Restoring Wildlife Connectivity Across the High Divide

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to Collin Peterson as wildlife program coordinator with the National Wildlife Federation. Peterson is the wildlife project coordinator. Additionally, the article has been updated to reflect that NWF has now removed or replaced 40 miles of fencing with wildlife friendly fence as opposed to 25 miles.

When it comes to charismatic megafauna, the Northern Rockies are the envy of the nation. Sitting today on the sagebrush hillsides of the High Divide—a vast land mass straddling the border of southwest Montana and southeastern Idaho—a Shoshone hunter would find himself right at home among the elk, deer, pronghorn and moose. However, one feature that would be quite foreign is the barbed wire fencing that crisscrosses the landscape, fragmenting otherwise ideal wildlife habitat.

These obstacles are especially cumbersome for migrating ungulates, and while fencing isn’t inherently a problem for their seasonal journeys, in its current condition, it can be deadly.

“Southwest Montana has a high density of pretty impermeable fencing,” Simon Buzzard, a wildlife biologist with the National Wildlife Federation, told Mountain Journal. “Which comes from a legacy of sheep ranching and hasn’t really changed in 100 years.”

These woven-wire fences are particularly challenging for pronghorn because the bottom wire contacts the ground and the species doesn’t jump well, causing them to spend valuable energy and time looking for gaps instead of foraging.

“We’re using pronghorn as the focal species, but recognizing that there are benefits to other species like mule deer, moose and elk,” Buzzard added.

For millennia, migration has been key to survival and the same is true today. The difference is now species must deal with the additional pressures applied by an ever-expanding human presence.

“You can’t help but note these extreme changing patterns in climate,” said NWF Wildlife Project Coordinator Collin Peterson. “Hotter summers, shorter winters. All of that is contributing to decreased quality of forage and availability of water, and we have this increasing footprint of human development, barriers to movement that have an amplifying effect on all these other stressors.”

Despite this recent development, much of the southwest Montana landscape is still largely intact, making it an obvious area for a focused conservation effort and bringing together a coalition of agencies, nonprofits, landowners and recreation groups known as the Southwest Montana Sagebrush Partnership.

“In the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and adjacent High Divide, there’s some of the most intact ecosystems of ungulates left in the world and they undergo these phenomenal migrations because of the extreme diversity of the landscape,” Peterson explained. “Being proactive and prioritizing these landscapes that still retain a lot of that ecological integrity is an effective strategy for conservation.”

Given this high level of ecological integrity, support has come from the top down and the bottom up, an enviable combination setting the project up for success. At the federal level, the Department of the Interior issued Secretarial Order 3362 in 2018, calling on agencies to improve habitat quality for big-game species in the West. Subsequently, the Bureau of Land Management identified the High Divide as one of 21 priority landscapes, allocating almost $10 million from the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to restoration and resilience efforts in the region. At the USDA, the Migratory Big Game Initiative, which started in Wyoming, provides additional funds landowners can access to pay for fencing improvements. After a successful pilot, the program was expanded to Montana and Idaho, adding another piece to the funding pie.

In the field, the National Wildlife Federation and their partners have removed 40 miles of fencing in the High Divide since work began in 2021, and they’ve been busy this summer adding to that total. “The goal is to make a proof of concept in Beaverhead County, demonstrating how this can work,” Buzzard said, referring to the largest county by area in Montana, which shares a border with Idaho along the Continental Divide. “We’re one example, but we’re seeing this happening across different landscapes.”

That includes other critical corridors adjacent to Yellowstone National Park. On the Beartooth Front, there’s the Absaroka Fence Initiative. In Sublette County, Wyoming, more than 700 miles of fencing has been removed or improved since 2017, showing how the effort can scale with the right resources in place.

While there’s significant buy-in from the feds and technical know-how from the NGOs, success in many cases depends on the trust of private landowners and the capacity of volunteers. “Most of the landowners we work with really want to prioritize conservation of wildlife,” Peterson said, “but have this reality where their livelihood and the economic viability of this community depends on livestock. These fences are a solution that satisfies both of those things.”

On a 40,000-acre ranch southwest of Dillon, ranch manager Colton Clarno is molding the program to his specific needs. Instead of a one-size-fits-all solution, the initiative is flexible enough to serve the diverse realities across this sprawling landscape.

“I can put a twist on things that benefit the ranch a lot,” Clarno said. “We did a 4.5-mile project that cost us $1,800. Nobody can build fence for that price, so financially it makes excellent sense.”

Initially, Clarno was skeptical because the wildlife-friendly fencing isn’t designed to hold cattle, but he converted after seeing wildlife pass through without causing any damage. “These fences allow the wildlife and game to travel more freely, so what I have noticed is that the maintenance is way down,” he explained. “The elk and deer can go over them freely, and the antelope and babies can go under.” On net, Clarno is coming out on top financially, and the wildlife are benefiting, too. “We want to make sure Mother Nature’s taken care of as well, because we destroy that and obviously it hurts us.”

With the funding in place and the landowners on board, the last piece of the puzzle is the volunteer workforce. Their time and energy bring scale and efficiency, but also highlight a shared passion for the landscape and a desire to protect and improve it.

“You can see this immediate impact when you remove these barriers that so obviously contrast with the rest of this landscape,” Peterson said. “And there’s an emotional response when you see a calf elk stuck on the other side of a fence and its mother is pacing and they’re separated by this physical barrier.”

Removing that physical barrier is a tangible action, and bit by bit, mile by mile, the benefits are starting to add up.

“We may not see the impacts of our attempts to restore or conserve landscapes, but they’re slow and subtle over time and culminate to some really impressive change,” Peterson said. “It’s good for those folks that consider themselves stewards of the environment to appreciate the hardships animals go through and to remain optimistic about how much of a positive impact we can have.”

With the headlines focused on everything we’re losing, the Southwest Montana Sagebrush Partnership is choosing instead to highlight what we still have. By taking a holistic, landscape-scale approach, they’re connecting federal dollars to local landowners, and passionate volunteers to impactful projects.

As the old fences come down, ancient corridors are restored, and a better balance is struck.