-poisoning dog teams, and more—almost too much to keep track of. But “the complexity of this project is its strength,” says one final report, and I agree. As human beings, we are integral parts of ecosystems, and our interactions with nature—wolves, in this case—take many forms. Therefore, it is crucial to consider all these aspects comprehensively.

As of 2023, wolves have been detected in every EU country except the islands of Ireland, Cyprus, and Malta. The population was 20,000 and climbing. Given wolves’ legal protection and unassisted spread, the Alps will probably never be wolf-free again. Which means it will probably never be conflict-free, either. But hopefully, through a multi-pronged effort happening at the same time all over a huge region, the Alps will learn how to live with wolves in a way that protects the region’s ecological, social, cultural, and economic values. And it may even be that wolves can become a bridge that forces people to think beyond boundaries.

Francesco Bisi is a zoologist and research fellow at Insubria University in Italy. An expert in alpine vertebrate monitoring, his research focuses on wildlife conservation and human-wildlife interaction and he teaches a course on sustainable use of wildlife. During the LIFE WolfAlpine EU project, he has been responsible for wolf monitoring activities in the central Alps for the Lombardy Region and has been involved in stakeholder engagement through sharing information about species distribution and wolf population dynamics.

Header image: The first wolves to step foot in the Alps in nearly 100 years appeared in France’s Mercantour National Park in 1992. (JP Valery/Unsplash)

Could a centuries-old pastoralist tool help conserve a rare antelope?

By Annabella Helman  

In Kenya’s Rift Valley, a pride of lions begins to stir as the sun descends to the horizon and the air grows still. A pastoralist with his 60 cattle, alert to the night’s dangers, begins to usher the herd inside of a large enclosure called a cattle boma. The boma, a centuries-old conflict mitigation tool typically made of branches from the acacia tree, creates a thorny barrier to keep out lions, leopards, and spotted hyenas that might eat, injure, or harass the cattle. Today, some communities use more effective, metal-fenced bomas to protect their livestock from depredation overnight.

Like many ways that people deal with human-wildlife conflict, these bomas work by creating barriers to separate property from wildlife. This method has greatly reduced the immediate problem—large carnivores killing livestock—but new research indicates that cattle bomas have an unintended consequence that threatens the Jackson’s hartebeest, a unique and rapidly declining antelope in central Kenya. Rather than addressing this decline by advising against the use of this crucial human-wildlife conflict mitigation tool or reducing lion numbers, conservationists in Kenya have an opportunity to strategically leverage the cattle boma to conserve lions and their wild prey.

As human populations and affluence escalate, human-wildlife conflict is increasing in both frequency and severity. Direct conflicts, like predators killing livestock and people, get a lot of attention; most solutions, including compensation schemes and predator removal, focus on these unambiguous situations. Indirect conflicts often go unnoticed but can have profound impacts on both wildlife and human communities.

In Laikipia County, located in central Kenya, local people’s main economic activity is herding goats, sheep, and cattle. From the 1950s to 1980s, pastoralists and ranching businesses often killed lions to suppress predator population numbers and their perceived threat to the local cattle economy. But as wildlife tourism in Kenya gained popularity and offered an additional or alternative way to earn a living, local people saw the value in maintaining populations of large predators to encourage tourist dollars. This led to the restoration of lions in the late 1990s.

Concurrently, the growing popularity of multiuse landscapes in conservation, which aim to maintain wildlife populations without disrupting human activities, means that pastoralists are herding livestock on the same landscape where tourists will have their first lion sighting. The increased overlap of wildlife and human activities means more conflict—predominately between livestock and wildlife—which has led to a reliance on cattle bomas across multiuse landscapes.

Recent research has discovered that these bomas create a legacy of impact on the behaviors of wildlife long after they are rotated to new locations or abandoned. In the months that cattle spend their nights fenced inside the bomas, their manure accumulates and fertilizes the area. After the cattle and bomas are gone, the rich soil gives rise to glades—lush lawns of highly nutritious grasses. The grass attracts grazers, especially zebras, that will gather in large numbers within the glades. Lions, who appreciate predictability when hunting, will then seek out these gatherings of zebra for a better chance at their preferred meal. This dynamic, where cattle bomas create hotspots that attract zebras which subsequently attract hungry lions, has an unfortunate consequence for hartebeest.

Jackson’s hartebeest, a hybrid between Coke’s hartebeest and Lelwel hartebeest, only occurs over a small range in central Kenya and is one of the fastest declining antelope species in this region. Researchers have historically attributed this rapid decline to a combination of disease, habitat loss, and predation pressure. Recent work linking predation pressure to bomas and glades could change the way the antelope is conserved.

Dr. Caroline Ng’weno and her team found that when hartebeest, a territorial species, have cattle bomas rotated within 500 meters of their territories, they suffer significantly higher predation rates compared to hartebeest that don’t have cattle bomas near their territories. That’s because hartebeest are fairly easy to hunt, so if they are present at a glade, lions will often favor killing them over the zebras that first drew the lions in.

This finding highlights the unintended consequences of human activities on wildlife, even when those activities are aimed at reducing direct conflicts. It also demonstrates that efforts to mitigate conflict may miss dynamics like these when not taking a holistic view, focusing on single species, and not including humans in the conversation of ecology. The irony lies in the fact that cattle bomas, initially intended to minimize clashes between livestock and wildlife and to reduce retaliatory killing of predators, are inadvertently contributing to the decline of a particularly vulnerable antelope.

However, because this dynamic originates with human intervention, there may be a way to leverage cattle bomas as a tool for conservation. If pastoralists are strategic in planning boma locations away from hartebeest territories, they could help concentrate lion hunting away from this sensitive species, thereby offering a spatial refuge.

This approach would not only engage pastoralists in conservation efforts but also contribute directly to the protection of the rapidly declining hartebeest population in central Kenya. Moreover, this method offers a promising alternative to the traditional approach of reducing predator populations to alleviate pressure on threatened species. By manipulating natural predator-prey interactions, we have the potential to conserve both lions and their prey, striking a balance between the needs of humans and wildlife in shared landscapes. Taking this more holistic approach, which accounts for both direct and indirect impacts of human activities, opens the door to creative solutions grounded in coexistence, not conflict.

Annabella Helman is a PhD Student in the Zoology and Physiology Department at the University of Wyoming under Jake Goheen. Her research focuses on methods of promoting human-wildlife coexistence in Laikipia, Kenya with an emphasis on local-led conservation efforts. Her work will implement an informed boma placement strategy to conserve hartebeest in Kenya.

Header image: Cattle bomas reduce human-wildlife conflict by creating barriers to separate people and their property from wildlife, but a more holistic understanding of the situation indicates that people might leverage their impact on the landscape to support healthy populations of both lions and hartebeest. (Anabella Helman)

Small tweaks in USDA programs support working lands and migrations in Wyoming 

By Shaleas Harrison 

It’s 8 am as the sunlight moves across the foothills of Carter Mountain, the longest mountain in the Absaroka range and east from Yellowstone National Park. Ronee Hogg loads Callie, her gray corgi, into her pick-up truck and we head down the road to inspect some newly built fences on a part of her ranch that is leased for wildlife habitat.  

The lease spans miles of rolling hills, ravines, creeks, and native grasses. As we traverse the hillsides, pronghorn sprint to cross the road in front of our truck. We stop to check a wildlife-friendly fence—built with funds from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA)—that has a smooth bottom wire for pronghorn to crawl under and a low wire at the top for elk and deer to easily jump. Nearby, small clumps of cows with nursing calves congregate on the green grass still remaining in July. Hogg makes sure that all the nursing cows have calves. Otherwise, she notes, “There’s a good chance that a grizzly got to them.”  

Hogg and her two sons operate Hogg’s Black Diamond Cattle Company, which has been in the family for over a hundred years. Like many other properties in the region, the ranch supports more than just the Hoggs’s 250 Angus-cross cattle and small herd of Angus bulls. It also furnishes essential winter habitat for the thousands of deer, elk, and pronghorn that migrate between it and the high country of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem each year.  

Hogg’s habitat lease is part of a new program, known as the Migratory Big Game Conservation Partnership, that the USDA launched to better support landowners like her who provide wildlife habitat for migrating big game. What’s unique about the initiative is that rather than creating novel programs, the USDA prioritized existing resources in key areas of big game habitat and tweaked the delivery of programs to work better for private landowners. These focused adjustments to USDA programs have amplified the impact of conservation investments and helped protect migrations on a landscape level.

​​​​​This attention to wildlife habitat on private lands is driven, in part, by relatively recent advances in documenting wildlife migrations in the West. Over the past decade, GPS technology has helped biologists demonstrate that wildlife migrate across land ownership boundaries and that private lands indeed provide critical habitat to these herds.  

It’s no accident that some of the best habitat today is private. It was settled because it holds the elements necessary for life in Wyoming’s harsh climate—water, wetlands, and high-quality vegetation on flat land. It also tends to be lower in elevation with a milder climate. That makes ranches like Hogg’s ideal places for big game in the fall and winter, where they can find optimal seasonal forage and refuge from deep winter snow.  

But landowners like Hogg face many challenges keeping their properties intact and economically viable due to development pressures, market conditions, and family succession issues. Supporting wildlife can add to the strain, through damages to crops and fences, diminished grass and hay production, and loss of livestock to carnivores.  

Across the country, an estimated 14 million acres of rangeland ​​​​were lost to development between 1983 and 2017. Between 2017 and 2022, Wyoming lost just over 200,000 acres of farm and ranch land to other uses—some of which was once valuable habitat for wildlife. Without support, the working lands that account for 30% of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem will continue to fragment and their important ecosystem services could disappear. 

The Big Game Partnership, which began in 2022 when Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon and USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack signed a Memorandum of Understanding called the USDA-Wyoming Big Game Conservation Partnership, aims to address this issue. It reorients conservation dollars and incentives to these places, regarding the producer and their working lands as essential to conserving wildlife and migrations. 

In the years before the big game partnership’s rollout, USDA leaders did their homework. First, they identified four priority areas that were productive landscapes valuable for wildlife and littered with private working ranches and farms rearing cattle, bison, sheep, and commodity crops. Hogg’s ranch is in the Absaroka Front; the other three areas are the high desert sagebrush steppe of the southern Wind River Range, the tribal lands of Wind River Country to the north of the range, and the grasslands surrounding the Medicine Bow National Forest. 

Then, USDA representatives made strategic visits to Wyoming to meet with leaders and landowners to better understand the challenges that producers face to stay operational. “Landowners consistently asked for the ability to enroll in multiple USDA programs and to be paid fairly for feeding wildlife,” says Laura Bell, a facilitator for the East Yellowstone Collaborative. Bell helped convene landowners and agencies in the years leading up to the big game partnership, along with several other organizations including Western Landowners Alliance. (Disclosure: The author is employed by Western Landowners Alliance.) 

The USDA heeded landowners’ input. Within the big game priority areas, the USDA increased payment rates for an existing habitat lease program, allowed producers to sign up for multiple conservation-oriented programs on the same land, and released more money for conservation easements. Now, families like the Hoggs, and the wildlife they support, are reaping the benefits.  

A habitat lease is an agreement between the landowner and a federal, state, or private entity that provides payment for maintaining wildlife habitat. Within the USDA’s existing programs, the Grassland Conservation Reserve Program, or Grassland CRP, functions most like a habitat lease. But enrollment in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem had been virtually non-existent. To conserve migratory big game habitat, it needed some improvements to make it work better for landowners. 

To start, the USDA established a minimum rental rate of $13/acre to more fairly reflect the cost of habitat to landowners. Previously, rates in Wyoming were often as low as $1/acre. The USDA then offered an additional $5/acre payment incentive for counties within the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. The initiative also made it easier for people like Hogg to enroll by ranking priority area applications higher, which helped them enter the nationally competitive program.  

Since she enrolled in the Grassland CRP, Hogg has received two annual payments in exchange for maintaining forage for wildlife and not developing the land or turning it into row crops. She follows a conservation management plan developed with the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), which stipulates grazing regimes that benefit wildlife. Her lease will run for 15 years.  

“We use our habitat lease payment for buying hay,” she says, referring to the payment she receives from the USDA. “We don’t have much hay ground, so we need to buy around 200 tons a year to feed the cattle in the winter. The cost of hay ranges from about $145-285 per ton, so the extra income helps with these types of operating costs.”  

Hogg is also able to enroll in NRCS’s Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) while receiving Grassland CRP payments. EQIP helps landowners cover the cost of conservation practices or expensive infrastructure like wildlife-friendly fences, water developments, weed control, or habitat restoration. For example, replacing an old fence with a wildlife-friendly fence can cost more than $3.80 a square foot, or $95,000 for twenty-five miles of fencing. EQIP helps offset these costs and encourages landowners to integrate conservation measures they may otherwise be unable to afford. Hogg used EQIP to help pay for the wildlife-friendly fences we spent the morning inspecting.  

When I ask Hogg about conservation easements—the third prong of the Big Game Partnership—she says she is considering it. A conservation easement is the sale by a property owner of his or her development rights, usually accompanied by other promises which maintain the property’s conservation values. Most working farms and ranches are able to continue their current land use practices after the sale of a conservation easement, so selling a conservation easement can prevent fragmentation of agricultural lands and be a valuable tool for intergenerational succession planning.  Although ​​Hogg’s ranch does not have a conservation easement, other ranches in the region do. In the first year of the Big Game Partnership, the USDA dedicated over 10 million dollars in Wyoming for its Agricultural Conservation Easement Program. 

Embedded video: Wildlife friendly fences—like those Hogg was able to install with EQIP funding—have a bottom wire high enough for animals to crawl under and a top wire low enough for animals to jump over. (Tanner Warder/Wyoming Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit)

Beyond the USDA tools, Wyoming Game and Fish has a dedicated Big Game Coordinator to help agencies, NGOs, and other partner groups work together to help landowners access the programs. The USDA also granted the University of Wyoming nearly a million dollars to provide technical and scientific support to the NRCS, Game and Fish, and other partners. With those funds, the Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources is evaluating the initiative’s implementation, and Jerod Merkel’s lab is creating science-driven mapping tools to direct conservation practices like wildlife-friendly fences and invasive annual grass treatments.   

Regardless of these small but innovative changes, the initiative is not for everyone. For some landowners, the payments for the Grassland CRP are still not enough to justify complying with the management plan. Other landowners don’t have the time to apply and jump through the hurdles required to access the programs, which can take three to five years, for example, for an agricultural conservation easement. These challenges, and many more, may limit the federal government’s capacity to conserve private land on a landscape level. But the USDA has taken a first step and initial results indicate widespread success. 

In 2023, the Grassland CRP enrolled 61,149 acres in designated Big Game Priority Areas—a 264 percent increase from the ​​​​previous two program enrollment periods in 2021 and 2022. With the additional funding for agricultural conservation easements, land trusts supported landowners in forever conserving over 11,830 acres of working lands and big game habitat across the state. The initiative in Wyoming proved so successful in its first year, the USDA expanded it to Idaho and Montana in November 2023. Now, producers in those three states can also benefit from the package of opportunities available through the Grassland Conservation Reserve Program, Environmental Quality Incentives Program, and Agricultural Conservation Easement Program.  

Preliminary research indicates that the Big Game Partnership has plenty more room to grow. A recent survey of nearly 800 Wyoming landowners, many of whom live within big game habitat, revealed that 85% of survey participants were unaware of the programs and benefits offered through the Big Game Partnership. Despite this lack of awareness, 55% said they might participate in the initiative if they were eligible. “This shows tremendous need and potential for partners and agencies to get the word out,” says Hilary Byerly Flint, a Senior Research Scientist at the Haub School who is leading a multi-year project to track how landowners are responding to these large-scale public investments in conservation. “The goal of our research is to better understand landowner experiences so that programs can meet landowner needs and achieve conservation goals at the same time,” she says.  

Never before has there been such a galvanized approach to supporting working lands and migrations within the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, especially one that involved landowners so closely in the development. Bell, of the East Yellowstone Collaborative, says, “We commend the USDA for listening to the landowners. This improved approach to working land conservation has increased partnerships and trust with the very people who steward the land. This little bit goes a long way.” 

Shaleas Harrison is the Wyoming Resource Coordinator for the Western Landowners Alliance, which advances the policies and practices that sustain working lands, connected landscapes, and native species.  

Header image: Through the USDA Migratory Big Game Initiative, Hogg leases part of her ranch for habitat through the Grassland Conservation Reserve Program and is also able to enroll in the Environmental Quality Incentives Program to help fund things like wildlife-friendly fencing. (Shaleas Harrison) 

Local communities lead the protection of an endangered antelope 

By Tesia Lin 

In the 1990s, Kenya’s hirola antelope population “plummeted from 15,000 to an estimated 300-500 animals,” says retired professor Dr. Richard Kock. As chief veterinary officer for the Kenya Wildlife Services at the time, Kock became involved because a virus called Rinderpest was a suspected cause of the antelope’s rapid downturn. The veterinary department was a new feature of the young agency, as was an emphasis on community-based wildlife management. Kenya’s declining wildlife, including hirola, had spurred the reorganization of government conservation agencies and a growing focus on including different stakeholder perspectives in order to better regulate and meet management goals. The changes, within Kenya and broader African conservation communities, were not smooth ones, Kock recalls.   

An early test for the new agency came when Elders of the Somali ethnic group sought the agency’s aid in their stewardship of the hirola antelope. “They were saying, ‘We really like this animal, and we don’t want it to get taken away.’ They felt that they had a right, in a sense, to decisions made with this animal, as it was sort of sacred,” recalls Kock. But the team didn’t at first listen to their suggestions, reasoning that state authorities had rights over the antelope, not local people. “Being sort of arrogant conservationists, we thought, ‘Well that’s a nice idea, but we’re thinking something else instead,” says Kock. Suspicious of the motives of local people, the team instigated relocation of a substantial number of hirola to Tsavo National Park to reinforce a small, previously translocated population. Without seeking further advice from the Elders, this created tension.  

While places like Kenya are scientific meccas for foreign researchers hoping to work with “exotic” wildlife, people trained in other parts of the world are no match for the wisdom that local and Indigenous communities provide when it comes to cultivating or stewarding the land and its resources. Because these communities have persisted for centuries among eastern African wildlife, their understanding of the balance between people, wildlife, and the land is both deeper and more expansive. 

Thus, when the Somali Elders requested assistance with a fenced-in sanctuary that would protect the hirola from predators, Kock recounts the idea as contrary to (what was then) best practice. “Their requests went against some [Western] principles of conservation,” he says. Fences cut animals off from the rest of their habitat, creating barriers to migration routes and reducing access to water and other resources. This can be particularly problematic in arid ecosystems like those in eastern Kenya, where water and good forage are already scarce.   

But the team didn’t have many more promising options. Captive breeding had been fruitless and expensive in other countries and was considered unsuitable for this shy antelope. National parks and reserves had worked for other large mammals, including predators, but that success made them unlikely to support hirola. The sandy-colored antelope are highly visible in today’s grasslands, herd in small numbers, and leave their young relatively unprotected, all making them easy prey. Putting them in parks where predators were thriving could hurt the hirola numbers or stall population growth. Expanding national parks to encompass the hirola would also displace local people, whereas moving the hirola to existing parks isolated them from a beneficial environment alongside deeply invested protectors—the Somali community.  

The Somali people have lived alongside hirola “since time immemorial.” The antelope, which Kock calls “living relics,” are thought to have existed in Kenya for almost 7 million years. As recently as the Pleistocene (which ended around 12,000 years ago), populations roamed from the Horn of Africa to the continent’s southern tip. However, as the climate changed, so did the vegetation. Open, desert-like land that previously sustained the hirola dwindled and fragmented, pushing them closer to pastoral communities, where the antelope found benefit in cohabitating with cattle. Cattle sites were better fertilized, resulting in more grass for consumption, and humans were protecting their livestock from predators, which increased hirola survival rates too. 

Rather than see this as a conflict, Indigenous communities observed connections between the hirola, livestock performance, and land fertility. Only nourished land was capable of sustaining both hirola and cattle, and the presence of hirola suggested healthy cattle, since the two are vulnerable to droughts and the same diseases. The hirola presented no harm to cattle and instead became tied to cattle well-being.  “They became a symbol of good things, achieving a sacred value among the people,” says Kock.  

As Kock and his team learned more about the depth of this relationship, they also realized the infeasibility of Western conservation ideologies. Echoing a need for change during this same time period, the hirola was re-classified into its own genus, Beatragus, prompting the International Union for Conservation of Nature to elevate the species to critically endangered. This re-classification not only generated more interest and resources for conservation efforts, but it built momentum for the team to re-evaluate their approaches to restoring hirola populations. They began to accept that the Somali Elders—strong and committed in their efforts to save the hirola—had knowledge integral for maintaining hirola populations and that overlooking their advice would be data missing in the conservation effort. Kock says, “We didn’t have to work with the people, but it was the sensible thing to do to manage the species, so we eventually felt it was important to more concretely give them our support.”  

As the millennium turned, a new community-based organization, the Northern Rangelands Trust, was set up out of the Lewa Conservancy (which Kock directed at the time). Partially motivated by the tension and misunderstandings surrounding previous hirola translocations, this innovative trust developed to address the growing need for involvement of local and Indigenous communities with wildlife related issues on a local level. Unlike government-owned national parks and reserves, trusts and conservancies tend to be smaller community programs that actively incorporate local people into stewardship. The trust worked with the Somali ethnic community to fulfill the Elders’ suggestions for a fenced refuge, and in 2004 laid the framework that became the Ishaqbini Hirola Community Conservancy. This conservancy is owned and managed by local, Indigenous people and is focused on empowering the pastoralist communities. Given the opportunity to sustainably manage both their rangelands and hirola populations, the conservancy has since begun to see the recovery of the antelope. 

“Problems at home need a home-grown solution,” says Dr. Abdullahi Ali. Ali is an Indigenous Kenyan, founder of the Hirola Conservation Program, and a University of Wyoming alumnus. He has always shared his home of Garissa—a small town situated by the Tana River in eastern Kenya that calls itself “Home of the Hirola”—with the antelope. Its enduring presence throughout his life inspired him to pursue a conservation career that puts his Indigenous knowledge first.  

Growing up in the midst of Kenya’s changing conservation policies, he often noticed how scientists external to Indigenous communities would come in and misunderstand the situation at hand.  For example, he says the enthusiasm for African predators caused scientists to seek out proof that predators were responsible for declining hirola populations. This excluded other factors contributing to hirola decline, such as habitat degradation, and it would have highlighted predator control as a solution. But predator control is resource intensive and, because “Africa has a multi-predator system that is key to ecosystem health,” Ali says, it could upset the delicate balance of natural and human communities.  

For Ali, protecting the hirola is about maintaining that balance through grassland restoration, a more approachable method backed by his research. Ali’s doctoral dissertation at the University of Wyoming focused on the impact of habitat degradation on hirola antelope. He found that habitat change in eastern Africa from open grasslands to forested woodlands had been accelerated by the loss of elephants that no longer removed a lot of the woody trees. He believed that this could be remedied in a way that benefitted both local communities and ecosystems. Since “almost 70% of wildlife in Kenya thrives and coexists on community land,” he says, restoring grasslands to support the hirola also helps sustain people’s livelihoods.  

Now, Ali’s Hirola Conservation Program endows eastern Kenyan communities with resources to conserve hirola, and inadvertently livestock, at a local level. The program employs people to essentially replace the work of elephants by thinning trees and planting native grasses. These same people then harvest the grass seeds and sell them back to the program. Farmers also receive suggestions on how to selectively graze their livestock on these grasses to ensure sustainability, and communities learn to help monitor hirola populations.  

Given that the people have strong intrinsic cultural attachments to the land and wildlife that provides for them, many communities have established their own small conservancies, blending centuries of inherited knowledge and observation with modern needs for conserving wildlife. These smaller, more localized conservancies are a powerful tool for conservation and community development, Ali says. “Conserving in our own land improves the living standards of our communities, and helps minimize competition and conflicts.” 

If given space and inclusive voices, both Ali and Kock believe that ecosystems can recover—and thus, people can recover. Ali believes, “When you empower the communities, you can feel a larger impact of conservation,” not only for the animals, but for the people. Despite the earlier involvement of many stakeholders in hirola conservation, it was the integration of foreign ideologies and science with locally-led approaches that drove the development of solutions that ensured both hirola and human well-being. Ali believes that “there is a lot of conversation globally about putting conservation in local hands; we should add to that momentum. We all want to save the animals and the planet.”  

Tesia Lin is an ex-wildlife biologist and current biological systems researcher. She is passionate about learning from communities whose lifestyles and cultures are historically intertwined with their land, and is grateful she has the opportunity to share their stores.   

Header image: These sandy-colored, desert-adapted antelope are highly visible in todays grasslands, making them more vulnerable to predators. (Hirola Conservation Program)

In the right places, flood irrigation might be doing more good than harm

By Emily Downing

Every spring, Chris Williams looks forward to seeing the terns alight on the meadows of the southern Wyoming ranch that he manages. It’s a fleeting sight—the birds are there for one day and then they’re gone, off to breeding grounds further north. However brief, the terns’ stopover on the ZN Ranch is an essential part of their migratory journey, as it is for the dozens of other species Williams sees every year.

“We provide this edge of green right in the middle of the sagebrush, which is important for a lot of animals,” Williams says. “Our irrigation isn’t just about waterfowl and wading birds, but it’s that edge habitat that supports deer, elk, antelope, sage grouse—all of it.” 

The ZN Ranch, like most other ranching operations in the Upper North Platte watershed, relies on a system of dirt ditches dug by hand in the 1880s to sustain that edge of green. In the spring, when tributary creeks are running high, the ditches divert water and spread it over the floodplain to grow lush grass that will be cut for hay. In the face of a drying western climate, ranching operations that use flood irrigation to grow food for livestock have come under fire for taking too much water out of streams and rivers. But new research is showing that flood irrigation in certain places does so much more than grow hay—it might just be the glue holding western ecosystems together. 

As the West’s water resources are stretched thin, policymakers and the public are calling for increased irrigation efficiency on agricultural land to reduce one of the highest demands on water in the West.  The reasoning goes that flood irrigation—where water is spread out over a field and left to slowly saturate the soil—is inefficient because much of the water that’s diverted is “lost” to seepage and evaporation, rather than directly supporting growing plants. Conversion to center-pivot sprinklers, lined canals, and other irrigation methods intends to minimize these losses while ensuring as much water as possible goes to crop production. As a result, federal programs that fund irrigation infrastructure upgrades are prioritizing the conversion to drip or pivot sprinkler irrigation systems. 

But this calculated way of thinking about crop production doesn’t account for the interconnected pathways that water follows as it moves through a healthy watershed, supporting aquifers, fisheries, and wildlife along the way. Specifically, flood irrigation that happens along historic river floodplains can provide a slew of benefits beyond agricultural yields.  

Before rivers became highly regulated and channelized, floodplain meadows served as sponges, soaking up the spring runoff that topped the creek’s banks. Beaver dams and other diversions slowed the fast-moving snowmelt, spreading it over low-lying meadows and saturating everything. The flooding formed temporary wetlands that provided habitat for migratory waterbirds and food for big game animals. Later in the season, when river flows were low, water that wasn’t absorbed by the plants growing along the floodplain returned to the waterway’s main channel, helping keep it flowing and functional. 

Today, the dirt ditches used by Williams and his neighbors along the banks of Pass Creek mimic these natural flooding cycles, sustaining ribbons of green that provide outsized value for wildlife and human communities. A 2024 study published in Agriculture, Ecosystems, and Environment found that although flood-irrigated floodplain meadows are only 2.5 percent of the Intermountain West’s irrigated footprint, they provide 58 percent of the region’s temporary wetlands (shallow wetlands that exist for fewer than two months each year) and 20 percent of seasonal wetlands (wetlands that remain wet between two and six months each year).  

Both wetland types are needed by waterbirds and waterfowl at different stages of their lifecycle, from nesting and breeding to fueling up during migration. Patrick Donnelly, a spatial ecologist for the Intermountain West Joint Venture and the US Fish and Wildlife Service who led the research, says that without flood irrigation practices, many of these wetlands would vanish, creating massive habitat gaps for migratory birds. (Disclosure: the author is employed by Intermountain West Joint Venture.) 

“These sites are often invaluable because they’re putting water in the right place at the right time of year to provide the right kind of habitat for the birds moving through the area,” Donnelly says. “When they dry up, due to infrastructure conversion or maybe even the loss of the agricultural operation to development, the flyway becomes increasingly fragile.” 

Emerging research also suggests that flood irrigation can provide other benefits by saturating soils and feeding groundwater supplies, although there is still much to learn about how surface and groundwater are connected. Frontiers in Environmental Science recently published one such study on the Henry’s Fork River in Eastern Idaho, an important fishery at the headwaters of the Snake River. 

Christina Morrisett, the lead author of the research, says that from 1978 to 2000, many agricultural producers along the Henry’s Fork converted from flood irrigation to pivot infrastructure. As expected, surface water diversion from the river decreased by 23 percent over those years, meaning operators were taking less water out of the river. However, return flows to the river also decreased significantly. That’s because when irrigators change to a system that sprinkles or drips small amounts of water onto crops, it waters the crops and nothing else. “You’re probably not putting anything back into the system,” says Morrisett. The end result was that there was less water in the river after the conversion than there had been before.  

In contrast, Williams points out that the irrigation water he uses is recycled multiple times as it moves downstream. After helping plants grow, the “excess” water from flood irrigation infiltrates the earth and can make its way back to the river, creek, or aquifer and continue downstream for future uses. “My upstream neighbors turn it out and put it on their fields and then it goes back into the creek and I’ll pick it up and irrigate with it again and again,” he says. “That water will get used four or five times before getting back to the creek.” 

Morrisett says that’s one reason why operations located higher up in watersheds might be the most important places to maintain traditional flood irrigation practices. There, irrigated meadows in the floodplain can soak up and slowly release water for wildlife and downstream users across the growing season. “Water flows downstream, so whatever isn’t used high up can be recycled by someone else,” she says.  

As communities of the West make difficult decisions about water, science that pinpoints where irrigation provides multiple ecosystem services will be increasingly helpful. Further research into how water moves through watersheds and affects groundwater supplies and aquifers—and how human actions influence both of those things—will also be important. 

In the meantime, supporting farmers and ranchers like Williams who use flood irrigation high in the watershed is ​​​​an easy way to bolster resilience and preserve critical habitat in the West. Funding federal and state programs that enable producers to continue doing what they’re already doing, on a relatively small percentage of private land, will have outsized impacts on preserving watershed function—and key habitat—in the places where it counts. That way, the terns (and the sandhill cranes, the warblers, the mule deer, the pronghorn, and the elk) have somewhere to return to next spring, and all the springs in the future. 

Emily Downing is the Water 4 Communications Specialist for the Intermountain West Joint Venture, a regional public-private partnership that conserves habitat for the benefit of priority bird species, other wildlife, and people. Her role involves producing media that tells the story of emergent wetland habitats on public and private lands in the Intermountain West. In her free time, she is outside with her husband and dogs exploring the mountains and sagebrush around their home in Polaris, Montana. 

Header image: A field in Utah’s Upper Bear River Watershed is flood-irrigated to produce grass hay. Flood irrigation in historic floodplains higher in watersheds can create a sponge effect that slowly releases water back into the waterway over the course of a growing season. (Intermountain West Joint Venture)

How the intersection of wildlife ecology and social science can improve human-wildlife conflict management

By Ezra Stepanek

Bruna Ferreira tried to go into her conversations with the people living around Atlantic Forest State Park without expectations. That was the point of Fantastic Detectives, the program she leads in central Brazil aimed at developing community-driven strategies for coexistence between people and wildlife. With farms, ranches, and villages surrounding the 3.6 square miles of protected area, it seemed like a recipe for conflict. There were some cases of mountain lions and other predators killing livestock, but Ferreira and her team were not making any assumptions. Instead, they were asking the community to define the problems they experienced and share their ideas for living alongside wildlife.

She was still skeptical when she heard story after story of black jaguar sightings. “My grandfather saw a black jaguar,” one rancher told her. “I was driving, and I saw one off the road,” another claimed. “It seemed really impossible, because there haven’t been any register of [black] jaguars in the area for decades,” she says. Then, just a few months after hearing these stories, the team caught a black jaguar on the wildlife cameras they set up in the state park. “People knew about it earlier than any of us that were researching there,” she says. “It was amazing to see and hear and then look through the people’s stories with new eyes.”

Fantastic Detectives is part of an emerging field that combines social and ecological understanding to attain a better picture of the complex interactions within a landscape shared by people and wildlife. This is a departure from conservation management and planning that focuses only on ecological data, like habitat suitability, and disregards people’s attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors completely or until the end. Meaningfully including people from the beginning, Ferreira and others say, is a far more effective way to reduce human-wildlife conflict and improve conservation outcomes.

“Generally, we see when there is a coexistence project, there are [conservationists] that come and say, ‘These are the methods you can use to avoid predation [of cattle] and all that,’ but they don’t often ask what the farmers want or what the ranchers want,” says Ferreira. Situations like this often result in regulations that locals feel are forced on them and don’t reflect the situation on the ground. After being left out for so long, communities can be wary of engaging with researchers at all.

Fantastic Detectives, with support from the Cerrado Mammal Conservation Program and Colorado State University’s Center for Collaborative Conservation fellowship program, plans to develop a conservation and coexistence action plan that involves local people every step of the way. “We want this action plan that can be really implemented and can be made in collaboration with everybody, so everybody has ownership of the process,” Ferreira says. Hearing stories from the local people, like black jaguar sightings, has been the first step in building trust between the local people and the team. Their discussions and workshops with locals are centered around conserving the iconic, but threatened, jaguar, mountain lion, hoary fox, and maned wolf. The Fantastic Detectives have also presented in schools, hosted a fire training, and shared what they captured on camera traps to open the conversation.

Already, Ferreira has noticed a world of difference in how friendly the people are compared to the beginning of their research. One farmer, who was one of the team’s first interviewees, called her a month after they visited to report a huge jaguar pawprint on his land. He sent pictures and invited the team to come back to visit. “It was really special because after a month away, he still remembered us and talked to us,” says Ferreira. The key, she says, is just letting people into the conversation. “When you just give them time to talk, they engage in the projects because it’s more near what they know.”

Because they are still in the early stages of their work, the Fantastic Detectives have yet to observe tangible conservation improvements. Nevertheless, Ferreira is hopeful their efforts to create a collaborative space will not only foster human-wildlife coexistence but also increase citizen participation in conservation efforts.

Dr. Keifer Titus also studies conflict between agriculture and conservation, but on working lands in Montana. Before starting the field work for his PhD in Wildlife and Fisheries Biology from Clemson University, he had seen and heard a lot of negativity about ranchers in the West. “The people that [do] extractive agriculture or agriculture in general almost always get a bad rap, right? Like, they’re the ones doing the harm for the wildlife.” But, he says, “when I got out there and interacted with these folks…it couldn’t have been more opposite. These people care more about the land than most. They want to see wildlife doing well.” Those conversations showed him that “if we could just, from the beginning, get these stakeholders on the same page, it just would do so much better for conservation and preservation of culture and livelihoods,” says Titus.

Like Fantastic Detectives, Titus’s work is grounded in bringing local stakeholders into the conversation from the beginning, specifically to coproduce science, which he says can create better conservation strategies for both people and wildlife. “Without public buy in, most of the time [wildlife restoration and conservation efforts] are unsuccessful, especially in the long term,” says Titus. Where his work goes beyond community engagement is combining data about ranchers’ attitudes towards wildlife with common spatial modeling techniques to create a map of social and ecological conditions on a landscape. “We’re really good at modeling the environmental side. A lot of times we can have the best habitat available for the species we’re looking to restore or conserve, but if social conditions aren’t right, it’s a barrier to achieving a lot of the restoration goals that we might have,” says Titus. Being able to see where both factors are favorable, called areas of socio-ecological suitability, can help conservationists make more informed decisions on where to focus their efforts.

For example, part of Titus’s work was trying to identify the best place to do habitat restoration for mountain lions in and around Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge. To do this, he developed maps to identify places with both high habitat value for mountain lions and high local tolerance for them. To measure tolerance, Titus and his team sent out mail surveys to Montana ranchers across the plains region asking them to agree or disagree with statements related to their attitudes towards the species, their support for incentives and conservation for the species, and how they behave toward the species on their land. Titus mapped the survey results, relating tolerance to things like the proportion of public lands and the presence of conservation easements around respondents’ ranch lands. Then, he modeled habitat suitability according to land type, elevation, terrain, and the distance to roads and water. Based off only the habitat data, the public land in the wildlife refuge appeared to be the best candidate for habitat restoration. But tolerance was relatively low there. Conversely, further north of the wildlife refuge in areas with more private land, the habitat quality was much lower but the tolerance for mountain lions was the highest, which “seemed backwards to us from the ecology side of things,” says Titus.

Since Titus’s framework was one of the first of its kind, he was uncertain if the suitability results reflected an accurate picture of the landscape. He had the opportunity to share his results at the Nature Conservancy’s Matador Ranch Science and Land Management Symposium, where wildlife researchers, ranchers, and the public come together to discuss the latest research. Titus and his team spoke with some of the same ranchers surveyed to collect tolerance data, who confirmed the accuracy of the predictive maps. Because higher quality mountain lion habitat is in the wildlife refuge, those working around it are more likely to have had negative interactions with mountain lions and therefore lower tolerance. The ranchers living where mountain lions don’t frequent as much have higher tolerance because they haven’t had any issues with them. Bringing the two sets of data together helped create a clearer picture than each on their own. “It hit home that it’s so much more than habitat, and it causes us to need to think creatively about how we’re aiming for restoration,” says Titus, who now works as a postdoctoral scholar in the Oregon Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit in the Department of Fisheries, Wildlife and Conservation Science at Oregon State University.

Though his model is among the first, socio-ecological integration is a growing field. A 2023 literature review in Landscape Ecology found 104 articles that used integrative approaches like Titus’s, with the majority from 2020 or after. There were several different approaches in analysis, including attempts to understand the complicated drivers behind tolerance and incorporating predictions about the outcomes of possible management strategies. Common research questions included where on a landscape human-wildlife interactions occurred, what ecological and social factors impacted interactions the most, and if interactions could be accurately predicted to improve management strategies.

The review also pointed out challenges and opportunities for growth, particularly around the measurement of sociological data. According to Titus, social variables like attitudes and tolerance can be hard to map onto a landscape, fluctuate often, and take time and money to repeatedly survey for. A lack of standard methodology, on the other hand, makes collaboration and comparison across studies difficult. But none of these challenges are stopping Titus. “While it might not be systematic, necessarily, from a Western science perspective, there’s tons of qualitative information that can really help us move the needle for wildlife.”

The more research there is, the better. As new studies fill in gaps and streamline the process, socio-ecologically integrated approaches will become easier to implement widely and may start to change norms in the conservation community towards always including diverse voices in the conversation. Titus is very excited at the possibilities: “I think this is going to be the next frontier of how we approach wildlife restoration in working lands.”

Ezra Stepanek is a WyACT Science Journalism Intern and an undergraduate student at the University of Wyoming. He is studying environmental systems science, environment and natural resources, and communication.

Header image: A black jaguar and a mountain lion photographed by wildlife cameras in Atlantic Forest State Park (Courtesy Bruna Ferreira).

The Greater Yellowstone Coordinating Committee celebrates six decades of cooperative conservation

By Kristen Pope

Chip Jenkins, Superintendent of Grand Teton National Park, knows he has to pay attention to what happens beyond his park’s borders. He points to the Snake River, which he says is “arguably the lifeblood” of the park. “The headwaters are up in the Bridger-Teton National Forest. It flows through Yellowstone, flows through the John D. Rockefeller Parkway, through Grand Teton, and on through the community. So it’s affected by what goes on outside the boundaries of Grand Teton National Park.”

It’s not just water, but also people, plants, and wildlife that cross boundaries, which is why Jenkins and other regional land managers participate in the Greater Yellowstone Coordinating Committee (GYCC). The committee is not a formal decision-making body, but instead aims to foster voluntary collaboration and cooperation among agencies. Celebrating its 60^th anniversary this year, the GYCC shows that the simple act of coming together, even without extensive power and resources, improves conservation of large, complex landscapes.

The committee’s purview—the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem—is approximately the size of Maine, with Yellowstone located right in its heart. Described as “one of the largest nearly intact temperate-zone ecosystems on Earth,” it is home to vast herds of wild bison and elk, grizzly bears, wolves, bald eagles, and even lynx and wolverines.

It also spans three states—Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming—and includes national parks, national forests, wildlife refuges, and other federal, state, and private lands. Because each land manager has their own unique policies, regulations, and priorities, issues that affect a broad area can get complicated. The GYCC, which began in 1964 as a Memorandum of Understanding between the US Forest Service and National Park Service, has evolved over the decades to address this challenge.

“In the beginning, it was just the national parks and forests agreeing to communicate and collaborate at that time on routine matters,” says Tami Blackford, GYCC executive coordinator. Over the years, the group took on larger, more collaborative projects. In the 70s, members worked together to develop consistent management direction for grizzly bears. In the 80s, the group worked to aggregate their management plans and in 1990 they released a draft Vision for the Future, which culminated in the 1991 Framework for Coordination.

As the GYCC focused on wider projects, it only made sense to bring more land management agencies to the table. In 1999, the committee brought in the US Fish and Wildlife Service and in 2000, it created an executive coordinator position. In 2012, the Bureau of Land Management joined, followed in 2020 by the state wildlife directors of Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. While cities, counties, private landowners, and tribes are not official committee members, the GYCC welcomes their engagement.

Together, committee members build relationships, exchange information, collaborate around cross-cutting issues, and support each other’s work through annual grant opportunities. “There are really rich opportunities to share and coordinate and not duplicate effort,” Blackford says. The GYCC’s three strategic priorities are maintaining resilient landscapes, responding to increased visitor use, and strengthening coalitions, partnerships, and communications.

Jenkins, who currently chairs the committee, says the committee “provides a framework and form where we come together on a regular and routine basis. First and foremost, it provides the catalyst for us building relationships where we get to know each other as people. We get to know each other in terms of the work that we do, the challenges that we face, and what we’re trying to do.”

More than 300 people participate in the GYCC’s nine subcommittees, which tackle the transboundary challenges of fire management, hydrology, invasive species, whitebark pine, native fish, wildlife, climate change adaptation, and clean air. Coordinated research and planning efforts have led to joint products like the 2021 Greater Yellowstone Climate Assessment and the 2024 Whitebark Pine Interagency Agreement.

The GYCC also funds around $250,000 of projects in priority areas each year. The 2024 round of selected projects focused on the ecological health of birds, creating smoke ready communities, stream restoration, and more. One project addressed long-term monitoring of whitebark pine—an important fall food for grizzly bears—in northern parts of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, while another project funded an outreach and prevention campaign about invasive species in the region.

“The Greater Yellowstone Coordinating Committee’s fingerprints are on a lot of really cool projects in that part of the world,” says Brian Nesvik, the just-retired director of the Wyoming Game and Fish Department. “While a lot of that ground is protected, there are still some real conservation needs. So the [GYCC] doing the work they’ve done over all these years is a really good thing for the ecosystem.”

Arthur Middleton, associate professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley thinks the committee has especially shined on certain issues, like work with grizzly bears and migrating ungulates. “The GYCC really is a place for these emerging issues to more rapidly become understood and kind of integrated into the planning across all those units,” he says.

In other cases, limited funding and personnel hours, as well as the spectrum of things the committee cannot control—like climate change and what happens on private lands—means the non-decision-making body’s power has been limited. “I think like anything that’s existed for 60 years, the GYCC has had its ups and its downs in terms of meeting its mission and intended goals, Middleton says, though he points to the positive impacts of the organization saying, “I strongly feel that conservation has been improved by the GYCC.”

Jenkins acknowledges there have been bumps in the road, but believes the teamwork is paying off, pointing to the recovery of grizzly bears, wolves, and bald eagles, among others. “The reason that we have had these conservation successes is because people at the local community, at the state, and at the federal level have chosen to pursue and to work towards improving the condition of the ecosystem,” Jenkins says. “Yes, it’s been contentious, yes there have been fights, yes there’s been political compromise, yes there’s been litigation, but arguably the ecosystem is in better health and better shape today than it was 60 years ago. And it’s because people set out to be intentional and thoughtful about the decisions that they want to make and recognize that they need to do that in a collaborative way.”

Kristen Pope is a freelance writer who lives in the Tetons. Find more of her work at kepope.com.

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Greater Yellowstone Coordinating Committee Photo: 

A new tool to suppress an invasive fish shows promise

By Isabella Sadler

In October 2019 and 2020, helicopters hovered above the pristine waters of Yellowstone Lake, surrounded by an autumn landscape of yellowing aspen trees. The helicopters carried a weight equivalent to 14 small cars—17,000 kilograms of circular, brown pellets—which they released near a small, rocky island in the lake’s West Thumb. The pellets rained down, sinking to the lake’s bottom, where managers hoped they would suppress the thousands of invasive lake trout born in Yellowstone Lake annually. Years in the making, this novel technique targets a life stage that past efforts have been unsuccessful at controlling, and shows promise as an effective, low-cost way to eradicate invasive fish.

Yellowstone Lake is home to the largest population of genetically pure Yellowstone cutthroat trout, a spotted, golden-colored trout native to the western US. This culturally and ecologically significant fish attracts anglers from across the country and serves as a valuable food source for many land mammals and birds in the area. But lake trout—an invasive, predatory trout species first discovered in Yellowstone Lake in 1994—threaten cutthroat trout and the animals that rely on them.

Lake trout eat cutthroat, which led to a severe decline in the cutthroat population after the lake trout population expanded. Lake trout also do not occupy the same ecological role as cutthroat, which has implications for the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem as a whole. Cutthroat are medium-bodied trout that reproduce in streams connected to Yellowstone Lake, making them available as food sources for many land animals that pass by streams. Lake trout, however, are much larger and do not access the streams, making it nearly impossible for land predators to catch them. Because of this, fewer cutthroat means less food for brown bears, black bears, eagles, osprey, and more.

To combat this problem, the National Park Service fisheries program began removing lake trout in 1995 with gillnets, which are large nets that entangle fish as they attempt to swim through. While lake trout numbers in Yellowstone Lake have decreased since 2012, the invasive trout persist in large numbers and pose a substantial threat to the cutthroat. In addition, gillnetting is very expensive, and young fish, typically two years old and below, are small enough to slip through the gillnets.

Thus, park service biologists sought methods to kill young lake trout before and just after they’ve hatched. To do this, they targeted where lake trout lay their eggs, attempting to make these spawning grounds inhospitable to the developing fish. After years of research, they developed pellets that mimic the way a decomposing lake trout carcass removes oxygen from the water. Releasing these organic, “carcass-analog” pellets in the water around the spawning grounds reduces oxygen concentrations to lethal levels, smothering lake trout eggs. This only harms the lake trout young because cutthroat spawn in streams far away from Yellowstone Lake.

It’s also cost-effective. More than $2 million is spent gillnetting lake trout in Yellowstone Lake each year, while it’s estimated that applying pellet treatments to all known spawning sites would cost just $250,000 annually. Gillnetting would still be needed to target adult lake trout, but fewer fish hatching each year would slow their reproduction and reduce overall costs.

Park biologists piloted this new method in 2019 and 2020, dropping the pellets on Carrington Island spawning reef. In the two years following pellet treatments, biologists didn’t catch a single lake trout hatchling in traps surrounding Carrington Island, implying that nearly 100% of lake trout eggs died at this location. While these results are very promising for controlling young fish, Carrington Island is just one of 14 known spawning sites in Yellowstone Lake. Researchers do not yet know how suppressing hatchlings at one site will impact the lake-wide invasive trout population and would need to treat more spawning locations to determine the pellets’ overall efficiency and impact on the lake trout.

Biologists must also consider potential negative side effects of this treatment. Two studies are currently evaluating the effect of pellet treatments on Yellowstone Lake. One project collects tissue samples of algae, zooplankton, macroinvertebrates, and fish to measure the extent to which pellets are incorporated into the food web. The other project evaluates the impacts of pellet treatments on water quality and nutrient dynamics. Because pellets contain nitrogen and phosphorus—nutrients that can stimulate the growth of algae—there is a chance that the pellets reduce water quality and affect other organisms in the lake. While they don’t expect unintended effects, biologists want to be certain before expanding the treatment to more spawning sites.

Overall, Yellowstone National Park is moving forward with cautious optimism. The cutthroat trout population has greatly recovered due to these efforts, but lake trout control will need to continue into the foreseeable future. Carrington Island will be treated again in autumn 2024 and 2025, and the pellets’ initial success has inspired further development and research. Not only is this new method a milestone in the park’s 30-year battle against lake trout, but the work in Yellowstone Lake is paving the way for management in other large, deep lakes where controlling invasive species has been extremely difficult.

Isabella Sadler is a PhD student in the Program in Ecology at the University of Wyoming. Her research interests involve how invasive species and disturbance alter freshwater ecosystems.

Header Image: The angular rock surrounding Carrington Island in the West Thumb is prime lake trout spawning habitat in Yellowstone Lake (Koel et al., CC BY 4.0).

As chronic wasting disease spreads, wildlife managers plea for strategies that could work

By Christine Peterson

No one knew why the deer were losing weight, struggling to stand, and then keeling over, dead. So for years in the 1960s and 70s, researchers at a Colorado State University research facility recorded the mystery by collecting tiny slivers of the deer’s brains and filing them away.

Then one day a PhD student named Beth Williams unearthed those slides. Under a microscope, each sample appeared filled with holes, like the brain tissue had turned into Swiss cheese. Those holes, she realized, were similar to the ones veterinarians had already identified in sheep brains, and the always-fatal illness with no cure was coined chronic wasting disease (CWD).

As she and other researchers sounded the alarm, the strange new disease spread from Colorado to Wyoming, and then Nebraska and South Dakota, killing any deer or elk it infected. In 1996, Williams gave what now feels like a prophetic piece of advice about managing CWD: “You’ll have to be aggressive,” she said. “Remove all sources…and all potential movement. Cut wider and deeper than you ever think necessary. The deer will come back; but you’ll get one chance. If CWD gets widely established, you’ll have it for a very long time.”

In the decades since, states that followed her advice, like New York and Minnesota, have so far mostly kept the disease at bay. But in places like Wyoming and Wisconsin, which have largely lacked the will to cut as deep for as long as disease experts say is necessary, CWD has continued to spread. “There is apathy from both the wildlife managers but also the public,” says Brian Nesvik, director of the Wyoming Game and Fish Department. “Does this worry me? Absolutely.”

Today, CWD has become one of the thorniest wildlife diseases of our time, infecting deer, elk, reindeer, and moose in three-fifths of the US and portions of Canada, Norway, and even South Korea, with prevalence rates as high as 60 percent. Despite this, most experts and wildlife managers agree that it’s not too late to act. Try something, they say. Don’t just watch and wait.

~

Chronic wasting disease, or transmissible spongiform encephalopathy as it’s known to scientists, is caused by the buildup of misfolded proteins called prions, which kill brain cells and leave holes in animals’ brains. Infected animals become lethargic and emaciated, wasting away until, inevitably, they die. Because it isn’t a bacteria or a virus, it can’t be treated with antibiotics or prevented with traditional vaccines.

The disease first spreads among animals largely through nose-to-nose contact. Once CWD is established in a population and animals shed prions onto the landscape, experts believe individuals can then contract the disease through infected soil or even, possibly, through prions clinging to blades of grass.

Researchers know that deer contract the disease at higher rates than elk, which contract the disease at higher rates than moose, though no one knows exactly why. Bucks seem to be infected twice as often as does, likely because they tend to move and socialize more.

Left unchecked on a landscape, it moves slowly—it took about 40 years for CWD to creep from southeast Wyoming to the western portions of the state. But humans have given it a lift by moving captive elk and deer between businesses that raise them for food or hunting opportunities. Saskatchewan imported the disease in a captive elk from South Dakota in the late 90s. South Korea then unknowingly imported an infected elk from Canada in 2001.

Because there is no cure, and infectious prions may linger on the landscape a long time, CWD researcher Krysten Schuler, a wildlife disease ecologist and director of the Cornell Wildlife Health Lab, says the best way to contain the disease is to limit possible sources of transmission. Stop treating deer and elk like livestock that can be shipped between captive facilities, particularly across state lines, she says. Explain to hunters that carcasses should go to landfills or carcass-disposal facilities and not get tossed on the side of a dirt road, where they could potentially infect nearby herds. Don’t transport brain or spinal tissue to new areas.

New York, where Schuler works, took this lesson to heart when it identified the disease in an infected deer from a captive deer facility that was made into chili for a local fire hall event in 2005. After the first discovery, officials found more positive deer at another captive facility, and ultimately paid to depopulate both businesses. Since then, they’ve worked on keeping the disease out by banning facilities from importing live deer or elk from out of state, prohibiting hunters from bringing intact carcasses in from other states, outlawing baiting and feeding to reduce gathering spots, and surveilling herds especially in high-risk areas. The state has even paid meat processors and taxidermists $10 and $20, respectively, to send in either a head or lymph node for testing.

The state is proof, Schuler says, that CWD can be isolated. “There’s an obligation to try and stop it and not just throw up our hands and say it’s going to be everywhere.”

Bryan Richards, the emerging disease coordinator at the USGS National Wildlife Health Center in Wisconsin, advocates for an even simpler approach: reduce the number of deer gathered in close quarters by thinning herds. It’s the same one Williams recommended almost 30 years ago.

When CWD popped up in Minnesota in 2011, wildlife managers used sharpshooters and a late-season deer hunt to try and reduce the spread. Since then, the state regularly culls several hundred deer from hot spots where infections pop up before the disease has a chance to spread. And the strategy has largely worked. Officials believe only one herd has established CWD, and rates hover around 1 percent.

But this aggressive response only seems to work with a public prepared for what trying to control CWD requires. Years before the CWD outbreak in Minnesota, the state culled whitetail deer in its successful fight against bovine tuberculosis, a disease that can sicken and kill both whitetail deer and cattle. Because of that, says Kelly Straka, head of fish and wildlife for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, hunters and the general public knew what to expect.

In contrast, when researchers in the rolling foothills of the Norwegian mountains discovered CWD variants in a herd of reindeer, the swift response was deeply unpopular. They essentially eliminated one population, killing more than 2,000 reindeer, says Atle Mysterud, a university of Oslo professor who has studied CWD for years. They’re monitoring the spread of CWD in another one.

That initial attack was met with uproar from the public, and Mysterud is not sure Norway will be so aggressive again. “We should have clearer goals. Current aim is ‘limit, if possible eradicate’ – but limit vs eradicate involve quite different actions.”

~

In Wyoming, where CWD is established in many, but not all, deer and elk herds, the state has had to walk the line between limiting the spread and managing infected populations.  “For the vast majority of the time, we didn’t engage in any meaningful statewide management,” says Justin Binfet, a wildlife biologist with the Wyoming Game and Fish Department. But now the state has a new CWD plan, which he hopes will help Wyoming turn a corner.

The plan, finalized in 2020, calls for reducing deer or elk densities at potential hot spots like center irrigation pivots or haystacks and directs Game and Fish to sample at least 200 buck mule deer and 200 elk out of each of the state’s herds every five years. It also says thinning herds or increasing buck hunting in some herds may be necessary to conserve the state’s abundant wildlife. But the latter has proved challenging to enact.

In 2022, a mule deer herd in the early stages of CWD infection lived tucked up along the east side of Wyoming’s Snowy Range. Rates of the disease in buck deer were around 8 percent, a far cry from the 40 percent or even 70 percent in mature bucks farther north.

Research in other herds showed that left unabated, prevalence would inevitably increase. It also showed that CWD spreads first in bucks and then into does. Cut down on the number of bucks, especially big, old bucks, which are prized by hunters but are more likely to carry the disease and spread it around, and potentially control the disease.

So Lee Knox, a Game and Fish biologist, made a plan. He held a series of public meetings explaining CWD research and gauging hunters’ thoughts on increasing buck harvest. At the time, the herd of almost 4,000 deer had about 40 bucks per 100 does. Many other Wyoming herds keep buck numbers around or under 30 bucks per 100 does, and states like Minnesota hold their herds often around 20.

He proposed, and many of hunters in those early meetings agreed, to offer 100 more buck tags spread across four hunt areas and allow hunters to look for them in November instead of exclusively during the first two weeks of October.

But before the concept could even make it to the Wyoming Game and Fish Commission the following spring, online hunting forums exploded. Game and Fish was trying to kill all of the area’s bucks, people said. In a deer population that is already struggling, increasing hunting would ruin opportunities to shoot big bucks in the future. The outrage reached such a fever pitch that the department pulled the proposal, saying it was just not the right time.

“You’ll hear people say the cure is worse than the disease, which is not true at all,” Knox says. “But the public wants a guarantee, and we can’t guarantee anything.” Two years later, CWD prevalence rates in the herd now hover around 15 percent.

The story illustrates the difficulty of trying to reduce CWD’s spread by increasing hunting in a state where mule deer are so prized they adorn license plates, and herds are struggling from drought, development, invasive species, and disease.

Game and Fish Director Nesvik doesn’t blame people. Increasing hunting or thinning herds is a hard pill to swallow when populations are already lower than people would like. Plus, he said, “the public can’t see the disease killing deer. They know there’s less deer, but they go to the things that are simpler to understand. They think, ‘Well, we know mountain lions eat deer, so mountain lions are the problem.’ I think that people are having a hard time believing that CWD is actually having an effect on the population.”

Wyoming officials are also quick to point out other differences between combatting CWD in New York and Minnesota and fighting it in the Cowboy State. The Midwest’s abundant deer stay relatively put, while deer and elk herds in the West migrate dozens if not hundreds of miles, which complicates efforts to slow the spread. Managing a landscape steeped in the disease, they say, is also very different than keeping the infectious prions out.

Once the disease has already taken root, even Schuler and Straka say there’s no reasonable way to get rid of it. At that point, entities are left to manage through monitoring the spread and trying to keep prevalence down. But if support for cutting deeply once to prevent CWD’s establishment was difficult to come by, the will to cull year after year just to maintain disease levels has been even more elusive.

Wyoming wildlife managers once dramatically increased hunting in a deer herd in Thermopolis but soon discovered CWD was already enmeshed in the area. After two years, the public’s appetite for keeping deer numbers low dropped, hunting returned to usual, and rates spiked.

In Wisconsin, where disease pathologists first detected CWD in three deer killed by hunters in the fall of 2001, wildlife managers took the arrival seriously. They made deer hunting essentially unlimited in many places, required hunters shoot a doe before they kill a buck in others, and department officials culled deer. But when they sampled more than 40,000 deer the following year, they found another 205 cases. The disease, it appeared, had already taken hold.

Six years later, the hunting public had had enough. They were willing to invest in a short-term solution, it appeared, but not one that could last forever.

“Ultimately, populations are managed by hunters, and hunters wield funding and influence,” says Richards with the USGS. “As long as agencies keep producing lots of deer and big deer, the influence hunters apply is positive. But if hunters are unhappy, then the legislature takes over.”

Hunters wanted to go to back to the good old days of hunting, when the forests and fields were full of big deer, before culling dropped the number of overall deer. So the state legislature ordered an analysis of the efforts, and upon learning the results were inconclusive told the Department of Natural Resources to stop. Hunting seasons returned to normal, deer numbers bounced back, and now, 20 years later in a state with two million whitetail deer, prevalence rates in some areas are over 50 percent.

Somewhat ironically, Richards has a paper coming out this year that looks back at those early efforts to contain the disease and found that they did, in fact, help curb the spread.

~

Researchers and wildlife managers like Richards and Nesvik are frustrated by the general lack of willingness to do anything, the desire to just go back to the days before the disease gripped the landscape, before hard decisions like thinning herds needed to be made. Even in places where prevention has largely been successful, like Minnesota, “there can be a perspective of impending doom,” says Straka. “You can continue to do whatever you want, but the threat will be there.”

“It’s a wicked problem,” Richards says. “There’s no easy answer and no one group by themselves can manage the outcome.” But researchers agree that states need to work together, sharing infection data and comparing strategies to aggressively prevent the disease’s spread and keep prevalence down in infected populations.

That’s not likely to happen unless CWD spreads to humans or domestic livestock like cattle, Richards says. Or, adds Nesvik, if a study could show irrefutable proof that reducing densities in areas like Wyoming’s rolling sagebrush and rugged mountains works.

Schuler thinks by now the message should be clear. “The one constant with CWD is it always seems to get worse, but I don’t think people are really trying to make it better,” she says. “I think we need a groundswell of hunters and conservationists and the public to talk to their elected officials and say, ‘This is really important to me, and we need to do something about it.’ Because the status quo is we’re losing, and we’re losing pretty badly.”

Christine Peterson is a freelance journalist covering the environment, wildlife and outdoor recreation for local, regional and national publications from her home in Laramie, Wyoming.

Header image: D026, a female deer that was studied as part of a collaboration between the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, University of Wyoming, and United States Geological Survey to better understand chronic wasting disease and how it affects mule deer populations. She was collared southwest of Casper, Wyoming and died in October 2021 at five years old because of CWD, which is always fatal. Photo by Justin Binfet.

Issue 14: Global Wildlife Conservation

By Birch Dietz Malotky

When the University of Wyoming brought together a couple dozen managers and researchers from around the world to visit the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and discuss international wildlife policy, one reaction stands out to me above all others: “For better or worse, it’s nice to see that you’re dealing with the same issues we are.”

As national parks expert Bob Keiter observes in Upstream, Yellowstone National Park has served as a model for global conservation since its protection in 1872. Widely heralded as the world’s first national park—though Mongolia’s Bogd Khan Mountain, protected a century earlier, has a strong claim to the title—Yellowstone has continued to be a nursery for innovation in wildlife conservation and land management. From tracking and mapping animal migrations, to supporting private land stewardship, to collaborating across agencies for landscape-scale management, the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is truly a leader.

And yet, in today’s constantly evolving world, huge challenges remain. Managers and researchers continue to battle invasive species and wildlife disease. They look to balance development pressure for food, fuel, tourism, and first, second, and third homes with preserving year-round wildlife habitat. And they work to reconcile what drought, wildfire, flooding, heat waves, and more will mean for the people and animals that depend on these cherished landscapes.

As Katie Doyle discovered in Spain’s Canary Islands, going away can teach you a lot about home. Around the world, people and organizations are working to reduce conflicts between livestock and carnivores, reconnect fragmented landscapes, and foster community-driven ecotourism that supports both people and wildlife. In these shared challenges, there is opportunity to learn from new and experimental thinking unbounded by decades of tradition, as well as the enduring wisdom of a people’s age-old relationship to the animals and the land.

While this issue of Western Confluence is divided into four, cross-cutting themes—evolving threats, patchwork governance, from the roots, and toward coexistence—what struck me in editing these stories was how entangled all the categories were. In the Alps, addressing conflict between wolves and people required coordination across a half dozen countries. Climate mitigation strategies had unaccounted-for impacts on the bond between people and reindeer that has shaped the arctic tundra of Sápmi. And repurposing a pastoralist community’s centuries-old adaptation in Kenya offered an unexpected way to protect lions and the rare antelope they hunt.

It’s a good reminder that thinking across borders includes looking outside the systems and silos we work in to see the web of cause and effect, problem and solution, that unite people, animals, and the landscapes they share. From tropical forests to African savannah, wet meadows to Mongolia’s mountain slopes, please join
me on a tour of large landscapes around the world as they work to address the most pressing issues in wildlife conservation and management today.

Header image: Protecting large landscapes is about more than preserving individual species, it’s also about sustaining ecological processes and relationships. In the arctic lichenlands of Sápmi, the cyclical migration of reindeer and people is woven into both land and culture. So too has the wildebeest migration shaped the Serengeti, working lands provided refuge for waterfowl and antelope in the Mountain West, and shepherds trod their mark on mountain slopes from the Alps to Mongolia. The story of wildlife conservation, then, is one of abundance, and movement, and coming together as people and animals to share the landscape, face new threats, and care for one another. Ina-Theres Sparrok, a herder in Voengelh Njaarke reindeer herding district in Norway, captures this confluence in the spring migration of reindeer across snow- and ice-covered routes that grow more treacherous with climate change.

Who should pay for wildlife management?

By Hilary Byerly Flint 

“We’re pretty darn lucky,” says Brian Nesvik, director of the Wyoming Game and Fish Department. “People come to Wyoming [for] bighorn sheep and grizzly bears, elk and moose, sage grouse and waterfowl.” Nesvik’s agency is responsible for managing the state’s wildlife, which includes some of North America’s most diverse and abundant populations of large mammals. “We’re always going to have that as long as we continue to do the right things and put our resources in good places. We’re going to continue to be able to provide that wildlife resource for a lot of different people to enjoy.” 

Wildlife and the tourism it attracts are particularly exceptional in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem—a 22 million-acre area encompassing Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks. Craig Benjamin, conservation director at the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, agrees with Nesvik’s assessment. “Our wildlife is generally doing pretty well. [Wyoming] Game and Fish does a good job. We have a relatively healthy ecosystem. There are huge pressures and huge threats, but this isn’t 1975 where we have 130 bears left.” 

But some are less optimistic, both about the health of the ecosystem and the promise of the status quo. Kristin Combs, executive director of Wyoming Wildlife Advocates, says “The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem seems like a wildlife paradise and people think, ‘Oh, it’s so great. Everything’s there’…But when you look beneath the surface, wildlife here is still facing an incredible uphill battle, especially large carnivores and non-game species.” In her view, and in the view of a growing coalition of organizations, that uphill battle is the result of state wildlife agencies’ focus on game species, which are animals that can be hunted or fished. This focus, they say, is to the detriment of other species, overall ecosystem health, and the interests of all those who value wildlife.  

At its root, this controversy is about funding. State wildlife management is funded by a so-called “user-pays” system that was established more than a century ago and hasn’t evolved with changing values. Many of today’s wildlife users, the people who interact with and benefit from wildlife, don’t provide revenue to support broader management, leaving state wildlife agencies with limited and ear-marked resources. In Wyoming, for example, game-related taxes and fees provide 85 percent of Game and Fish’s funding, and game species receive 87 percent of the agency’s spending. That leaves less than 15 percent for non-game species like raptors, songbirds, certain small mammals and fish, bats, amphibians, reptiles, crustaceans, and mollusks. Combs and others say it’s time to rethink this model.  

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Wildlife agencies’ funding and priorities are rooted in their origins. In the late 1800s, profit-seeking hunters and government policies caused steep declines in wildlife populations. “Sportsmen were the core of the effort to rebuild those populations,” says Nesvik, “and they did it through funding.” Recognizing the need for wildlife protections if they were to continue their sport, recreational hunters and anglers successfully advocated for better management. By 1910, every state had established a commission to protect wild game and fisheries and created wildlife agencies to manage hunting and fishing.  

These new agencies were funded by asking those who “used” wildlife to pay for its conservation. States generated revenue by selling licenses and hunting tags, and more money came from two federal tax laws. The Pittman-Robertson Act of 1937 imposed an 11 percent tax on the sales of firearms and ammunition. Soon after, the Dingle-Johnson Act levied a similar tax on fishing equipment and allocated a portion of the gasoline fuel tax (attributable to small engines and motorboats) towards fisheries conservation. As a result, wildlife management was originally in service of, and funded by, hunting and angling. 

This legislation, and subsequent coordination between the federal government and states, formed the basis of the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation. Among other tenets, the model holds that wildlife are a public trust resource that should be be managed for the benefit of all citizens, and management should follow scientific principles. It is a unique and successful model that has largely restored and maintained wildlife populations.  

Over time, state wildlife agencies have been asked to do more without major new sources of funding. “Sometime in the 1960s and 70s, you started to see this shift in wildlife management and wildlife management expectations of state agencies, particularly with the passage of the Endangered Species Act,” says David Willms, associate vice president of public lands for the National Wildlife Federation. The environmental awakening of the time led to new laws and broader visions of environmental management that went beyond game species. Since then, the US Fish and Wildlife Service intervenes to manage endangered species while state wildlife agencies are left to manage the rest of the animal ecosystem, including those species that might become endangered.  

Facing a broadened ecological scope without commensurate funding, state agencies have worked hard to leverage what they have. Willms says, “The money to manage all wildlife—those resources just weren’t there, and they haven’t been there. It’s been, how do you stretch the hunter-angler dollars as far as you possibly can to be able to manage all species?”  

Wyoming Game and Fish, for its part, has a nongame bird and mammal program. In the last year, the agency conducted bald eagle and trumpeter swan monitoring, black-footed ferret management, studies of American pika, shrews, and prairie dogs, and more. But with just an eighth of the agency’s budget and a fraction of its staff, the nongame program can’t directly address all 229 species of greatest conservation concern, most of them nongame, identified in the State Wildlife Action Plan.  

When Benjamin worked for the National Wildlife Federation, “That was the thing we heard from [state wildlife] agencies across America: ‘We want to go work on all these species that are not endangered, yet. They could become endangered, but they’re not game species, and we don’t really have funding for them because we’re not supported by dollars that come in for those species.’” 

State wildlife agencies also take advantage of an umbrella effect. “A lot of the work [Wyoming Game and Fish] does to manage for big game benefits all species,” says Benjamin. “The habitat restoration or migration corridors for pronghorn or elk, that’s then benefiting hundreds of other species.” Indeed, a 2016 literature review in Biological Conservation found evidence that managing for game could have positive impacts on non-game species by protecting habitat and mimicking natural disturbances. Recent work by Arthur Middleton, an ecologist who studies the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, showed that protected big game migration corridors help to sustain carnivores, scavengers, and other animals on the landscape. But these findings aren’t conclusive. The 2016 literature review also identified neutral and negative impacts of game management on other species and concluded that, with only 26 studies at the time, the impacts were both variable and poorly understood.  

In the end, Nesvik says, “there’s an endless list of projects that need to be done. We’ve taken the resources we have and prioritized the absolute most important places we can go to try to spread that out across the state.” He also says “a lot of our work and the messaging and the justifications revolve around species that are hunted and fished. That’s really our charge. That’s what we do.” 

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Not only has this user-pays funding model failed to support wildlife agencies’ expanded management mandate, it also neglects dramatic changes in wildlife users and payers nation-wide. When the Pittman-Robertson and Dingle-Johnson tax laws passed, hunters and anglers were the primary users of wildlife and the primary buyers of firearms. Today, many people who “use” wildlife do not contribute towards its management, and firearms sales are increasingly disconnected from hunting. 

According to a 2016 report from the US Fish and Wildlife Service, only 4 percent of US residents hunt, down from 7 percent in 1991. In contrast, 34 percent reported watching wildlife. Wildlife viewing is one of the fastest growing wildlife recreation activities and a top reason for visiting national parks like Yellowstone and Grand Teton.  

Further, while most Americans once thought of wildlife as existing solely for the benefit of humans, a 2021 paper in Nature Sustainability showed that, nationally, Americans increasingly think of wildlife as part of their social community and are concerned “about wildlife population decline, habitat protection, restricting humans to benefit wildlife, and maintaining natural conditions.”  

Because the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation says that wildlife should be managed for the benefit of all citizens, these preferences have management implications. Predators like wolves, for example, are hunted for sport and as a way of bolstering the populations of other huntable species like elk and deer (in addition to protecting livestock). But a 2016 study found that wolf hunting and trapping along the boundaries of Denali and Yellowstone National Parks reduced wolf sightings within the parks.  

Research also shows—and Native people have long known—that a broad range of plant and animal species and interactions are necessary to support ecosystem health, ecosystem services, and successful conservation, which in turn provide benefits to society. Jason Baldes, member of the Eastern Shoshone Tribe and executive director of the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative, says that “restoring the holistic nature of our environment… means we need to have water in the river. It means we need to have buffalo on the ground and able to move. It means we need to have those wolves and bears living their lives.”  

But large-scale shifts in use, values, and knowledge have not been accompanied by funding. Despite research on the ways that “non-consumptive” recreation can disturb, displace, and even damage wildlife populations, wildlife viewers are not paying to protect or mitigate their impacts to wildlife in the ways that hunters and anglers do. Moreover, rural communities—where traditional values remain prevalent and where hunting and angling are central to many personal identities, communities, and economies—continue to bear most of the costs of conflict with wildlife.  

At the same time, there have been shifts in who is funding wildlife management. Today, hunters generate the largest share of revenue for state wildlife agencies only in certain states like Wyoming and Montana, where hunting is still prominent and out-of-state hunters purchase expensive licenses. Nationally, revenue from hunting licenses and fees has stayed flat at about $1 billion annually since 2000, whereas revenue from Pittman-Robertson excise taxes has increased sixfold in that same time period, to $1.2 billion. Now, firearms and ammunition buyers are the largest single source of user-generated funds for state wildlife management.  

The thing is, “about 75 percent of Pittman-Robertson funds are not coming from hunters. They’re coming from people that buy guns [and ammunition], but not for hunting,” says Kevin Bixby, founder of Wildlife for All, a national campaign whose mission is to “reform wildlife management to be more democratic, just, compassionate, and focused on protecting wild species and ecosystems.” A 2017 report from Pew Research Center found that protection has surpassed hunting as the number one reason for firearm ownership, with 67 percent of gun owners citing protection as a major reason they own a gun and only 38 percent citing hunting. Sport (or recreational) shooting is not far behind, cited by 30 percent of gun owners. Bixby says that there is a similar decoupling of user and payer with the Dingell-Johnson funds, “because Dingle-Johnson taxes are imposed on fishing equipment but also on the gasoline that goes into lawn mowers and snowblowers.”  

Willms says, “The growth of the firearms industry, especially from the recreational shooting standpoint, has kind of created a bandaid for the declining hunter participation nationally.” In turn, these recreational shooters and lobbies are gaining a voice in how state wildlife management funding is used. For example, the National Shooting Sports Foundation successfully lobbied for Pittman-Robertson funding to pay for shooting ranges on public lands.  

As scholars John Casellas Connors and Christopher Rea wrote in their article “Violent Entanglement: The Pittman-Robertson Act, Firearms, and the Financing of Conservation,” “The source of funding is thus redefining the user and reshaping the policy, as opposed to maintaining a fixed definition of what is used and enlisting other users of the [public] trust (e.g., hikers) as payers.” 

~ 

That’s why for many, funding is the place to start modernizing state wildlife management.  

Some ideas adhere to the user-pays model. Both the Wyoming and Montana Legislatures passed resolutions in the last five years asking the National Park Service to collect a “Conservation Fee” from Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks visitors. These resolutions are non-binding, but they intend to make a point—the millions of people who visit these parks each year to see wildlife ought to contribute to the state agencies that manage those animals as they roam beyond park boundaries. A similar idea is to levy “backpack taxes,” as has been done in Virginia and Texas, which tax certain outdoor equipment to parallel the excise taxes on hunting and fishing equipment. 

Another avenue could fundraise from businesses that profit from wildlife. Taylor Phillips, who runs an ecotourism business in Jackson, Wyoming, says “For years I’ve been in the tourism space, interacting with guests, showing them the diverse array of wildlife. And I’ve seen this disconnect of who benefits from wildlife and who pays for it. The tourism sector that is largely driven by wildlife doesn’t financially contribute.” In response, Phillips founded WYldlife for Tomorrow, which solicits businesses to voluntarily contribute a portion of their profits to fund wildlife conservation projects conducted by Wyoming Game and Fish.  

Bixby, on the other hand, wants to stop user-pay entirely. “Wildlife is in the public trust, it’s a public good,” he says. “It’s like schools or libraries or fire stations. We wouldn’t think access to these public goods should go to the people that pay more in taxes. No, everybody should have access to them, because everyone benefits. Same with wildlife. We all benefit from wildlife whether we use it in some way or just enjoy the fruits of natural ecosystems that wild animals contribute to. I really don’t like the idea of ‘user pays’ at all in terms of wildlife conservation funding. We’re all users.” 

Nationally, the proposed Recovering America’s Wildlife Act (RAWA) offers perhaps the greatest hope of funding for more inclusive wildlife management. The legislation would provide around $1.4 billion annually to be split between states and tribes. “It would be a game-changer for states, in the revenue that would be created,” says Willms, whose organization is among the leading advocacy groups for the legislation. “I don’t know that you’d have to do much more if that were to pass. It would be such a huge shot in the arm.”  

RAWA would also address the current wildlife funding system’s insufficient support for tribal wildlife management. “We have a tribal fish and game department on the [Wind River] reservation that has three game wardens for a reservation the same size as Yellowstone,” says Baldes, who is also the tribal buffalo coordinator for the Tribal Partnerships Program of the National Wildlife Federation. “Tribes are ineligible for Pittman-Robertson funding. While most state agencies receive quite a bit of federal dollars for wildlife management, tribes are left out of that. Recovering America’s Wildlife Act would ensure that tribal governments can protect their own laws and lands with law enforcement.” 

None of these funding alternatives are perfect; voluntary efforts will be too small to make a difference, new fees and taxes require changes in legislation, and user-pays schemes can further disenfranchise already marginalized groups. In the case of RAWA, which failed to pass the US Senate in late 2022 and was reintroduced in March 2023, the source of funding is still stuck in political negotiation.  

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Advocates are also pushing to diversify the voices at the decision-making table. In almost every state, wildlife commissions advise and oversee the wildlife agency and its budget. They are also overwhelmingly populated by sportsmen. Commissioners are not required to have scientific or ecological expertise. “It has to start with reform of wildlife commissions, because they have an enormous amount of power,” says Combs. “Then you can start having conversations about how to let more diverse groups contribute to wildlife conservation and management and start putting those into action.”  

Indigenous leaders could play a greater role in informing management, particularly on public lands and in areas where tribes hold off-reservation hunting rights. “I respect [using science and technical information] but there are a lot of things that aren’t explained by science, and that’s why you need Indigenous voices in what we’re doing,” says Wes Martel, member of the Eastern Shoshone Tribe and senior Wind River conservation associate for Greater Yellowstone Coalition.  

Indigenous voices can also help elevate concerns around how wildlife management and legislation have marginalized and excluded Native Americans from their traditional lands and resources. “From the scientific and technical side, we try to follow the advice of biologists and scientists when it comes to management,” says Martel, “but at the same time, give recognition to our elders and the ceremonial and traditional uses that we have for some of our plants and animals and other things that we utilize. You know, those are not really recognized or upheld under state law.” 

Even with better funding and a more diverse group of decision makers, it may be necessary to create more flexibility in how existing funds get spent. Dingle-Johnson excise tax revenues can only be used for “species of fish which have material value in connection with sport or recreation in the marine and/or fresh waters of the United States.” The authorizing legislation for state wildlife agencies also limits management. Bixby gives the example of black-tailed prairie dogs in New Mexico, which “have been reduced to about 10 percent of their original range and yet, under state law, our state wildlife agency does not have authority to manage them.”  

Often, both federal excise tax revenues and agency mandates are restricted to mammals, birds, and fish, thereby excluding management and conservation of other species critical to healthy ecosystems. This prompted a September 2022 ruling by the California Supreme Court that classified bees as fish to allow for their protection under the state’s endangered species act. 

The absurdity of such an action lays bare the limitations of our current system. So much has changed since the inception of non-Indigenous wildlife management and conservation in the United States: science, values, users, and funders. Updating wildlife management to reflect these changes has been and will be a challenge. Combs, of Wyoming Wildlife Advocates, acknowledges this. “I want to give [Wyoming Game and Fish] credit for doing a difficult job, because it is hard to manage people and wildlife at the same time. They get it from all sides. I don’t envy their position.” 

With this reality, it’s unclear whether or how the system might meaningfully change. “Typically things move when there’s some sort of crisis or big threat,” says Benjamin of Greater Yellowstone Coalition. “And I don’t feel like that exists right now.”  

What exists are passionate people who care about our wildlife—from advocacy groups to legislators, Indigenous leaders to agency directors—all working to gradually refine wildlife funding and management in ways that better accommodate the diversity of wild species and human values in the United States. 

Hilary Byerly Flint is a senior research scientist at the University of Wyoming. She is based in Jackson, Wyoming. 

Booming elk numbers create a rare opportunity for hunting and tourism

By Janey Fugate

While scouting for mule deer on a chilly October evening in southeast Wyoming, the last thing I expected to see was several hundred elk. But there they were, at last light, filtering over the crest of a bare ridge and winding down the valley floor towards a river. Awestruck, I watched from a crouch. Cold eventually forced me to my feet and I started moving back along the hillside towards my car. As I walked, blaze orange vests alerted me to the presence of three other hunters lying behind a rock, rifles at the ready. I knew that they were waiting for the elk to step across an invisible line onto public land.

This image of three hunters watching a band of wary elk moving across a darkening landscape has stayed with me. Elk numbers are up across Wyoming, creating more hunt opportunities and possibly more funding for state wildlife agencies. At the same time, this ties to a host of management challenges related to changing property ownership, balancing in-state versus out of state tag allocations and finding enough access to private and public land for more hunters on the landscape. While these challenges aren’t unique to Wyoming, they are particularly acute here as the state moves to adapt to a growing outdoor recreation industry.

Against this backdrop, the state is leveraging its need to control elk numbers with a desire to boost the outdoor recreation economy through increasing nonresident tag allocations, with implications for game managers, landowners, and hunters.

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In the age of environmental crises, it’s unusual to hear of a wild animal that’s thriving. But in Wyoming, elk are at historic highs. In the 1980s, the state had an estimated 65,000 elk. Since then, elk populations have nearly doubled to reach over 120,000. Barring a few herds in the northwest, elk today exceed the desired numbers determined by game managers.

“It’s the heyday of elk. It really is,” says Lee Knox, a wildlife biologist for the Wyoming Game and Fish Department. Knox attributes elk population growth to a range of factors, including elk’s adaptability to different habitats and food sources relative to other hoofed mammals, their long-lived nature, and ability to learn to avoid hunters by hanging out on private lands.

Another major, though indirect, contributor to elk abundance could be a lessening of hunting pressure driven by changing landownership and changing landowner values. What were once large working ranches that supported hunting are now often divided into smaller ranchettes and developments, where elk are viewed less as a nuisance or a hunting resource and more as an attractive feature of the property. On the flip side, some landowners have consolidated large ranches that are less open to hunters than in the past, effectively locking up herds of elk from hunting pressure. This is particularly relevant in eastern Wyoming, where the amount of private property drastically limits hunter access compared to the western part of the state, causing hunters to crowd into patchy public lands.

While having too many elk is certainly a better problem to solve than its opposite, overpopulated elk can take a toll on the landscape. Elk can damage fences and get into haystacks or crops, compete with mule deer for habitat, and can be tough on willow and aspen stands, which are already declining as the climate gets drier.

Yet, elk are one of the most coveted kinds of quarry by both nonresident and resident hunters. As such, elk offer a particularly salient window into how big game hunting, a $250 million industry in Wyoming, fits into the tension around how to grow the state’s recreation economy while best managing habitat, access, and hunter satisfaction.

The Wyoming Wildlife Taskforce—a group of stakeholders from around the state that formed to tackle issues related to wildlife management and the sporting industry—may have found a way to bring elk to more sustainable levels. Their proposal could reap the economic benefits of attracting more out-of-state elk hunters, who pay significantly more than Wyoming residents to hunt. They proposed several legislative changes to elk hunt management in the state.

The first change was to remove a longstanding 7,250 cap on nonresident elk tags. The state legislature approved this change, which will go into effect in 2024. The demand for these tags has steadily exceeded their availability. According to the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, in 2022 there were 30,000 applications from out-of-state hunters for the 7,250 allotted elk tags.

In addition to removing the cap, the taskforce recommended splitting the nonresident tags into two categories: special (40 percent) and regular licenses (60 percent). The price of nonresident special licenses, which are designated for coveted hunt areas that offer higher rates of success on larger, mature animals, will increase to just under $2,000. For the regular tags, the nonresident price will remain at its current level of $692.

Boosting the number of licenses allotted for nonresident hunters like the taskforce proposed can be controversial when it’s perceived as taking away opportunities for in-state folks. This can be especially sensitive in Wyoming because the state already has higher nonresident tag allocations than neighboring states. Compared to Montana, which limits nonresidents to 10 percent of the available tags, Wyoming allocates 16-20 percent of elk, deer, and pronghorn tags to nonresidents. Jess Johnson, policy coordinator for the Wyoming Wildlife Federation, a sportsmen’s advocacy organization, says that maintaining a culture that prioritizes in-state hunters is a critical concern for residents.

“A fundamental part of being from these states is the ability to draw these tags,” she says. “Hunting, fishing, and trapping is a constitutional right in the state of Wyoming. Folks are very protective over it, understandably.”

According to the taskforce, these changes will not affect resident elk prices or the quantity of tags available to resident hunters, but they will affect Game and Fish’s budget—for the better.

Currently, 80 percent of the Wyoming Game and Fish Department’s budget is funded from hunting license fees. And 80 percent of that 80 percent comes from out-of-state tags. For example, an elk tag that currently costs nonresidents $692 is only $57 for residents. Doubling the price of a portion of these nonresident tags for elk, as well as deer and pronghorn, like the taskforce proposed has the potential to boost Game and Fish’s $90 million budget by 6 percent, adding an estimated $5.7 million in revenue each year.

“To me, that’s a win-win when you can approach the market value of a product and help your state agency,” says Sy Gilliland, president of the Wyoming Outfitters and Guides Association and a member of the taskforce.

According to an economic survey conducted by the Wyoming Outfitters and Guides Association, the number of nonresident hunters applying increased by 10 percent from 2015 to 2020, reflecting a broader trend in big game hunting. With shows like Meateater popularizing hunting and a growing desire to eat ethically harvested meat, the demand for western hunting isn’t showing signs of slowing down. And Wyoming is well positioned to capitalize on it.

“We have a world-class wildlife resource, and the world knows it,” says Gilliland. “Elk hunting right now is the best it’s ever been in modern history. [People] want to come here and experience it, so raising the cost of licenses can slow down or recoup the real value of that license.”

Gilliland has been guiding hunters all over Wyoming since 1977. Owning the state’s largest outfitting business, he’s led black bear hunts, moose hunts, and everything in between. As an outfitter, Gilliland also occupies a unique space in the cross section of hunters’ values. Outfitters need nonresident hunters to support their businesses, while still desiring the solitude, abundant wildlife, and public lands access that residents cherish.

He hopes that the change in the nonresident tag quota will indirectly benefit his industry, and Wyoming. His logic is that nonresidents willing to pay for the higher price of an elk tag may be more willing to hire a guide.

“The best bang for your buck is to put that license in the hand of a nonresident using outfitters,” says Gilliland. “He leaves the most dollars on the landscape.”

And repeat customers are the easiest the retain. Jim Moore, a Virginia native, has been coming with his son to hunt elk in the Wyoming backcountry for the last 10 years. Moore says that for him, harvesting a bull elk is just a part of the deeper experience of being immersed in nature. While telling me about his hunts, he described sharing a kill with a red fox that helped itself to Moore’s elk carcass, finding wolf tracks in the snow, and nervously keeping watch on a nearby grizzly bear while his guide field dressed their elk. With his outfitters, he’s hunted both private and public land.

“It’s a real opportunity for people that they can use commonly owned land,” says Moore. “It’s millions and millions of acres of opportunity for people.”

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And while it’s true that the opportunities to hunt public land are vast and worth celebrating, Wyoming’s overabundant elk are just as often found on private lands. This is where access comes in, a hunting buzzword. Increasing access to both private and public land is a big piece of the puzzle. Both Knox and Gilliland believe that nonresidents may be more willing to hunt private lands—and pay the steep fees landowners often charge for access—than residents are. For instance, in eastern Wyoming, Knox says local hunters are more likely to travel elsewhere in the state for hunt opportunities rather than try to get access to private lands.

“Most [residents] will go west if you allow it because there is more public land,” says Knox.

Gaining permission to hunt on private land presents a barrier for hunters that don’t have existing relationships with the landowner. When I watched the three hunters hiding on the ridge, they had no alternative other than to wait at a distance and pray the elk would cross onto public land. Similarly, in Area 7, a hunt unit near Laramie Peak, there were roughly 1,000 elk tags sold to hunters, but the hunter success rate was only 30 percent. In this area, there’s not a shortage of public land, but a lack of access to the private land where the elk hang out.

Private lands can even inadvertently prevent public lands from being accessible, an issue recently brought to the forefront of national news with the now infamous “corner crossing” case. In 2021, a landowner sued four out-of-state hunters for crossing a corner of his ranch to access public land on Elk Mountain they drew elk tags for. This more than $7 million lawsuit, still ongoing, pits the rights of public users against the rights of private landowners, adding to the friction felt around the West.

“The relationship between landowners and hunters is breaking down,” Johnson says. “There’ve been bad actors on both sides, frankly.”

This dynamic is painfully real to Ross Cook, a hunting mentor of mine whose family has owned a ranch outside Lander for the last 35 years. A few years ago, he caught two hunters going to retrieve a mule deer buck they shot illegally on his property. This is a more extreme case of the kinds of harmful behavior that deter landowners from opening their properties to hunters, but it illustrates a rising lack of trust.

“I have zero interest in letting people come and hunt that I haven’t shot with and worked with,” says Cook. “Vetting someone is really hard and most ranchers don’t have time for that.”

There are many reasons why landowners may not want hunters on their property, despite how much money people will pay for access. These range from not wanting the hassle of managing strangers and concerns over ensuring safety to not agreeing with shooting animals on principle. But for Cook, it comes down to finding hunters that share his ethics.

“I would love for people I know who have elk tags to come up to my land and go to town… but finding individuals you can trust is really hard.”

Landowners may have another reason not to allow elk hunters on their land. Cook says that landowners often claim money in elk-related property damages from Game and Fish instead of allowing hunters on their land, which incentivizes a cycle of limited access and over-abundant elk. Programs like Game and Fish’s “Access Yes,” where landowners can make their property open to hunting, address this dilemma but haven’t seen much success.

So bridging a desire to capitalize on nonresident hunters’ dollars with the potential to knock back elk populations is complicated on a lot of levels. The next step may be to match a rise in nonresident hunters with properties willing to let them hunt elk.

“How do we get more hunting pressure on reservoirs of private property?” asks Gilliland. “The best bet for that is to put more licenses in the hands of nonresidents who have the ability to hunt that land and have the ability to pay landowners.”

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Hand in hand with removing the 7,250 cap on nonresident elk tags is a taskforce proposal to create new nonresident elk hunting units to change how managers can distribute hunters across the landscape. These changes signal how Wyoming is grappling with a growing demand for western hunting and a desire to both protect its wildlife and maintain its identity in a changing West.

And though distrust between landowners and hunters is a thorny issue, some of these challenges may hopefully open the door to creative solutions that give hunters access to private property where elk congregate. For example, in other parts of the state and the region, online startups are connecting recreationists to private landowners with hunt opportunities, similar to Airbnb for hunting.

The economic benefits of attracting and capitalizing on nonresident hunters and the revenue they might bring to the state are significant, as is the potential to bring elk to more sustainable levels.

But for Gilliland, there is another, less tangible benefit to welcoming more nonresident hunters to Wyoming.

“We change lives, I have seen it so many times. [Hunters] are so grateful to the state of Wyoming for this opportunity,” he says. “I’ve guided congressman, they are hunting their public lands… when they come out here and they see their wilderness for the first time, they are advocates and they go home and help form policy.”

Janey Fugate is a storyteller and a master’s student with the Zoology and Physiology Department at the University of Wyoming under Matthew Kauffman. Her research focuses on how Yellowstone bison, after being reintroduced to the park, established the migration patterns they exhibit today.

Header image: Elk stand silhouetted against a sunset in Wyoming. (Shutterstock)