A southwestern Wyoming big game hunting advocate who spent the past 13 years safeguarding beleaguered mule deer has been appointed to a high position in the Trump administration’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. 

Josh Coursey, the co-founder and longtime president of the Muley Fanatic Foundation, announced to the group’s membership on Wednesday that he’ll be assuming his new post in May. Coursey did not disclose the nature of the position and reiterated to WyoFile that he was not yet at liberty to say. 

“It’s a presidential appointment,” Coursey told WyoFile. The position, he added, does not need to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate. 

In his departure note, Coursey said he felt “called to serve” and is eager for the new challenge.

“I know, as the [Muley Fanatics] motto states, Do the Right Thing, that this calling is the right thing to do,” he wrote. 

Coursey’s announcement did not mention President Trump’s nominee for the top Fish and Wildlife Service post, Brian Nesvik, who’s also a Wyoming resident. Nesvik, a former Wyoming Game and Fish Department director, is still undergoing his Senate confirmation. He’s cleared the first hearing and subsequent first vote, 10-9, along party lines, the Jackson Hole Daily reported.

But Nesvik and Coursey run in the same Wyoming wildlife circles. The former Game and Fish director even appeared on Coursey’s podcast, Wild Things and Wild Places, in a two-part series in late 2023. 

By some measures, Coursey is lesser known. Desirée Sorenson-Groves, who leads the nationwide National Wildlife Refuge Association, had never heard of him when reached by WyoFile on Thursday.

Sorenson-Groves’ hunch is that Coursey was selected as a “political” deputy director at the Fish and Wildlife Service. “That is what I would guess,” she said. “A guy named Siva had [the position] before.”

Siva Sundaresan, a former Wyoming resident, was deputy director of the agency under the Biden administration’s director, Martha Williams. 

Besides Nesvik and Coursey, at least a couple other Wyoming residents have been selected for appointments by the Trump administration. Sheridan County resident Cyrus Western, a former Republican statehouse representative, was picked to helm the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Region 8 office in Denver, Colorado. And Cheyenne attorney Karen Budd-Falen was selected as the acting deputy secretary under U.S. Department of the Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. 

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Coursey told WyoFile he could not yet discuss the nature of his role or the issues he’ll be working on.

When he starts in May, he’ll be helping to lead a federal agency significantly diminished by the administration that selected him. The Trump administration’s Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency cuts have hit the Fish and Wildlife Service nationwide, including in Coursey’s home state of Wyoming. There are plans to close the agency’s tribal office in Lander, staffing impacts at places like the Saratoga National Fish Hatchery and blows to the Service’s black-footed ferret recovery efforts. 

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At the behest of state lawmakers, Wyoming in 2024 took unprecedented steps to regulate shed antler hunting — actions that have started a western trend. Specifically, the Equality State now requires out-of-state residents to get a conservation stamp and to wait a week, giving residents a head start. 

Those changes caught some shed-seeking Westerners off-guard. But the majority of antler seekers are relishing the new rules, wildlife officials now know. 

“High levels of approval, in and of itself, shows that people were really receptive to the regulation,” said University of California-Berkeley PhD candidate Sam Maher, who’s been studying antler hunting in Wyoming since 2023. 

In 2024, Maher and her collaborators surveyed 318 shed hunters online and in person at trailheads within the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, where there’s a seasonal closure on antler gathering until May 1. The results suggest that 64% of all respondents were in favor of the new restrictions on non-resident antler gathering. To no surprise, Wyoming residents who stood to benefit were the most on board: 87% favored the new rules, versus just 27% of non-residents. 

The new regulations also motivated more locals to hit the hills. Some 22% of the Wyoming residents that Maher and company surveyed said they “would not have shed hunted otherwise,” but went out because there was the perception of less competition. Non-residents, meanwhile, were effectively dissuaded from coming to Wyoming, even after they could on May 8. Some 29% of those surveyed reported not coming because of the new regulations. 

“We asked residents and non-residents how it changed their behavior,” Maher said of the new rules. “It seemed like the increased enthusiasm by residents offset the fact that non-residents couldn’t come in for the first week.” 

Studying under UC-Berkeley professor and seasonal Wyoming resident Arthur Middleton, Maher has been examining the burgeoning pursuit of antlers in the American West for a chapter in her dissertation. The first batch of data she received after her 2023 surveys provided new insights into the demographic makeup of shed hunters: The majority are white male westerners who like nature and exercise and are not motivated by the high dollar that elkhorn can fetch. She’s adapted the results into a user-friendly story map dubbed “Brown Gold Rush.”    

There’s also a greater goal for the research. Maher and the University of Wyoming’s Tyler Kjorstad are working on an academic paper, “The emerging need to manage scavenged wildlife resources,” that’s going through the peer-review process with the Journal of Biological Conservation.

Kjorstad, who’s with UW’s College of Business, is also working with Maher on another paper estimating the economic contribution of shed hunting in Wyoming. All the data they’re amassing, he said, is useful outside of academia. 

“There’s information that’s advantageous for policy managers and ecologists, and in my opinion, economists,” Kjorstad told WyoFile.

The steps that Wyoming has taken to regulate shed antler hunting are “a big deal,” Maher said. Those regulations started with seasonal closures back in 2009 to protect wintering wildlife, but have since evolved to protect the experience of shed antler hunting. Antlers fall into a “weird gray area” because, after they separate from an animal, they’re typically not protected from commercial sale, like wild game meat is. 

“The act of regulating this is pretty unprecedented and interesting,” Maher said. It sets the stage, she said, for land and wildlife managers to regulate “similar resources,” naming bird feathers, snake skins and seashells. 

Already, neighboring states are copying Wyoming’s approach to regulating shed hunting. Starting in 2025, for example, out-of-state shed hunters in Idaho will have to possess a nonresident hunting license — a $185 investment. The Montana Legislature also is weighing a bill that proposes a $50 non-resident license fee for shed hunting, according to the Montana Free Press’ bill tracker.

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A dismayed Chris Servheen is raising the alarm about what’s become of federal scientists who have kept watch over the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem’s grizzly bear population for the last 55 years. 

The group of research biologists and technicians, known as the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team, are being hamstrung at best and arguably dismantled, he told WyoFile. For decades, until his retirement in 2016, Sevheen worked closely with the study team while coordinating grizzly bear recovery for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. 

“It’s functionally destroying the organization,” Servheen said Thursday. “The study team has been in place since 1970 — over 50 years of work and experience and knowledge. It’s going to just disappear and die.” 

Servheen’s perplexed about what the Trump administration has to gain. 

“How could anybody be so negligent and vile that they’re trying to destroy something that has brought grizzly bears back from the edge of extinction?” he said. “Why would you do that? It’s just so destructive.”

Led by Elon Musk, the Department of Government Efficiency’s dismantling started with a hiring freeze. Longtime supervisory wildlife biologist Mark Haroldson retired, and his position is not being filled, according to Servheen. Then, the team’s longtime leader, Frank van Manen, announced an earlier-than-desired retirement. 

“He didn’t want to leave,” Servheen said of van Manen, who declined to comment. 

According to Servheen, van Manen’s departure was related to the federal government’s ongoing upheaval.  

“They’re putting fear into people,” Servheen said. “That’s basically evil, to do that to hard-working people who have been civil servants for decades.” 

The Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team is part of the U.S. Geological Survey, and its website lists four other employees. Three are technicians, which are often seasonal, entry-level employees. The remaining staff biologist has been in the job about three years.

If any of the study team’s employees opt to stick it out amid a second wave of buyouts, they’re likely to be out of an office space come fall. The Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center, described by its director as “one of the nation’s key laboratories to study the ecosystems and species of the Northern Rockies,” is one of hundreds of federal facilities being shuttered by DOGE. 

Although located in Bozeman, many of the federal facility’s researchers do work in Wyoming. 

“They do all kinds of other stuff: brucellosis and chronic wasting disease and aquatic species,” Servheen said. “It’s a huge science center.” 

The planned closure has elicited protests. According to Yellowstonian.org, 42 retired or active biologists petitioned Montana’s congressional delegation to use their influence to “protect [the science center] and its employees from these unwarranted attacks by DOGE.”

Federal offices located in Wyoming have not escaped the closures. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s tribal-focused Lander conservation office and a USGS Cheyenne water science station are among those that have been marked for the chopping block. 

WyoFile could not officially confirm impacts to the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team. Federal agencies under the Trump administration have declined or not responded to WyoFile’s requests for more information on downsizing and office closures. An inquiry to a USGS public affairs officer on Thursday yielded no information about the matter. 

The Center for Biological Diversity has been pressing the federal agency for details as well. On Thursday, the environmental advocacy organization publicized a Freedom of Information Act request to gain more insight into the future of the federal grizzly team. 

Both recently departed veteran study team members — van Manen and Haroldson — are staying engaged in grizzly science in pro-bono emeritus roles, according to a source familiar with the situation. 

Nevertheless, Servheen worries that the hit to the science team could trickle down to the grizzly population — estimated at 1,000 or so bears in the Greater Yellowstone — that it’s charged with studying.

Over the decades, federal researchers have played a pivotal role in improving understanding of the region’s bruins, including completing studies that have helped make the case that grizzly bears are fully recovered and no longer require Endangered Species Act protection. They’ve also amassed mortality and other demographic datasets and compiled an annual report. 

“The foundation of Yellowstone grizzly bear recovery has been built on science,” Servheen said. “Removing that science eliminates our ability to maintain Yellowstone grizzly bears.”

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It’s spring: time for migratory pronghorn to leave the Green River Basin for their more verdant summer habitat to the north, but not without encountering “bottlenecks” along the way. 

The definition of the geographic pinchpoints is straightforward: A “bottleneck” is any portion of migration corridor where “animals are significantly physically or behaviorally altered,” according to Wyoming’s migration policy. 

As the herds drop off the Hoback Rim, the fleet-footed tawny-and-white ungulates hit the “Noble Basin Bottleneck.” It’s a strip of land, primarily on privately deeded ground, where the forest closes in on the open country pronghorn prefer. 

To the northeast, another segment of the migratory Sublette Pronghorn Herd bound for Jackson Hole via the Gros Ventre River drainage faces the “Kendall Bottleneck.” There, the animals encounter a “very tight restriction between a dense residential subdivision that includes many fences and forested habitat to the west that is not preferred by migrating antelope.” 

Those details about the Sublette Pronghorn Herd’s migrations, which are at “high risk” of being lost, come from the Wyoming Game and Fish Department’s recently completed 140-page “biological risk and opportunity assessment.” It’s the next step in the effort to designate and protect the historically significant “Path of the Pronghorn” migration, a process that Wyoming wildlife managers have been navigating for over six years. 

The assessment examined one of the “most data-rich ungulate populations in the world,” and put some numbers and analysis to the landscape that the massive pronghorn herd depends on for survival. Biologists, for example, detailed how there are 13 bottlenecks within the Sublette pronghorn migration corridor. Although they take up the least amount of land within the 2.6-million-acre corridor at just 27,375 acres, nearly half of bottlenecks occur on private land. That’s important because private land is exempted from restrictions imposed by Wyoming’s migration policy. 

“Bottlenecks, some of them were just ideal areas for private land ownership during the settlement era,” said Doug Brimeyer, a recently promoted Game and Fish deputy director. “People selected those kinds of habitats.” 

A century-plus later, a herd of 20,000-plus pronghorn still recovering from a harrowing winter are passing through the same places. If access further diminishes, it’d be an enormous blow: Some 75% of the herd is migratory, according to Game and Fish. 

Brimeyer knows the Sublette Pronghorn Herd’s migration routes and the threats they face about as well as anybody. As a Game and Fish biologist in July 1998, he fitted GPS collars onto pronghorn in Grand Teton National Park. Long before Wyoming even had a migration policy, movement data from that work and follow-up studies were used to justify a 2008 forest plan amendment that provided protections to the migration corridor, albeit only the portion on the Bridger-Teton National Forest. 

Fast forward to the present, and Wyoming’s “risk assessment” provides a much more complete picture of what was protected on the national forest 17 years ago. There are even two new forest bottlenecks — one dubbed Bacon Creek and another Red Hills — that haven’t been mapped before, according to Meghan Riley, the Wyoming Outdoor Council’s wildlife program manager. That’s “significant,” she said, especially because the Bridger-Teton’s Forest Plan is up for revision. 

Riley lauded Game and Fish’s exhaustive assessment. It was “pretty unflinching” in examining threats, she said, which were identified for the entire corridor and specifically for 10 different segments. Habitat fragmentation from residential development and the energy and mineral industries were at the top of the list, but threats were numerous and covered everything from cheatgrass incursion to highways and fences. 

“I thought it was great the department made it clear that there are many things threatening connectivity for these animals,” Riley said, “and that you can’t protect the migration if you don’t address all of them.” 

If it makes it the distance, the Sublette Herd’s migration would be the first pronghorn route designated under Wyoming’s new policy. Three mule deer corridors have been designated — for the Sublette, Platte Valley and Baggs herds — but all were completed prior to the state overhauling its process in response to industry concerns. The new designation process, being taken for its first spin, extends beyond the Wyoming Game and Fish Department’s purview. If the agency’s commission decides to recommend designation to Gov. Mark Gordon, and he’s on board, the state’s chief executive would then have to appoint an “area working group” consisting of county commissioners, hunting advocates, industry reps and others. 

“The area working group will make a determination and deliver that to the governor,” Brimeyer said. “He’ll either formally designate, he’ll return with some recommendations to the department — then we might do some further refinement — or he can just reject that, and it’ll stay identified.”

First, however, steps remain within Game and Fish. The agency’s commission is expected to vote on the route’s formal designation at its July meeting in Evanston. 

The public has a say in the matter, too. There are also several upcoming public meetings: One in Green River on April 9, Jackson on April 10 and Pinedale on April 15.  

The Sublette pronghorn migration biological risk assessment is also open to comments through May 2. Wildlife officials are looking for any and all feedback, including about the 13 bottlenecks. 

“We included [bottlenecks] in the risk assessment to get a take from our public,” Brimeyer said. 

Noting portions of bottlenecks that might be high-priority for a conservation easement or highlighting existing land uses are the types of information that would be especially helpful, he said. 

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Two years ago, as one storm after another piled feet of snow across south-central Wyoming, pronghorn started walking to find something to eat. 

But quickly, they bunched up against a fence. Then another one. 

They kept moving, bumping into more fences. Mile after endless mile they trekked, running into impenetrable wires in every direction before thousands finally succumbed to exhaustion and died. 

One female walked a staggering 225 miles over 60 days, searching for food and bare ground, wandering north and south, east and west. She collapsed for the final time about 20 miles from where she started. 

“This was the perfect storm situation where all of these different forces came together to cause a mass mortality event,” said Ellen Aikens, co-author of a recent paper published in the journal Current Biology documenting the deadly consequences of so many miles of fencing. 

The Red Desert pronghorn herd die off was a catastrophe in the making, one biologists feared could happen. The paper’s authors hope their work and an associated short film produced by Wyoming Migration Initiative filmmaker and research scientist Pat Rodgers could help people better understand the importance of connected landscapes, especially as winters become harsher and wildfires become more extreme.

“We often assume that anytime we have a tough winter, that mass mortality with deer and pronghorn is unavoidable,” said Hall Sawyer, a wildlife biologist with Western EcoSystems Technology, Inc. and co-author on the paper. “But the fact is, if these animals can move freely across these landscapes, the likelihood of them dying is drastically reduced. It’s the antidote to these mortality events everyone is so concerned about.”

Fences to the moon and back

No one knows for sure how many miles of fence string across Wyoming or the West, but researcher Wenjing Xu arduously mapped fencing in Sublette County and discovered more than 4,300 miles, twice the length of the U.S. border with Mexico. Extrapolated out, she figures the western U.S. alone has more than 620,000 miles of fence, roughly enough to span to the moon and back.

Fences can be a barrier to all wildlife depending on the situation, but some are better at handling it than others. Mule deer and elk, for example, can relatively adroitly jump over common cattle fences, while pronghorn tend to crawl underneath. 

“They may try to jump, but they’re really bad at it,” said Bob Budd, executive director of the Wyoming Wildlife and Natural Resource Trust. “They try to go under if they can.”

But piling snow makes it harder to burrow under, and woven wire fence — the kind that forms in squares and not single barbed-wire strands — makes it all but impossible.

Little shows how much pronghorn struggle than GPS collar data from two years ago. Sawyer began placing collars on pronghorn in 2020 on behalf of the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, which wanted more information on the Red Desert pronghorn herd’s movements. But by the end of the 2022-2023 winter, more than half the animals in his study were gone.

“They died of starvation,” he said. “They couldn’t escape.”

Pronghorn search for areas where plants stick out of the top of the snow to provide them with critical calories to keep them alive in the winter. They also look for bare spots that make moving less costly and calorie-intensive. When they can’t find those, they essentially walk until they starve to death.

Aikens and Sawyer also discovered through the study that pronghorn particularly struggle when they wander into unfamiliar territory. The creatures generally know where they can cross under fences in their normal home ranges — they’ve found the loose wires or gaps where they can squeeze through. But during unusually severe winters, they move out of those home ranges looking for relief.

“You think, ‘I’ve seen pronghorn cross a road or fence’ and that’s because it’s the fences and roads in their neighborhood,” Sawyer said. “When they have to leave, it’s a whole new game. They have to figure out all these new barriers, and it’s a real problem.”

And for many of the Red Desert pronghorn, those new problems showed up in the form of more than 100,000 acres of land closed off by woven wire, impenetrable fence. 

Fenced in

Tom Chant’s grandfather settled in the Red Desert decades ago, managing sheep in areas closed off by woven wire fence, including one 10,000-acre section.

“Fast forward 75 years,” Chant said in the short film, “and we no longer have sheep.”

He knew fencing was problematic, but replacing fences is costly. After Sawyer’s research became public, though, Wyoming’s WYldlife Fund, the Wyoming Game and Fish Department’s fundraising arm, teamed up with the Wyoming Wildlife and Natural Resource Trust and Knobloch Family Foundation to ask Chant if they could replace that woven wire fence with wildlife-friendly fencing. And they had the more than $400,000 it would take to do all the work.

“If the fence can accommodate being a wildlife-friendly fence and control our livestock, I was all in,” he continued. 

The group spent last summer and fall replacing the fence, and pronghorn can now access 10,000 acres they’ve been blocked from reaching for decades. But the work isn’t done, said Amy Anderson, Game and Fish’s terrestrial habitat biologist in the Lander region. She wants landowners to know more money exists to convert fencing and willing hands stand ready. Game and Fish has even hired a full-time fence coordinator to help identify critical areas where wildlife can’t pass through fences and work with landowners and agencies and nonprofits to replace them. Almost 90,000 acres still remain inaccessible in the same area. 

“Landowners and producers are some of the hardest working people in the state and margins are slim,” said Chris McBarnes, WYldlife Fund president. “The reality is if we want our herds healthy moving forward in the future, we have to figure out a way to incentivize our private landowners and producers to create habitat for wildlife, and fencing is one component in that toolbox.”

As weather becomes more erratic and development continues encroaching on wildlife habitat, Aikens stresses how important it is to open lines of connectivity for animals like pronghorn so when the next storm hits or catastrophic wildfire burns through, the pronghorn, like so many other species, can find refuge.

Correction: This story was updated to fix a mispelling of Tom Chant’s name. —Ed.

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The Bureau of Land Management’s contentious plans to remove all free-roaming horses from vast reaches of southwest Wyoming’s “checkerboard” region could begin as soon as this summer, although a legal appeal to stop roundups remains in limbo. 

On Monday, the federal agency released a 47-page environmental assessment outlining plans to gather and permanently remove several thousand wild horses from 2,105 square miles — an area nearly the size of Delaware — managed by BLM’s Rock Springs and Rawlins field offices. Horses would come off an additional 1,124 square miles of private land within the checkerboard. A public review period is underway with comments due by April 30. If the BLM greenlights the round-ups, they could begin within the next three months and continue for a couple of years, possibly longer. 

First to go would be the estimated 1,125 free-roaming horses in the Salt Wells Creek herd and 736 animals in the northwestern portion of Adobe Town, according to BLM Rock Springs Field Office Manager Kimberlee Foster. Then in 2026, horse-removal crews would move on to eliminating an estimated 894 horses in the Great Divide Basin herd. 

“Additional gathers may be needed in future years to remove all wild horses to get to the zero-population goal, as some may be missed during the scheduled gathers,” Foster told WyoFile in response to emailed questions. 

Free-roaming horses, a nonnative species that faces scant predation, increase in population by about 20% annually. Reproduction, combined with missed animals during surveys, make estimating precise herd numbers difficult. The expectation is that 3,371 wild horses would be removed, but the ultimate number could range from 2,500 up to 5,000, according to the BLM. 

The push to rid southwest Wyoming’s checkerboard region of free-roaming horses traces back 15 years. The Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act directs the BLM to “to remove stray wild horses from private lands as soon as practicable upon receipt of a written request,” the environmental assessment states. In 2010, the cattle and sheep-centric Rock Springs Grazing Association, which owns and leases about 1.1 million acres of private land in the checkerboard, revoked consent to allow horses to roam on its property. 

There’s been a legal battle ever since. Lawsuits from both the Rock Springs Grazing Association and wild horse advocacy groups have targeted the BLM’s planned actions, but U.S. District Court of Wyoming Judge Kelly Rankin, a Biden appointee, ruled in the federal government’s favor in both lawsuits last August. 

Soon thereafter, a coalition of pro-horse petitioners — the American Wild Horse Campaign, Animal Welfare Institute, Western Watersheds Project, Carol Walker, Kimerlee Curyl and Chad Hanson — appealed. 

“This is just the latest lawsuit in a 12 or more year battle to save these horses,” American Wild Horse Executive Director Suzanne Roy told WyoFile. “We’ve litigated four or five times about this issue.” 

Attorneys for the federal government and horse advocacy groups exchanged arguments before the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in March. A decision is pending, but horse advocates are optimistic about their chances. 

“We have prevailed in the 10th Circuit previously on this issue,” Roy said. 

The BLM, she contended, has never before fully eliminated a herd of free-roaming horses without having demonstrated there are ecological reasons for doing so. 

“This would be the first time in the 54-year history of the Wild Horse and Burros Act that the BLM eliminated a herd management area and eradicated entire wild horse herds — two of them — when the agency itself concedes that the area has sufficient habitat for the horses,” Roy said. “It has implications for wild horse protection across the West, because if private landowners that have land adjacent to or within herd management areas are allowed to dictate the presence of wild horses on the public land, that’s a very dangerous precedent. So we are anxiously awaiting the court’s ruling.” 

Meanwhile, the BLM is staging resources necessary to move forward with its plans. The Adobe Town/Salt Wells Creek herd roundup is the largest on the BLM’s tentative wild horse and burro gather schedule for 2025. It’s scheduled to take place from July 15 through Sept. 15. In regions of the Adobe Town herd area where horses are being allowed to persist, there are related plans to remove 2,179 free-roaming horses — numbers that exceed the “appropriate management level.”

It’s unclear how or if the Trump administration’s slashing of the federal government workforce will impact the horse gather operations. Asked by WyoFile if the BLM-Wyoming’s horse and burro program is fully staffed right now, Foster, the field office manager, wrote “BLM is prepared to conduct the planned gathers with current staffing.”

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Like plenty of other Wyoming stockgrowers, Luke Lancaster is an outdoorsman who appreciates seeing wildlife on his Star Valley ranch.

There’ve been exceptions. A hefty herbivore that runs in big herds, elk, are notoriously hard to live with for cattle ranchers whose bottom line depends on the volume of grass growing on their rangeland and having enough hay stacked up to get through the winter. On top of that, the native ungulates can transmit the disease brucellosis to cattle, and vice versa. 

So, until recently, elk were more of a headache for the fourth-generation cattleman who runs Lincoln County’s Spring Creek Ranch. His reaction upon seeing them: “Oh, shit.” 

“This winter was the first time I’d seen them where I was like, ‘Oh, that’s cool,’” Lancaster told WyoFile. 

What changed? 

Ahead of this winter, Lancaster struck a voluntary, incentive-based deal with a conservation group, the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, to allow elk on his property southwest of Afton. Paying landowners to benefit wildlife isn’t new: Providing habitat is a big part of the very concept of conservation easements. Take, for example, compensation programs for California rice farmers to keep fields flooded for waterfowl. 

But there’s a novelty and timeliness to what the Bozeman-based nonprofit has dubbed “elk-occupancy agreements.” As the chronic wasting disease epidemic ramps up in a corner of Wyoming where it’s expected to have especially devastating effects, pressure is building for the Wyoming Game and Fish Department and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to abandon a vector for infection, the century-old system of feeding elk. 

“The real goal is to facilitate closing feedgrounds and to create a model to show ranchers who have properties: Here’s an option where you can get paid,” said Steve Sharkey, director of the Knoblach Family Foundation, which funded the Spring Creek Ranch elk-occupancy agreement. 

The situation in southwestern Star Valley is in a way a trial run at the broader initiative. Over the next three or so years, Game and Fish will be reviewing all of its 21 feedgrounds and exploring opportunities to change or even do away with them. 

There was never a permanent feedground on or immediately adjacent to Lancaster’s Spring Creek Ranch, but it was an on-again, off-again feeding site in emergencies. The last time Game and Fish threw hay there, during the cold, long winter of 2022-’23, some 250 elk were holed up on the property. 

Even when the feeding stopped last winter, he said, they had to “fight” 50 to 100 head of wapiti that returned to his land. A lot of that fight was left to Game and Fish, whose staff go to great lengths — even using drones — to haze and even kill elk deemed a nuisance. 

Wyoming Game and Fish personnel weren’t available for an interview on Friday, but the state agency’s staff has been critical to making the Lincoln County deal happen. A warden, James Hobbs, put Lancaster in touch with the Greater Yellowstone Coalition. The agency’s Jackson Region wildlife management coordinator, Cheyenne Stewart, also played a big role.  

“I was skeptical, but Cheyenne talked me into it,” said Sharkey, the funder. 

How it works

Going into the winter of 2024-’25, Lancaster was already thinking of trucking his 250 cow-calf pairs to Utah pastureland to spend the winter. “[I]t looked a lot better than having them here in this -40 degree hellhole,” he said.

The deal cut with the Greater Yellowstone Coalition reimbursed him for about half of the transport costs, a roughly $10,000 savings. On top of that, the organization vowed to chip in on the cost of feeding his herd over the winter. 

“It costs about $56,000 to winter the cows,” Lancaster said, “and it cut our feeding bill in half.” 

The agreement also covered some modifications to Spring Creek Ranch, both its infrastructure and management. 

There was also a cost-share around retrofitting about a mile of fencing with “let down” features — a modification used for terrestrial wildlife and also avian species like sage grouse. 

“It can be removed and put down during the winter months, so elk can move through,” said Teddy Collins, the Greater Yellowstone Coalition staffer who worked most closely with Lancaster. “And then the fence can be put back up during the summer months to keep cattle down in the irrigated pastures.” 

The final component of the deal is being called a “standing forage incentive.” Essentially, Collins said, Lancaster is being compensated to not graze cattle on high ground that Game and Fish has identified as “crucial winter range” on the ranch during any part of the year. Elk, in turn, have that vegetation to browse and graze on during the winter. 

Collectively, it’s a good chunk of change for Lancaster, who has a keen interest in keeping his ranch going in an agricultural community that’s losing its longtime identity to real estate development. Star Valley “has a clock,” said Lancaster, but on his own land he wants to slow down the hands.

“Every field’s getting developed, it’s kind of turning into Jackson,” he said. “This has helped us financially to be able to grow the herd to a [size] where we can actually live off of it and support the ranch. Hopefully, my kids will want to take over, and continue on with them.” 

Scaling up? 

Spring Creek Ranch’s elk-occupancy agreement isn’t the first of its kind. In northwestern Wyoming, the Greater Yellowstone Coalition and LegacyWorksGroup first put the concept into action back in 2018.

The first couple of agreements were struck with some of Jackson Hole’s few remaining ranchers. Sharkey has been involved since the early days. He learned of the concept while out hunting with now-colleague Steve Kallin, who was then managing the National Elk Refuge, which had been trying, with difficulties, to scale back its feeding program.

“It was kind of like a short-term easement,” Sharkey recalled. “They were just being basically paid to allow elk presence in the spring.” 

The first deals were with a ranch in Spring Gulch, which is a valley adjacent to the federal refuge where elk consistently have been considered too numerous. Another was with a small ranch on the Snake River’s west bank that’s also struggled with elk. Unrelated to feedgrounds, the Greater Yellowstone Coalition and Property and Environment Research Center have also brokered elk-occupancy agreements in Montana’s Paradise Valley. 

But to date, it’s still a pretty niche endeavor in terms of the broader landscape and elk management in the feedground region.  

“It’s a nothingburger, at this point,” Sharkey said. 

Although the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is famously public land-dominated, there’s still a lot of private ground — many millions of acres — that elk herds rely on to survive, especially in the winter. There’s even been research quantifying how much unprotected private land each of the Yellowstone region’s 26 elk herds depend on to survive. (The Afton elk herd, which dwells on Lancaster’s Spring Creek Ranch, is actually one of the least private land-reliant herds.)

“There’s definitely a scalability challenge,” said Arthur Middleton, a University of California-Berkeley ecology professor. “If it’s going to be a broader-scale solution, it needs a lot more resources.” (Disclosure: Middleton is married to WyoFile board member Anna Sale.)

That could come from philanthropy, which is how it’s working so far. Alternatively, state and federal agencies could take a wildlife management tool that began as a niche, donor-funded program and scale and fund it themselves, Middleton said. 

There’s a blueprint for that in the Yellowstone region. 

“In the early days of wolf recovery, there was a time when [livestock damage] compensation was novel — an innovation that Defenders of Wildlife was doing with private money,” Middleton said. “Now we think of it as standard practice.” 

Sharkey’s brain is in the same place. 

“If this could be scaled up, we would hope that Game and Fish would take it over,” he said. “Instead of buying hay to feed elk, they could reallocate those dollars to paying ranchers to allow those elk onto their properties.” 

If Wyoming hypothetically diverted all of its elk-feeding funds, it’d be a good chunk of change. Game and Fish’s elk feeding program had a $3.1 million budget as of 2022, according to its feedgrounds management plan. 

The post Paying ranchers to host elk? Novel approach could help wean Wyoming off its feedground habit. appeared first on WyoFile .

As access advocates celebrated a court decision guaranteeing access to 3 million acres of public land in Wyoming and five other states, they asked for caution, common sense and respect when corner crossing.

Hunters, hikers and others who corner cross need to understand the entirety of the recent decision by the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, parties in the dispute said this week. A voice for ranchers said cattlemen were disappointed in the ruling. Jim Magagna raised the prospect of Wyoming still imposing “conditions” on corner crossing to ensure all uses of public land are “compatible.”

Corner crossing is the act of stepping from one piece of public land to another in the checkerboard landscape of public/private ownership. Corner crossers do not set foot on the kitty-corner pieces of private land but necessarily pass through the airspace above it.

The March 18 appeals court decision affects access to 3 million acres in 10th Circuit states — Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Kansas and Oklahoma, according to onX, the digital mapping company that’s been a key player in the five-year legal drama.

Western ranching custom and culture treated corner crossing as a trespass; a prosecutor in Carbon County brought the practice’s legality to a head in 2022 by citing four hunters for corner crossing to hunt public land on Elk Mountain. The 10th circuit said it is illegal to block access in such cases, meaning the public can reach its checkerboard land without fear of being convicted of trespassing.

“I didn’t go cheer,” said Magagna, executive vice president of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association. “There’s real concern,” he said, citing potential for trespassing and conflicts between hikers or hunters and herds of stock.

Buzz Hettick, co-chair of Wyoming Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, saw less worry. “There’s more work in the future to educate landowners and [the public] on how we go about this in the right way,” he said. His group spearheaded the hunters’ defense in criminal and civil court cases.

16 feet

The digital mapping company onX uses GPS satellites combined with public land records to show cellphone app users their location in the field. With the app, public land users can locate property boundaries with a measured degree of accuracy.

In the Carbon County case, four Missouri hunters used the app to approach a surveyed monument at a common checkboard corner. Once they sighted it, they were able to pass over the corner without touching private land.

All of those details, and more, are important, onX said on its website. The 10th Circuit ruling relied on an 1885 law that guaranteed access where “access to public lands is otherwise restricted,” the company states.

“This ruling indicates that if there’s another public route into a parcel of public land, the corner may not offer a short cut or alternative access point,” onX cautions. The company states that it is not giving legal advice and says the particular alternative-access issue “is not clarified” by the appeals court.

Most GPS systems are accurate to only about 16 feet, but corner crossing is “a game of inches,” the company says. “You need to have absolute certainty about the location of the legal corner.

“Don’t cross unless you can find a physical survey marker, usually called a ‘pin’ or ‘monument,’” onX states. Corner monuments need to be “survey-grade.” Although almost all of the Western land boundaries in question have been surveyed, not all of the corner monuments are easy to see or locate, and some may have been removed by one force or another.

Magagna, Hettick and onX agree that fences may not be exactly on property boundaries, so hikers and hunters must be aware of that. It is a hunter’s responsibility, Hettick said, to know where she or he is.

Finally, it’s possible a local sheriff could cite a corner crosser for trespassing. Although the federal court case would likely nullify that citation, “unfortunately, that would only happen when the case got to court,” onX said.

Fence lines

“We may have to live with this,” Magagna said of the six-state decision. However, he noted, Elk Mountain Ranch owner Fred Eshelman, the Carbon County landowner who sued Missouri hunters Brad Cape, John Slowensky and Phillip Yeomans and Zach Smith in civil court, could ask the entire 10th Circuit Court to review the case. He could also ask the Supreme Court of the United States to take up an appeal.

“I think there’s real concern … issues,” Magagna said. “All these fence lines and corners are not correct.”

What can a hiker or hunter do, he asked, on public land where there’s a herd of cattle or sheep?

Ranchers wonder, “are there conditions I can place on [public access] to make it compatible with other uses?” he said. The court decision “opens some opportunity to us to do something different in Wyoming.”

What that “something different” might be and whether it blocks access in a way the 10th Circuit said would be illegal is uncertain. But the court appeared to conclude that any blockage, threats, intimidation, fences and Wyoming trespass laws cannot be used against corner crossers.

Right now, the Wyoming Legislature has proposed taking up the issue as a study topic before the next legislative session begins at the start of 2026. The Joint Travel, Recreation, Wildlife and Cultural Resources Committee has proposed corner crossing as its fourth-priority topic.

Discussion would begin with the 2025 House Bill 99, “Access to public lands-corner crossing,” according to the proposed study topic. That measure would have made corner crossing legal under Wyoming law, but it never saw debate during the session and died.

Badass chapter

Conservationists hailed the 10th Circuit decision. Green Latinos, Western Watersheds Project, Earthjustice and Sierra Club Outdoors for All Campaign all issued statements applauding the decision.

“This case was about a multi-millionaire trying to prevent access to public lands so he could have it for himself,” Earthjustice said. The ruling “facilitates wildlife management, supports ecological research, and deepens people’s connection with the landscape,” Western Watersheds said.

Backcountry Hunters and Anglers “and our badass Wyoming Chapter” led the charge for the favorable corner-crossing decision, said Patrick Berry, president & CEO of the nationwide Backcountry Hunters and Anglers group. “BHA chapters helped raise over $200,000 for the legal defense of the hunters,” he said in a statement.

“The fundraising was a big deal,” Wyoming chapter co-chair Hettick said. MeatEater television and podcast host Steven Rinella offered his platforms for fundraising, Hettick said. Others helped, including access advocate Jeff Muratore, who wrangled attorneys for the hunters’ defense, Hettick said.

“Of all the conservation organizations out there, it was BHA and MeatEater that stepped up to the plate,” Hettick said. “It was one core group of guys willing to put themselves out there for access.”

“It was something that needed clarity,” he said. “I think it’s a good thing that [the 10th Circuit] did take their time and get it right.”

Although disagreeable, the decision that corner crossers “stay in the air” and not touch any property is far better than a ruling that would have said someone can actually set foot on private land, Magagna said. “It was rather narrow,” he said of the decision.

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WASHINGTON—Making a case that he’s the right man to lead the federal agency that manages the nation’s wildlife, Brian Nesvik declared a childhood love for the furred, feathered and finned among us, and the wild habitats they depend upon. 

“It would shape my life’s work,” Nesvik told members of the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works of his love for wildlife.

Testifying Wednesday from Capitol Hill’s Dirksen Senate Building, the longtime Wyoming resident also advertised the on-the-ground skills he’s developed as a rank-and-file warden, then chief warden, then director of the state’s Game and Fish Department. 

“I know how to put tire chains on a 4-wheel-drive pickup in a snowstorm, and I’ve classified deer from a helicopter, and [I know] how to patrol some of America’s most remote and wild country from a horse,” Nesvik told West Virginia Republican Chairwoman Shelley Moore Capito and other senators on the panel. 

In February, Nesvik became the Trump administration’s nominee to direct the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, a post that’s in charge of 8,000 employees and oversees a wildlife refuge system engulfing nearly 860 million acres. If confirmed, he’d follow in the footsteps of John Turner, a Fish and Wildlife Service director from a Teton County ranching family who led the agency in the early 1990s during the George H. W. Bush administration. 

Confirmation hearings in U.S. Senate committees are often used by those in the political minority to poke holes in an appointee’s credentials and career, shining light on missteps and controversy. There was little criticism, however, directed Nesvik’s way from congressional Democrats. The most fired-up line of questioning came from Alaska Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan, who bashed the Biden administration for “70 executive orders” that he alleged were harming Alaskans.

“The radical, far-left environmental groups want to crush my state,” Sullivan said. “Nobody ever wrote about that. It’s amazing. They’re not going to write about this, either.” 

Eventually, the Alaska senator formulated a question: “Will you commit to work with me on implementing the president’s day one executive order — very long, very detailed — on unleashing Alaska’s extraordinary resource potential?”

Nesvik was direct. 

“Absolutely,” he said. “I also look forward to visiting your state and learning about a lot of issues that you’re very passionate about.” 

In his opening remarks, Nesvik said that President Donald Trump’s “America first” agenda provides “immediate and transformational opportunities.” 

“Simplifying regulations, accelerating permitting with technology, and relying more on education, voluntary compliance and verification, I share [Interior] Secretary [Doug] Burgum’s vision that innovation outperforms regulation,” Nesvik said. 

In a later exchange with chairwoman Moore Capito, the one-time game warden from Pinedale was asked about his past experiences working with Fish and Wildlife Service personnel who he’d be leading.

“Certainly, at times, there’s this natural tension and friction between state and federal agencies,” Nesvik testified. “Fish [and] Wildlife Service is guided and directed by congressional action and laws, as are state agencies. A lot of times those interests are conflicting.” 

A bedrock of U.S. environmental law, the Endangered Species Act, can fracture states and federal relations — it’s an issue that in 2023 brought Nesvik to Washington, D.C., to testify. Two years later, he was asked whether he’d “commit to expediting” the ESA consultation process. 

Nesvik said that he thought the consultation requirement was a “good component” of the ESA when it was enacted in 1975, but that there were “opportunities to be more prompt and timely.”

Nesvik was introduced by three of Wyoming’s highest political leaders, U.S. Sens. John Barrasso and Cynthia Lummis and Gov. Mark Gordon. 

Lummis described him as “Wyoming’s real life Joe Pickett” — a nod to the C.J. Box book series about a game warden. Barrasso, a former Senate Environment and Public Works chairman, spoke highly of Nesvik’s professional credentials. 

“I actually first met him when he served in the Wyoming Army National Guard — he’s been in the guard since ‘86,” the state’s senior senator said. 

Gordon — who picked Nesvik to lead Game and Fish in 2019 — similarly touted the Trump administration’s nominee. 

“Brian has taken part in and led Wyoming’s efforts to successfully recover some of the world’s most charismatic megafauna,” Gordon testified. “In Wyoming, that’s grizzly bears, grey wolves, as well as some of our treasured species that have [been] declared extinct, like black-footed ferrets.” 

If confirmed, Nesvik could wind up leading the Fish and Wildlife Service with fewer Wyoming-based staff and resources because of the president who appointed him. The Trump administration’s Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency has caused disarray within the agency, slashing staff that lead black-footed ferret recovery and run its Saratoga fish hatchery and angling to close the service’s tribal-focused Lander Fish and Wildlife Conservation Office. 

Since the mass layoffs started in February there have been court-ordered rehirings, but the official toll of the cuts on Fish and Wildlife’s staffing and resources in Wyoming is unclear. Written questions sent in by WyoFile for several stories yielded only short statements from the agency’s Washington, D.C. headquarters. 

Nesvik declined an interview for this story. He cited his still-pending confirmation, which must clear the entire U.S. Senate. 

The post Wyoming’s Nesvik touts ‘America first,’ deregulation during his congressional hearing to lead Fish and Wildlife appeared first on WyoFile .

Every year is a conflict-prone year for the scores of cattle and grizzly bears that mix annually on Union Pass, but Coke Landers was especially glad to put 2024 behind him. 

The run-ins started shortly after the historic Green River Drift delivered many thousands of cattle to the national forest to fatten up over the summer. By the time ranchers herded the domestic bovids off the vast 267-square-mile Upper Green River grazing allotment on the Bridger-Teton National Forest in the fall, some 94 head of cattle were confirmed to have been killed by large carnivores, he said.

“Ninety-one of them were bears and three were wolves,” said Landers, who took the reins of the Upper Green River Cattlemen’s Association from former president Albert Sommers a few years ago.

“That was the highest ever,” Landers said. “It was a record.” 

That’s especially notable considering that the Upper Green has been the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem’s epicenter of grizzly-cattle conflict over the last couple of decades. It’s also been the site of a not-yet completely resolved legal battle about that conflict, stemming from a federal assessment that OK’d killing up to 72 Endangered Species Act-protected grizzlies due to cattle grazing on public land. 

Across grizzly range in the Equality State, it was a tough year for not only bruins killing cattle but for conflict generally. Grizzlies, in turn, were killed at record rates.

The phenomenon was partially explained by the dry year, which 2024 certainly was: More than 800,000 acres in Wyoming burned. The result is desiccated vegetation and sparse berry crops that send the adaptable omnivores looking for alternative food sources. Oftentimes, they end up finding trouble instead. 

Wyoming Game and Fish Department officials ran through the numbers and nature of the conflicts during their commission meeting last week in Cody. 

“They’re occurring on private lands, the majority of these conflicts,” said Brian Debolt, the large carnivore conflict coordinator for Game and Fish. 

Grizzly bears have stopped expanding their range in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, federal biologists say. Nevertheless, much of where they occur today is outside of what Wyoming officials believe to be “suitable habitat.” 

“The amount of private land occupied by grizzly bears in the Yellowstone ecosystem — outside of suitable habitat — is bigger than the area of New Jersey,” Debolt said. “Frankly, I get frustrated.”

A graph Debolt presented showed that upwards of 60% of all verified grizzly conflicts in 2024 occurred on private property. 

Another graph broke down the cause of the conflict. Cattle dominated with 188 of 242 — a whopping 78% — of all confirmed Wyoming grizzly bear conflicts attributed to domestic bovids in 2024. In order, the next largest conflict sources were pet food, livestock feed and birdseed (13 conflicts) and property damage (11 conflicts).

Grizzlies also killed a record number of Wyoming cattle, Game and Fish Large Carnivore Supervisor Dan Thompson told WyoFile. 

“It’s definitely our highest level of conflict,” Thompson said. “There’s this notion that nobody’s doing anything about it. That’s not true. Those producers are doing as much as they can to reduce that conflict potential — as are we.” 

About half of Wyoming’s grizzly depredations in 2024 occurred in the Upper Green. Four grizzlies there were captured and killed in response, Thompson said. 

There’s been mixed results from efforts to stem the grizzly bear-cattle bloodshed on the massive Bridger-Teton National Forest allotment. Nearly a decade ago, range riders attempted an experimental herding technique to keep cattle bunched up and less vulnerable. 

“The herding actually made the kills worse,” Landers said. 

More recently, the Upper Green River Cattlemen’s Association tested out motion-triggered LED lights known as “flasher tags” that were fastened to calves’ ears. 

“I put 250 in, and I didn’t have any calves killed with a flasher tag that year,” Landers said. “But when I pulled the flasher tags in the fall, of the 250, there were only 10 of them that were still working.” 

Wyoming secured, but then lost, a federal grant that was going to allow Upper Green cattlemen to scale up the effort with more durable flasher tags, according to Thompson. He didn’t specify exactly what happened to the grant, which went away during a period of extreme turmoil for the federal workforce and grants provided by the federal government under the Trump administration.

“There’s a lot of unknowns right now, let’s put it that way,” Thompson said. “But we still figured out a way to do a pilot component to look at some of these things. We’re still moving forward.” 

A new prototype of the tags, Landers said, went out on 14 calves during the 2024 grazing season. 

“One of my calves with a flasher tag got killed,” Landers said, “but all of those flasher tags were working when they came home.” 

In 2025, they’re going to try another design again, just not in big numbers, he said. 

A few months out from the Bridger-Teton grazing season, Landers is encouraged by the relatively big snow year in the region. Snowpack readings in the Upper Green River drainage were sitting at 110% of the long-term median as of Tuesday, but a SNOTEL site up in the allotment was at 127%. 

“We should have plenty of moisture and hopefully not as dry of a summer,” Landers said. “A better berry crop does make a difference.” 

If an easy conflict year doesn’t come to fruition, the status quo will have to do. Although there’s plenty of carnage, the system is one that the Upper Green River Cattlemen’s Association president says is working. 

“The way our cattle association has been living with the bears and the wolves — and with our state’s compensation program — is a pretty good success story,” Landers said. “Honestly, we’re living together. We’re not always getting along, but we’re living together and we’re getting it done.”

Grizzlies in Wyoming and throughout the Lower 48 continue to be managed as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act. A Biden-era proposal to extend that classification, which precludes grizzly bear hunting, is open to public comments through May 16.

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